UPbeat

News for and about University of Portland faculty and staff.

TLC from the TLC

TLC From The TLC: Future Teaching, Super Courses, and Core Exploration

For this week’s Teaching & Learning tip, Andrew Guest, psychology and core director, offers possible prompts for summer teaching dreams – with a specific invitation to start imagining courses for the new Exploration Level of the University Core.

With the end in sight of this most challenging and odd academic year, it can be fun to start thinking about a near future of (maybe) having just a bit of time to read, dream, and do the kind of imagining that makes good teachers life-long learners. I’m particularly excited to dive further into a new book on Super Courses: The Future of Teaching and Learning – thinking more about how we at UP can merge the current impetus for evolving our curriculum with best practices in creating great courses.

Dreaming of ‘super courses’ may also be worth some time for us at UP because of core revitalization opportunities to re-develop and create courses for the new Exploration Level – a set of course offerings to be phased in starting Fall of 2022 that aspires to interdisciplinarity, addressing timely issues, and broadening opportunities for students to learn and faculty to teach. For a brief overview of and invitation to Exploration Level opportunities and possibilities, see a new Teaching and Learning Community blog post on “The Once and Future Core Course: Imagining (and Designing) the Exploration Level.”

Finally, as one additional suggestion for the fast approaching summer possibility of having actual time to read, Heather McGhee’s recent book The Sum of Us: What Racism Costs Everyone and How We Can Prosper Together is excellent. While not specifically about teaching or higher education, it offers a robust and deeply evidenced take on what she calls the “solidarity dividend” – ways of working toward a better future by attending more carefully to the interests we almost all share (appropriate, perhaps, to the idea of the Core as UP’s shared academic experience).

TLC From The TLC: “Thank God for the Poets”

For this week’s Teaching & Learning tip, Lars Larson, English, suggests reading Margaret Renkl’s recent New York Times piece “Thank God for the Poets”:

Deep in the bloom of spring, we are all tired from a hard year. Here in National Poetry Month, Renkl’s short essay invites instructors to reflect on the role of the lyric in their lives and lectures.  While not directly about teaching, the piece is about suffering, solace, and the ongoing role of beauty in your life – all of which infuse our teaching. As Renkl concludes, poets “help us find the words our own tongues feel too swollen to speak. Thank God for the poets who teach our blinkered eyes to see these gifts the world has given us, and what we owe it in return.”

The article includes a shout-out to Maggie Smith’s poem “Good Bones”, which the editors of Writers magazine – UP’s student-run creative writing journal – chose for its 2021 theme. (Note that a launch party and reading of this year’s volume will take place via Zoom from 6-8 pm on Founders Day, April 20.)

And if today you lack the time for reading the article, then at least absorb four lines Renkl cites from Amanda Gorman’s shimmering inaugural poem “The Hill We Climb”: “Let the globe, if nothing else, say this is true: / That even as we grieved, we grew, / That even as we hurt, we hoped, / That even as we tired, we tried.”

TLC Teaching Tip of the Week: Citation Help with RefWorks

As we approach the end of spring semester, your students may be working on major research projects. (Or, looking ahead to summer, you may have some research and writing projects of your own planned). Citing sources is often a less-favored aspect of the research process; the library’s RefWorks database can help! As an alternative to creating citations from scratch or using free online citation generators, RefWorks is a web-based tool for collecting and organizing your sources and creating pre-formatted bibliographies in hundreds of citation styles (including all the major styles, as well as many journal-specific citation formats). As a bonus for students, RefWorks allows alumni to continue to access their RefWorks account after they graduate.  

Clark Library’s RefWorks guide offers guidance and brief online tutorials about getting started, organizing references, reading and annotating, and sharing and collaborating with RefWorks.  Additionally, learn about tools for writing papers with RefWorks; these optional plug-ins integrate into Microsoft Word or Google Docs to assist with formatting in-text citations (or footnotes) as well as bibliographies.  

If you or your students would like a guided overview of RefWorks, please contact us at reference@up.edu or make an appointment to meet with a librarian.

TLC Teaching Tip of the Week: Anchor Seminar

As a Teaching and Learning Tip of the Week, Andrew Guest is using his Core Director pen to share an invitation and introduction to a project for the new Anchor Seminar – an evolved version of the first year workshop which, starting in Fall of ’21, will include a faculty-led introduction to the Core and the broader values of a UP education. The faculty group is working to create a living anthology of potential readings and materials for the Anchor Seminar, and hopes for suggestions from the broader academic community at UP. As we approach the stretch run of this most challenging academic year, what are the great works and thoughtful writings that inspire you (and that we might share with new UP students)?

