This is a tentative journal of a Critical Thinking course’s first-time instructor. I embrace this new journey with commitment and passion hoping to transform the excitement (and anxiety) of novelty into chances for pedagogical experimentation and betterment. Over the course of the semester I will try to expose my reasoning behind class design and activities. […]
Emerging from the first week of classes, I find myself reflecting on my class preparation and the anxiety I often feel around demonstrating “mastery” of the texts I assign each week. After years of being a student myself, I feel pressure to make sure I understand every element of the text clearly so that I […]
Building on Kaysi Holman’s recent blog post “Rethinking Assessment: Some Questions to Ask Yourself,” I got to thinking about my recent experiences teaching the Introduction to Modern Art survey at Lehman College last semester. In-class exams based on slide identifications are par for course in art history surveys. In fact, I would go as far […]
My recent composition courses at LaGuardia have asked how experimenting with a classroom’s tone can contribute to power-sharing pedagogies. One way I have thought through this question is in relation to visual style—how the “look” of the syllabus and course materials might help establish a more equitable relationship between myself and my students. Before elaborating, […]
Homines dum docent discunt. “Men learn while they teach,” at least according to the ancient Roman philosopher Seneca the Younger. But where does teaching fit into the PhD experience today? I was told early on in my career as a PhD student that teaching was something best avoided during my studies if at all possible. The […]
Classes start in two weeks, and for the past month, I have been searching every corner of the internet, every research database, for academic articles that are critical of mainstream psychology that are accessible to undergraduate students. As a PhD student in critical psychology, I have been lucky enough to be exposed to critical race […]
At this point in my career, I’ve literally reviewed thousands of resumes or CVs for positions I was hiring for. A few years ago, I started putting on workshops for students on Resume and CV building, mostly because I was aghast at some of the simple pitfalls people seem to constantly step in. On Tuesday, […]
I am pleased to share my research paper entitled, Voluntarily Exiled? Korean State’s Cultural Politics of Young Adults’ Social Belonging and Korean Students’ Exile to a US Community College, published by the journal, Higher Education. This ethnographic study examines the complicated interlink between the Korean state’s identity politics of citizenship and working-class and lower middle-class Korean students’ […]
Each year in the LaGuardia Mellon Humanities Scholars program, we put on a workshop about career goals to help students identify the careers that best suit their interests and abilities, and to help them prepare materials that will help them in their applications for schools or jobs. For the last two years, I always start […]
main photo CC BY 2.0 of Marco Verch This past semester in particular, I’ve received a lot of questions from graduate teaching fellows about restructuring their courses’ assessment structures (mostly to be more in line with their student-centered pedagogical methods). After all, it creates a bit of a hypocrisy when a teacher tauts to their […]
