Periodic blog posts about the search for larger perspectives that balance being an academic with being human. Find me at Medium.com/@metadisciplinarity
The Profession
- Let’s Put More Humanity Into the Humanities: To build a more humane humanities in practice
- Some Ugly Truths I Wish I Knew Before Going into a PhD Program, And 8 Tips for Surviving Them: “Of the students who were on campus attending classes at the same time as me, fully half of them did not complete the PhD.”
- The world outside the lecture hall is on fire: On political engagement and our relevance as academics.
- A Professor’s Action Plan for the Trumpocalypse: A new list of priorities for the post-2016 era.
- Demolishers and Fabricators: A Post-postmodern Fable: An exploration of postmodernism and post-postmodernism in cartoon form.
Pedagogy
- What to Teach and How to Teach It: A quick introduction to my basic teaching principles, AKA “the three C’s and three A’s.”
- Pedagogical Transparency, Part 1: The Master Learning Objectives Grid: Using learning objectives to outline what the core academic and life skills acquired in the humanities.
- The Grading “Scorecard”: A Tool for Teaching a Diverse Student Body: A maximally flexible grading system to meet the needs of a diverse student population and to maximize engagement in the class.
- Dynasties & Dragons: A Role-Playing Game for Developing Term Papers: A complex semester-long role-playing game integrated into my introductory undergraduate survey courses in Chinese history.
- Team-Taught Interdisciplinary Course on Visualization: Integrating Medieval Chinese Buddhism and STEAM. This course was a New Media Consortium 2015 Idea Lab Winner.
- iPad-Enabled Hybrid Course: Utilizing the public history resources in the Philadelphia area, this class had two purposes: to learn about the history of medicine, and to meet with various curators, archivists, and other professional role models that could share advice and perspectives about career choices in history.
- Deconstruction is no longer enough: Transitioning from critique-only to a fuller range of tools for empowerment, empathy, and meaning-making.
- Storytelling Ethnography as Engaged Pedagogy for a Diverse Student Body: An example of the kind of course content suggested in the previous post, specifically designed for diverse students.