TLC Teaching Tip of the Week: Playing in the Classroom, Seriously

As we all skip, amble or trudge through our 4th semester of remote teaching, a recent essay from the teaching arm of The Chronicle of Higher Education offers ways to incorporate play into college classrooms. In the complete essay, linked here, author Sarah Rose Cavanaugh fleshes out each of the strategies offered in this streamlined version, and for most provides a research-based rationale and ideas on how to make it happen in a Zoom or Teams environment. For those who are content with just the facts, here are Cavanaugh’s 5 ideas/arguments for incorporating play into college classrooms, all of them tweakable for multiple disciplinary contexts:

  1. Play is a natural way to learn, as in doing so we are usually testing possibilities, strengthening cognitive and physical repertoires and imagining future scenarios that demand emergent knowledge and skills.
  2. Play offers mental breaks from dire news, a particularly compelling truth when students’ media feeds and daily conversations teem with danger and threat from phenomena over which they have very little—if any—control
  3. Take a few minutes (3-5 max) to have every one find a fun gif that either demonstrates a concept you are studying or captures how the learning is going, then do some screen-sharing in breakout rooms or with the whole group. It’s amazing how apt and memorable some of those gifs can be, so this strategy has the additional bonus of making course material adhere to brains in lasting ways.
  4. Use improv “warm up” or community-building activities and don’t call them icebreakers, as the first rule of icebreakers is that everyone hates icebreakers. Have students find an object in their room or home that could demonstrate a concept from the course;  have a snowball discussion in which students move from pairs to quads to octets building on conversation about cases, examples or dilemmas relevant to concepts they are studying.
  5. Move, move, move: 30-second yoga stretches, twists or jumps are investments of time that re-start waning attention spans and bring everyone in on the oxygenating fun, even if a few videos turn quickly off.

TLC Teaching Tip of the Week: How Not to Dread Reading Online Discussion Posts

Even in the Before Times, requiring students to contribute to online discussions was part of the teaching toolkit for many of us. Now it’s nearly de rigueur across all our disciplines. If reading classroom forums feels tedious at times, here is one idea that might bring back the glow: rather than generic instructions such as “write an initial post and then respond to two of your classmates’ posts,” see if you can craft a prompt that forces students to make an interesting decision/choice and defend it, drawing upon course material. When they are responding to their peers, they could be invited to identify the most compelling aspect of the argument, or the juiciest word choice, or the course reading that doesn’t seem to have been considered in the formulation of an assertion. This might help shift the nature of students’ responses from simply  “I agree/disagree” and parroting the readings to reactions that make for more gripping thinking and reading on everyone’s parts. It’s difficult to conceive of any subject matter that is truly morally or ethically neutral, so inviting students to take a stand on a thorny authentic problem—and defend it using actual facts—could flow naturally from just about any discipline. Initial prompts can be tweaked to fit your subject from stems such as “Given x reality, should Ted choose y or z path of action?” “Is Barney or Robin more likely to be successful in this scenario—how do you know?” “What song lyric from your Spotify list best captures the essence of this article—why do you say that?”

In addition to helping learners become conversant in the academic language of your discipline, an exercise such as this one helps answer the question “when am I ever going to use this new knowledge in real life?”

TLC Teaching Tip of the Week: Finding New York Times Articles

Do your students need to access current newspaper articles from the New York Times?  The library subscribes to a New York Times database that provides full text articles from 1980 through today. These articles are text-only; images are not included.

The New York Times database initially connects users to a screen where they can search by topic or keyword. To assist with browsing articles from a specific date, the librarians have created a tutorial describing how to find current issues of the New York Times or Wall Street Journal. This tutorial, and many others, may be accessed from our Tutorials guide.

If you’re interested in older articles, the library also provides access to a historical New York Times database that includes full text (including images) of articles from 1851-2007. Additional resources for finding current and historical newspaper articles may be accessed from our News subject guide.

Please contact reference@up.edu if you have any questions about finding or accessing newspapers through the Clark Library.

TLC Teaching Tip: Universal Design for Learning

The COVID-19 pandemic has changed the way we teach and learn.  Your experience may be similar to those faculty who have told me they recently implemented Universal Design for Learning (UDL) principles to develop new teaching strategies that otherwise would not have been implemented had it not been for the remote-learning model caused by the pandemic.   In AES we have received countless student reports of the thoughtful ways in which you as faculty support student learning and growth in these challenging times. Most of you plan to update and implement new iterations of these strategies once the University returns to a completely in-person model, post-pandemic.

How does this trend impact pedagogy moving forward?   Both Inside Higher Ed and the Chronicle of Higher Education recently featured articles addressing UDL planning for a post-COVID higher education landscape.  We as a University community recognize and celebrate your tremendous efforts in adapting your teaching to meet ever-evolving learning needs this year. The work you do to update your pedagogy to meet current needs, while stressful, is also urgent, flexible, experimental, innovative, and deeply appreciated by students.  This ongoing pedagogical work informed by UDL is happening across the country in myriad disciplines, including surgical education, and facilities and technology planning.   As these articles suggest, this work is most effective when done as a community within a user-centered UDL planning process which integrates physical design and technology considerations, and includes perspectives of faculty, administrators, students and IS staff. We in AES look forward to supporting this ongoing work and welcome your feedback and questions at any time.  As always and especially now, thank you for your ongoing partnership in support of students.

For more information please contact Melanie Gangle,  AES Manager at gangle@up.edu.

TLC Teaching Tip of the Week: Good Enough

As we claw our way to the end of a semester like no other, the Teaching & Learning Collaborative offers this pithy tip on the virtues of doing work that is not miraculous, but good enough:

“Good enough” doesn’t mean settling. “Good enough” isn’t a cop-out. “Good enough” represents an attitude of deep gratitude toward whatever happens at you. Not only is the perfect the enemy of the good, but the good is the enemy of the good enough. Follow the creed of “good enough” for long enough and something remarkable happens. The “enough” drops away like a snake sloughing its skin, and what remains is simply the “Good.”

 

— Eric Weiner (2020).  The Socrates Express: In Search of Life Lessons From Dead Philosophers (p. 116). Simon & Schuster