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Field Journal 004: Notes from the Week in Learning and Teaching
Published about 2 months ago • 5 min read
Thanks to all of you who have written in with encouragement and positive feedback about this newly-launched Field Journal format for the weekly Teaching in Higher Ed emails. If you missed some of the issues, or want to share them with others, visit the Field Journal home page.
This week's notes about learning and teaching include insight on public scholarship, curiosity, and a reminder from Parker Palmer about teaching as being more than technique. I also hope to hear from some of you about something you've changed your mind about regarding teaching or learning.
Listened
Episode 621
The Public Scholar with David Perry
I've got to admit that I'm not sure I could have given a sufficiently comprehensive definition of public scholarship before reading David Perry's The Public Scholar: A Practical Handbook, in preparation for interviewing him for Episode 621. Now, I have a more thorough understanding of the ways in which I already embody it in my practice. It was such a privilege to speak with David and soak up the wisdom and practical approaches from his book. As David encouraged us:
If we are really practiced at teaching, and as we develop our skills as teachers, those are the skills that can also take us into other spaces outside of the classroom.
We end with some Irish rock and songs of resistance. Visit the recommendations page to see these and all the others from the past 12 years.
Much of the discourse around AI in higher education has been on cognitive overload, as it relates to AI use and learning. In a LinkedIn post, Yasser Tamer Atef describes what he calls accessibility offloading, which came out of a conversation he had with Dani Dilkes. Yaser writes:
What troubles me is the broader impulse to offload accessibility altogether. It becomes something to automate, outsource, or defer. Asking for access carries a cost, and over time that cost accumulates into disabled burnout. It is not simply exhaustion, but the strain of navigating a world that was not designed for disabled people.
He links to a few pieces that have shaped his thinking and further explore the fatigue disabled people experience:
It took me longer than it should have to try our Remi Kalir's Fair Feedback Project. I didn't realize that it would only take me a handful of minutes to generate some evidence-based strategies to mitigate the inherent bias in course evaluations. From the Fair Feedback Project:
Decades of peer-reviewed research document that student evaluations are influenced by instructor gender, race, ethnicity, and other factors unrelated to teaching quality. This project provides practical, research-grounded resources for instructors and institutions.
I highly encourage you to try it out and take a practical step in your classes to support more fair feedback. Remi is coming on the show, soon, to share more.
Last week, I wondered about what you've been getting curious about. My friend, Rob Parke, and I keep texting each other multiple times a day. We keep waiting to see what's going to happen next, in a book we're both reading... but we don't want to spoil anything for the other person, in the process.
As of this morning, we are both just over 30% of the way through The Circle, by Dave Eggers. Neither of us can put it down. Here's a bit more from Vanity Fair:
Page-turning... The social message of the novel is clear, but Eggers expertly weaves it into an elegantly told, compulsively readable parable for the 21st century. What may be the most haunting discovery about The Circle, however, is readers’ recognition that they share the same technology-driven mentality that brings the novel’s characters to the brink of dysfunction. We too want to know everything by watching, monitoring, commenting, and interacting, and the force of Eggers’s richly allusive prose lies in his ability to expose the potential hazards of that impulse.
The LA Times refers to Eggers as "a literary polymath" in their review of The Circle. I can appreciate that, since the first book I read of his was a young adult novel. The Eyes and the Impossible is "An enthralling novel for all ages by award-winning author Dave Eggers, told from the perspective of one uniquely endearing dog."
Eggers is also well known as the founder of McSweeney's, a satirical website, which has frequently kept many of us in higher education laughing (or otherwise, we would likely cry).
I imagine you'll see The Circle showing up in a future recommendation from me. But for now, I anticipate that Rob and I are going to keep texting each other until we both resolve our curiosity about what happens next.
PS. I heard from another friend that the movie version of The Circle was awful. I didn't even know it was made into a movie, but won't be adding that to my Sequel App queue anytime soon.
This week, I'm wondering about changing our minds. I resonate with Adam Grant's scholarship on how important it is for us to Think Again, as he writes: “If knowledge is power, knowing what we don’t know is wisdom.”
What's something you used to believe about teaching or learning that you've since changed your mind about?
Hit reply to share your thoughts. I may share a line or two next week, with your first name, or anonymous if you would rather. Just say so in your reply.
Noted
This week: A Quote
Teaching as More Than Technique
Many of us are in the process of wrapping up classes, potentially exhausted and ready for rest. The work is done, but not complete. May we continue the good work of becoming who we are as teachers. As we are reminded by Parker Palmer in The Courage to Teach:
Good teaching cannot be reduced to technique; good teaching comes from the identity and integrity of the teacher.
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