Author
A Reflection on Facilitating Conversations on Difference and Power
Sep. 26, 2014—By Brielle Harbin, CFT Graduate Teaching Fellow Conversations about race are often fraught. The remains of past hurts or misunderstandings fill our words with emotion and implicit meanings. Peeling back these layers often reveals hurt, hurt caused by feeling misunderstood or invalidated. These hurts dwell in all of us, even when they go unengaged. We...
Teaching, Difference, and Power—with Our Language
Sep. 12, 2014—by Nancy Chick, CFT Assistant Director I’ve been thinking about the role of language in the CFT’s theme of “Teaching, Difference, and Power.” During the first semester of my first faculty position, fresh out of graduate school, I spoke the language of my dissertation. Beautiful (to me) multisyllabic terms, an elegant (to me) theoretical framework...
Teaching Ferguson
Aug. 30, 2014—by Nancy Chick, CFT Assistant Director This year at the CFT, through our theme of “Teaching, Difference, and Power,” we turn to the complexities of the roles of difference and power in both what many of us teach and how we all teach. In an earlier post, I explored the notion of “educationally purposeful” ways...
Teaching Writing in the 21st Century
Aug. 19, 2014—The Center for Teaching is again collaborating with the Writing Studio, the Jean & Alexander Heard Library,the English Language Center, and (new this year) the Curb Center to develop resourceful experiences for anyone who teaches writing at Vanderbilt. This year, we’re sponsoring a one-day Teaching.Writing.Learning. Institute, held on Friday, September 12. This day-long workshop will help participants develop...
Reflections from SoTL Scholar Abbey Mann
Aug. 15, 2014—“Scholarly teaching is what every one of us should be engaged in every day that we are in classroom, in our office with students, tutoring, lecturing, conducting discussions, all the roles we play pedagogically. Our work as teachers should meet the highest scholarly standards of groundedness, of openness, of clarity and complexity. But it is...
Grading Writing Assignments in Less than a Lifetime
Aug. 15, 2014—by Nancy Chick, CFT Assistant Director One of the greatest stresses experienced by new faculty (and not-so-new faculty) is the amount of time spent on effective teaching. Parkinson’s Law—the notion that a task expands to fill the time available—seems more true for teaching than many other responsibilities. During Wednesday’s Teaching at Vanderbilt orientation for new faculty,...
What Can Faculty Do about Students’ Classroom-Based Anxieties? More Than You Think.
Aug. 4, 2014—by Nancy Chick (CFT Assistant Director) Last week, The Princeton Review released its annual list of “The Top 10 Colleges for ___,” and Vanderbilt made a big splash by ranking #1 with the Happiest College Students in the US.* While this is fantastic news for the campus, and it’s interesting to speculate about what makes these...
The Mindful PhD: Sitting Down & Staying Still
Jul. 27, 2014—by Nancy Chick, CFT Assistant Director The progressive breakdown of my computer and resulting residencies of IT guys have conspired to force me to read some of the books I have stacked on my desk. Today, I read the copy of Teaching with Heart: Poetry that Speaks to the Courage to Teach (Intrator & Scribner, eds.,...
Curricular Redesign with the CFT
Jul. 14, 2014—One characteristic of “the best college teachers,” according to Ken Bain (author of the book by this name and founder of the Vanderbilt CFT), is the ability to “reflect deeply on the nature of thinking within their fields“: They know what has to come first, and they can distinguish between foundational concepts and elaborations or illustrations of...
Reflections from SoTL Scholar Hasina Mohyuddin
Jul. 2, 2014—The SoTL Scholars Program introduces participants to the principles and practices of the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning, an international, multidisciplinary field of disciplinary specialists studying student learning. SoTL (pronounced “sō-tul” in the U.S.) is a synthesis of teaching, learning, and research in higher education that aims to bring a scholarly lens—the curiosity, the inquiry,...