News for and about University of Portland faculty and staff.
UP aims to cultivate world-citizenship in its students; are faculty up to the task? In this week’s Teaching & Learning submission, Lars Larson reviews the book Factfulness: Ten Reasons We’re Wrong About the World – and Why Things are Better Than you Think that can help orient our global imaginations more accurately.
For more information contact Larson at larson@up.edu.
The ReadUP website has been updated to include several photos of people all over campus reading this year’s book, and also a video by Lars Larson, English, highlighting compelling elements and possible takeaways from the book, at this link.
For more information contact Karen Eifler, Garaventa Center, at eifler@up.edu.
How can white professors at UP achieve a more complex understanding of race and racism? In this week’s Teaching & Learning blog, Lars Larson offers an overview of this year’s College of Arts & Sciences book group selection, White Fragility: Why it’s so Hard for White People to Talk about Racism, by Robin DiAngelo (pictured).
For more information contact Larson at larson@up.edu.
Why do all UP students take an English course, regardless of their professional aims? This week on the Teaching & Learning Blog, English chair Lars Erik Larson details how ENG 112 works within UP’s Core program. This is the second essay in Core Matters, a year-long series started by Andrew Guest that offer a discipline-by-discipline explanation of our University’s existing core curriculum.
This year’s pedagogy book title for the College of Arts and Sciences annual reading was Make it Stick: the Science of Successful Learning (Brown/Roediger/McDaniel, 2014). Lars Larson, English, would like to know: If you were among the participants, did the book’s methods “to learn better and remember longer” actually stick? Whether you are new to the book or not, Larson provides a quick overview of its lessons in a recent Teaching and Learning blog post.
For more information contact Larson at larson@up.edu.
Author Leni Zumas will read from her work on Wednesday, November 15, at 7:30 p.m., in the Pilot House bookstore. Zumas is the author of the story collection Farewell Navigator and the novel The Listeners, which was a finalist for the Oregon Book Award. She teaches in the MFA program at Portland State University. Her forthcoming novel, Red Clocks, was selected for Publishers Weekly’s “Top 10 Literary Fiction” list and has been described by Maggie Nelson as “funny, mordant, political, poetic, alarming, and inspiring—not to mention a way forward for fiction now.”
For details follow this link to the English department’s list of readers or contact Lars Larson, English, at larson@up.edu. Please note: Leni Zumas is substituting for the previously scheduled Carmen Maria Machado.
Molly Hiro and Lars Larson, English, will present “Experiencing India: A Film Introduction” on Tuesday, November 14, at 4:30 p.m., in Buckley Center room 102. The presentation begins with a brief overview of their experiences while teaching abroad as Fulbright scholars, along with a quick introduction to some facts about the nation of India. The 30-minute kaleidoscopic film gives viewers an impressionistic sense of sights, sounds, music, and experiences of living abroad in that country. The presentation is free and open to all.
If professors are finding that students in class aren’t learning, one remedy is to make sure we’ve made time to teach them how. In this week’s Teaching & Learning post, Lars Erik Larson summarizes two easy ways we can make our assignments and our fields more accessible and transparent to undergraduates, particularly first-generation and non-traditional students.
Poet, memoirist, and Pacific Northwest culture scholar Alan Weltzien will hold a reading on campus on Tuesday, October 24, 7:30 p.m., in the Pilot House bookstore. Weltzien has published nine books, most recently Thinking Continental: Writing the Planet One Place at a Time, and Exceptional Mountains: A Cultural History of the Pacific Northwest Volcanoes, which explores the relationship between the region’s identity and the Cascade mountains amid the recent growth of outdoor recreation. He edited the Norman Maclean Reader, the poetry collection To Kilimanjaro and Back, and the Puget Sound memoir A Father and an Island: Reflections on Loss.
For details follow this link, or contact Lars Larson, English department chair, at larson@up.edu.
It is highly likely, across the past few months, that America’s 2016 election has worked its way into your classroom or even your curriculum. In this week’s Teaching & Learning Tip, Lars Erik Larson corrals a series of insights from NYU social psychologist Jonathan Haidt (pictured), who helps explain some unexpected roots beneath our political differences, and why it’s so hard to hold a civil conversation about them. This link offers ideas taken from his book The Righteous Mind: Why Good People are Divided by Politics and Religion, as well as a link to his post-election insights from a TED talk last month. Haidt’s perspectives offer instructors the background to help foster one of the last spaces left for civil discussion: the college classroom.