Commentary Category
Self-Authoring Community Activism:
Women & Gender Studies Students as Producers
Oct. 30, 2013—by Nancy Chick, CFT Assistant Director The CFT’s theme this year, “Students as Producers,” has given me the opportunity to talk with some talented and thoughtful colleagues across campus. On October 24, I brought together three of them to have a conversation on teaching about “Producing, Performing, & Creating Learning across the Humanities: Models of...
The Mindful PhD: How It Works, II
Oct. 24, 2013—by Nancy Chick, CFT Assistant Director I was thrilled when I learned the term “proprioception,” or our ability to sense the body and its movements in relation to the environment around us. I was deep into yoga at the time, and it gave me language (clunky, but useful) for something I found myself thinking about...
The Mindful PhD: How It Works, I
Oct. 17, 2013—by Nancy Chick, CFT Assistant Director My recent posts have been focused on issues of stress, mostly because I’ve seen the effects on my own life and worry about colleagues, students, and friends. Some of you have asked me to clarify how mindfulness works: what it actually does, how that happens, and what it looks...
The Mindful PhD: Stories of the Slow Professor
Oct. 10, 2013—by Nancy Chick, CFT Assistant Director Last week, I attended my 10th consecutive conference of the International Society for the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (ISSOTL)–in many ways, the highlight of my academic year, as it feels very much like ‘going home.’ After five days, though, it’s good to be back in my real home,...
The Mindful PhD: This Embodied PhD
Oct. 8, 2013—by Nancy Chick, CFT Assistant Director Two weeks ago today, I had a lumpectomy, and October is Breast Cancer Awareness Month, so I’m writing a bonus post this week to celebrate–and to stake a faculty claim in the land of women and men with bodies and emotions and cells. More…. Reposted from The Mindfulness PhD...
Getting to Know Coursera: VIDL and Vital Questions
Oct. 2, 2013—by Kathryn McEwen, (former) CFT Graduate Assistant The new school year is underway, bringing with it some big changes for online learning at Vanderbilt. At the end of May, the new Vanderbilt Institute for Digital Learning debuted. Led by Douglas Fisher, associate professor of computer science and computer engineering, VIDL will not only manage Vanderbilt’s...
The Mindful PhD: Playing with Others
Oct. 1, 2013—by Nancy Chick, CFT Assistant Director I recently received an email that, in another time, would have tested me. It’s a genre familiar to all of us: several paragraphs registering a complaint, only some of which we have control over, written out of frustration and haste, and expressed in a way that (we think) we...
The Mindful PhD: Being Fully Present in the Classroom
Sep. 25, 2013—by Nancy Chick, CFT Assistant Director A recent study on students’ laptop use in the classroom has brought a lot of attention to the issue of, well, attention in the classroom. As their title indicates, Sana, Weston, and Cepeda (2013) found that “Laptop multitasking hinders classroom learning for both users and nearby peers.” In a...
Looking to the Future: Reflections on Andrew Delbanco’s “College”
Sep. 25, 2013—by Derek Bruff, CFT Director This year’s Commons Reading is Andrew Delbanco’s College: What It Was, Is, and Should Be. Our first-year undergraduates have been reading the book and discussing it in their Vanderbilt Visions sections, and Andrew Delbanco himself will give a talk at Langford Auditorium on October 14th. Since I wanted to be...
Last Week’s “T.W.L.” Conversation on Teaching Writing: “Grading Is Teaching”
Sep. 24, 2013—by Nancy Chick, CFT Assistant Director Scott Juengel (English) talked about “Managing the Paper Load: Grading Writing Efficiently and Effectively” with approximately 30 faculty, staff, graduate students, and undergraduate students on September 18. This lunchtime gathering was the second in the “Teaching. Writing. Learning.” series of conversations on teaching writing. Although he’s been at Vanderbilt...