Thanks to the facilitating skill of Maria Figueroa, Edward Pohlert, and Denise Stephenson our campus-wide journey with Laura Rendon’s Sentipensante (feeling / thinking) Pedagogy began last Friday on the final day of flex week. As lively and engaging as that discussion was, it was still only a first step — a warm up. Here are three other ways to continue the journey:
The students return today and that means it is time for another First Day of Class Edition of Joyful Tidings!
On the Web
The web has a vast array of first day advice for college teachers. The most comprehensive I have found is Carnegie Mellon’s site: First Day of Class. Vanderbilt’s teaching and learning center also offers a comprehensive but slightly more condensed take on the first day of class.
Marilyn Weimer offers some specific activity suggestions in a faculty focus article about the first day. If you like a grab bag approach from which you can pick out one or two ideas among a hundred or so, the University of Nebraska’s 101 Things You Can Do In the First Three Weeks of Class might be useful.
I have two resources to share with you: 1) a video of our first Zoom Conversation: Discussing Discussions and 2) an amazing email about discussions I received from our wonderful colleague Jill Malone. If you have time for nothing else in this email today, please watch the video Jill included in her email — I am reasonably confident it will make you happy.
Conversation #1: Discussing Discussions
We videotaped our first live Zoom Conversation about discussion strategies. You can view it here (and count your time for flex) or you can visit this resource in Canvas (on’t forget to enroll in our PDP canvas site on your way). Curry Mitchell and Lisa Lane have some very creative and effective insights into discussions to share with you; I hope you will visit with them when you have time.
Our new Canvas PDP site offers all sorts of wonderful opportunities for exploration, especially via our Project Joy link which highlights faculty led teaching and learning related initiatives at MiraCosta.
Today, I would like to focus on our Integrative Learning page, which pulls together resources gathered by faculty working in our learning communities and health start programs, all of which focus “fostering students’ abilities to integrate learning—across courses, over time, and between campus and community life” (“A Statement on Integrative Learning”).
So while we wait for the thousands of responses to Joyful Tidings #23 to roll in, I thought I would take a moment to highlight two wonderful follow ups to previous conversations from Maria Figueroa and Sunny Cooke:
From Maria Figueroa in response to our conversation about empathy…
some holiday doggerel
with apologies to the many gifted poets on our faculty and staff
who must endure…
•••••••••••••••••••••
An Ode to Joyous Labor
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.
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
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.