Last week, I sent out a friendly email celebrating the arrival of our new students and calling on colleagues to share their ideas about first day strategies that work.
Six of them very kindly did so: dara, Rick Cassoni, Lisa Fast, Louisa Moon, Chad Tsuyuki, and Marti Klein. Thank you so much to each of you. I have included everything they shared below in this email, but in case you lose this inspiring email, you can always find it forever archived on our joyful teaching blog.
Greetings Colleagues:
In this post, I ask both faculty and staff colleagues to share ideas about the first day of class — how they experienced it as a student and how they think about it as an educator. I begin by sharing a “conversation starter” idea from a book devoted to how we begin classes.
Thank You!
I find it inspiring that more than 150 of our colleagues joined together this week to offer almost 100 flex workshops to our community. I want to use this final post to thank all of our presenters for their passion, perspective, and commitment.
Look at them: energetic, devoted, enthusiastic colleagues who seek nothing more than to share some big ideas with you, to shine light on the intellectual engagement of our faculty with our world. Keep reading this amazing post
The rigors of my involvement with yesterday’s New Faculty Orientation and the inauguration of our new Portable Teaching and Learning Center prevent me from doing justice in this post to the amazing range of workshops our colleagues are offering today.
The professional development drama continues today with the new full-time faculty continuing their orientation process and attending a reception hosted by their lodestars. Simultaneously (I know, I know, it’s simply unbelievable…) the Guided Pathways leadership team steps out with their first round of offerings (also available Wednesday afternoon), the Canvas team continues to strut their stuff, some colleagues share teaching strategies and experiences, and a variety of cool equity and student success workshops round out a sixteen session Flexorama of a day.
New Faculty Come Together!
The joy abounds today as our new full-time faculty arrive on campus to begin the epic journey that is new faculty orientation, and the second year faculty return for a day long retreat focused on pedagogy.
In this post, I offer an invitation to faculty colleagues who wish to explore equity gaps in their own classes and a list of student success and equity offerings during our coming flex week.
Equity in the Classroom: An Invitation to Fellow Explorers
The Situation
Over the past few years, I have been unhappily monitoring an equity gap for Latina/o students in the Humanities 250/251 (American Studies) sequence I teach. I find this gap particularly disappointing because like most community college professors, I came to MiraCosta to work on addressing inequities, not perpetuating them.
In this message, I wish to share with you two teaching narratives I have encountered recently as a way of advancing our professional development program’s goal of re-centering at least some of our conversations around teaching and learning.
A Humanities Narrative
Our new VP for Instruction, Diane Diekmeyer, shared with me some digital stories about faculty from her previous college. This one features Sharon Crasnow, a Norco College philosophy professor.
Double Take #1: To Joyful Teaching
If you have the chance, consider doubling back to earlier posts on Joyful Teaching to check out some of the comments from colleagues about Critical Thinking and Technology, Community and Teaching Naked. Some very thoughtful exchanges are going on in both of these discussion threads.