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).