pedagogy

“Imagine. . .”: John Lennon as an Entry Point to Learning about Transcendentalism

*As part of my studies in the Certificate for Teaching and Learning in Higher Education I was asked to write a Teaching Portfolio section on entry points to learning. We were asked to connect this entry point with Gardner’s theory of Multiple Intelligences. In this abridged version I introduce the difference between MI and entry … Read more

Kerouacking the Classroom and Talmudic-Style Annotation of Poetry

I teach a final year seminar called America With[out] Borders, and among the required readings are long poems by Lorna Dee Cervantes and Claudia Rankine. I have taught Cervantes’s “Bananas” and “Coffee” in other modules previously, but have rarely been satisfied with the lectures. These are challenging poems that require deep, well-researched readings. Students rarely enter … Read more

The Anthropocene Has Arrived

The Anthropocene has arrived, a new epoch hallmarked by mass-produced and often abused chickens, plastic pollution, and the fallout from nuclear tests: The new epoch should begin about 1950, the experts said, and was likely to be defined by the radioactive elements dispersed across the planet by nuclear bomb tests, although an array of other signals, including … Read more