Based on the name, I would’ve assumed that most scholars of digital pedagogy would be operating under some kind of assumption that technology was an innate force for good, that nonelectronic methods of teaching would become dated, or that the role of the instructor in individual interactions could be automated away, but it was nice […]

After having read a number of my peers’ posts and having read several different perspectives on Critical Pedagogy, I thought I wanted to spend my writing time this week thinking through a concrete application for Critical Pedagogical theory. I generally find that I’m unhappy with the work I am doing when I don’t have a […]

This week, a group of students from the Contemporary Pedagogy class at VT got together to discuss digital pedagogy. In this blog post we are going to address the use of technology in the class, be it digital devices or educational tools. A thorough analysis of the pros and cons of different technologies will be […]

In reading and thinking about case-based pedagogy, I found myself reading the word “case” so often that I lost all faith that I knew what it meant. What is a case, and what makes it different from an example, word problem, or open-ended question? I sometimes find it helpful to try and chase the history […]

I spend a lot of time thinking about names, partly because I’m terrible at remembering them, partly because I’ve had trans friends with strong feelings about acceptable names and nicknames even before I knew what the word trans meant, and partly because I’m very aware of how much it makes me feel personally known when […]

On average, I feel I’m part of a generation of academics that cares much more about teaching and pedagogy than some of our predecessors. It is still possible to get and keep a professorship while dedicating a minimum amount of time and attention to teaching, but it is no longer as “uncool” to care about […]

In last week’s post, I talked a bit about the problems with prerequisite series and remedial coursework when it comes to retaining students in science and engineering majors. I also talked about Dr. Klingbeil’s call to action for parsing out the chain of prerequisites in your academic department and how long it will take students […]

I’ve been thinking about course prerequisites for a while, since a class that I TA and will eventually teach at Virginia Tech is continually being revised to determine exactly how much “review” from the prerequisite statistics class is enough without spending half of a food science class teaching students statistics. For a number of frustrating […]

One of the major things I hear, even from professors I know with partial teaching appointments who care about how their students do and would like to continually do better, is that they are simply not rewarded or paid for their teaching efforts. This is perhaps a mantra that I hear more often than most […]

The Graduate Record Examination (GRE) is a standardized test taken by many aspiring graduate students. In fact, until very recently, the GRE test was required nearly universally for admission to US graduate programs. Much like the forms of standardized testing used in undergraduate admissions, GRE scores are often used predominantly with a cutoff to separate […]