Last night, I got to see my students sit shoulder to shoulder with community leaders, including Little Rock’s Mayor Frank Scott, Jr., on a panel about improving religious tolerance in our city. They organized, participated in, moderated, and advertised the panel after returning from a study abroad course I taught this summer in Spain.
In May, 2022, the Chronicle of Higher Education invited me and five other experts to contribute to a forum on solving the student disengagement crisis. The full forum is behind a paywall here: https://www.chronicle.com/article/how-to-solve-the-student-disengagement-crisis, but you can read my contribution below. For me, the most important thing we can do is build authentic human connections with our students–in both our online and our face-to-face classes.
After missing travel something fierce for the last couple of years, we have boldly gathered a group of intrepid students who are up for an adventure and we are heading to Spain! I am so excited and I am dreaming of having the chance to experience flying with Jettly.
To continue, the class is “Islam and Migration in Contemporary and Historical Spain” and we will be visiting Madrid, Toledo, Granada, and Salobreña over the next twelve days. In this blog, the students will be contributing one post each to document our journey and all we learn along the way.
In November 2019, I took a group of students to Morocco as a part of a travel course. We visited Rabat and participated in the International Model Arab League conference, traveled to the desert and to beautiful Marrakesh, and enjoyed the kind hospitality of the International University in Rabat. It was the trip of a lifetime and the memories sustained us through the darkest days of the pandemic when we couldn’t travel at all. The students documented our adventures in a blog, which, due to a series of unfortunate events, disappeared from our departmental website, but which I am recreating here on my personal website for posterity’s sake. And for the memories.
The last two years have really been something, amiright? The last time I was able to gather in person and talk about pedagogy with my colleagues was at the American Political Science Association Teaching and Learning Conference in New Mexico in February, 2020. If only we would have known what was just around the corner, I think we would have stayed out a little later and toasted a little harder.
Two years ago today, I wrote this guest post for the Duck of Minerva blog. At the time, professors everywhere—along with the rest of the world—were trying to figure out what this pandemic meant for our lives. Specifically, we were trying to adjust our classes and continue to teach students. Two years on, it feels like we are STILL trying to figure out how best to adjust and teach. But the priorities I emphasized two years ago held up pretty well through the many COVID surges we have endured. Don’t be too hard on yourself, focus on what online does well, and build rapport with your students. So, while many things have changed in the last two years (The US elected a new president! A giant ship got stuck in the Suez canal and then freed! I wrote an entire book on building rapport with students!), some things have stayed pretty steady.
Continue ReadingI just uploaded a video to YouTube and submitted it to a Virtual Teaching Forum hosted at my university, the University of Arkansas at Little Rock. I have been a political science professor there since 2009 and since my very first year (when I started teaching online with no clue what I was doing) I have been researching ways to improve online teaching and learning.
You can check out the video here: https://youtu.be/qRVHNxgBpTU. I hope you do, because I am really proud of it. Also, it’s only five minutes long, so it’s not a huge investment of your time. In the video, I try to convince my university that it should invest in training faculty in how to teach online classes with rapport.
In March 2020, when colleges and universities across the United States and the world started rapidly moving all of their courses online, a few colleagues reached out to me to ask about best practices for online teaching. I have been studying online teaching and learning for over a decade and can provide links for inclusive online course design, peer-reviewed academic articles, and handy best practice takeaways. But the truth is, what we are dealing with right now is not a “best practice” scenario. Now is not the time to try to do everything you might if you had the time and mental space to plan for an online class. Nor can we act as if there wasn’t a pandemic going on. What we are doing right now is emergency remote teaching.
