All posts by Prepostero

Joyful Tidings #10: All Things Equity (and Student Success)

Equity, Joyful Tidings, Student Success

equity matters

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.

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Joyful Tidings #9: Teaching Narratives, Exploring the How and Why

Classroom Teaching, Conversation Starters, Flex Planner, Humanities, Joyful Tidings, STEM

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.

Digital Story Feature Photo

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.

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Joyful Tidings #4: Some Big Questions About Teaching and Learning

Classroom Teaching, Conversation Starters, Joyful Tidings, Musings, Student Success

A  Conversation Starter

In What the Best College Students Do — a book with a title that unfortunately raises more hackles than interest — Ken Bain offers an intriguing summary of the big questions he believes faculty should consider when they think about their teaching:

“…the best educators thought of teaching as anything they might do to help and encourage students to learn. Teaching is engaging students, engineering an environment in which they learn. Equally important, they thought of the creation of that successful teaching and learning environment as an important and serious intellectual (or artistic) act, perhaps even as a kind of scholarship, that required the attention of the best minds in academia. For our subjects, that scholarship centered around four fundamental inquires:

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Joyful Tidings #3: All Things Canvas

Canvas, Classroom Teaching, Flex Planner, Joyful Tidings, Online Teaching

Greetings Colleagues:

I imagine that many of you, like me, are working through the transition to Canvas in some way this summer: whether it is moving a course or two, starting a new course, or refining sections you have already experimented with before. This image is of an old scratch sheet I used to think about how I wanted to “bend canvas to my will” by making sure that my pedagogical strategies drove my use of Canvas (rather than the the other way around!).

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Joyful Tidings #2: Technology, Community, and Teaching Naked

Classroom Teaching, Conversation Starters, Joyful Tidings, Musings, Online Teaching

“Instant access to knowledge and to each other has changed the nature of community and the speed of work, life, and, most importantly, thought. Time for reflection and interaction is a casualty of the digital age, and one of the primary goals of higher education should be to reclaim this time. The paradox is that the same technology that glues us to flat screens can also be the primary tool for reclaiming this lost time for human interaction. The ability to reach our students wherever they are means that we can extend the classroom and hence the conversation; we can recreate the ideal of students discussing Plato in the dining hall, but virtually.”

Jose Antonio Bowen, page 27-28
Teaching Naked: How Moving Technology Out of Your College Classroom Will Improve Student Learning
Jossey-Bass 2012

A Conversation Starter

I thought it would be fun to share some quotes from books available in our PDP library as a regular feature in our Joyful Tidings emails.

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Joyful Tidings #1: Flex Week!

Flex Planner, Joyful Tidings
Greetings Friends and Colleagues:
I come to your inbox today bearing tidings of great joy. We are less than 25  days away from flex week and a world of discovery awaits you!
 
If you have not done so, please take the time to check out the flex week schedule either via the master schedule  for the week (a glorious seven page document I need to borrow my nine-year-old’s Sherlock Holmes magnifying glass to read) or in myflex.

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