Every semester, thousands of faculty members create course websites on a learning-management system such as Blackboard or Canvas. Colleges purchase these platforms, which allow professors to post readings, send messages, and facilitate discussions among students. And yet these expensive, proprietary systems are rarely used outside of classrooms. Alternatively, teaching with free, open-source software, including the…
Close reading – observing the stylistic details of a text in order to analyze an author’s use of language – is a skill taught in almost all college literature classes. Often, I describe this to students as collecting the data that we will eventually use as the evidence to support an interpretation of the text….
This post is part of a two-part series that considers digital learning platforms as an issue of critical pedagogy. HASTAC as Critical Pedagogy I teach students to write and research with HASTAC.org because I’m committed to critical, engaged, student-centered education that prepares students for the world beyond the classroom. For me, this involves both preparing students for…
Danica Savonick, SUNY Cortland @danicasavonick Thursday, August 2 1:00 – 2:15 Digital Pedagogy Lab Institute Today I was honored to share some of my favorite writings about teaching with a group of passionate educators at the Digital Pedagogy Lab Institute in Fredericksburg, Virginia. I was so grateful to our participants, and for everything they refused…
Dear Fellow Graduate Student, As you well know, this is a rough time to be pursuing an advanced degree. We are underfunded, overworked, exploited, and devalued by a society that (to take just one recent example) attempted to tax our tuition waivers as income, which would have made graduate education untenable for most of us…
On August 30, 2017, three students from my Queens College composition course published an article in the scholarly, peer-reviewed journal Hybrid Pedagogy. Their article, “The Ultimate Life Experience: Preparing Students for the World Beyond the Classroom” argues that colleges ought to prepare students for a great future, and offers concrete suggestions for how teachers, administrators, and students can…
In this blog, I describe how my class co-authored a set of community guidelines in order to create a supportive environment for discussing issues of race, class, gender, and sexuality. This past semester, I had the deep pleasure of teaching an English course on “The Arts of Dissent” at Queens College, where I shared some…
This blog was published by Inside Higher Ed on June 27, 2017. Whether you have known me as one of my students or a colleague, you may have noticed that I am obsessive about timekeeping in meetings, events, and the courses I teach. If you haven’t known me in either capacity, nice to digitally meet…
This semester students in my ENG 241 course at Queens College took what they learned and co-created their own “arts of dissent”: original websites, videos, timelines, lesson plans, poetry, photography, and drawings. (I’ve included the rationale for this assignment at the bottom of this post.) Want to know what Queens College students think about 2017? They think…
At whose expense are service learning and diversity courses effective? Can U.S. education policy stop telling poor students what to do (and instead provide them with resources and opportunities)? How can we avoid reproducing oppressions in our social justice work in education? These are just some of the difficult and important questions addressed at this…
