Resource Category
The Mindful PhD: How It Works, III
Oct. 31, 2013—by Nancy Chick, CFT Assistant Director A man riding a horse approaches a man standing by the side of the road. The bystander asks where the rider is going, and the rider responds, “‘I don’t know. Ask the horse’” (Tan, 2012, p. 104). Chade-Meng Tan tells this story to illustrate the notion of emotional regulation,...
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...
Beyond the Five-Page Paper: Representing Student Learning Visually
Oct. 28, 2013—by Derek Bruff, CFT Director Recently, CFT assistant director Nancy Chick and I led a workshop titled “Beyond the Five-Page Paper: Representing Student Learning Visually,” part of the CFT’s “Students as Producers” theme year. We don’t dismiss the importance of essays as formative and evaluative activities for students, but we do want to encourage instructors...
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...
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...
CFT Offers New Guide: Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (SoTL)
Sep. 24, 2013—The scholarship of teaching and learning (SoTL, pronounced “sō-tul” in the US) is a synthesis of teaching, learning, and research in higher education that aims to bring a scholarly lens—the curiosity, the inquiry, the rigor, the disciplinary variety—to what happens in the classroom (brick-and-mortar, virtual, co-curricular, et al.). SoTL involves asking meaningful questions about student...