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:
One Example
Not all initiatives originating outside our institution are hostile takeovers peddled by the professional educational initiative industry. Often, MiraCosta College faculty discover great approaches to teaching and learning through their independent research and participation in discipline related conferences and networks. Then, working through their departments and in partnership with their deans, faculty initiate curricular and/or pedagogy change.
Greetings MiraCostans:
At our TED talk style flex extravaganza ScholarScapes: MiraCosta Profs Share Big Ideas, Sociology Professor Sean Davis offered an introduction to Problem Based Learning in a talk he titled Learning By Doing.
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…
While we could debate what aspects of and approaches to teaching and learning we wish to discuss as a community of teachers and learners, I hope we can all agree that the conversations themselves are essential.
Talking to each other about our teaching and learning opens us to ideas, relationships, and inspiration we can miss as we focus on our day to day work at the college. (It took me three hours to write that sentence without using the phrase “hunkered down in our silos,” which just shows how educational jargon has corrupted my very soul!).
I want to share an experience I have had with this kind of conversational synergy over the past few days.
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.