{"title":"Community Writers' Circle as a Space for Transformation","authors":"Katherina A. Payne","doi":"10.5325/trajincschped.29.2.0166","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5325/trajincschped.29.2.0166","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT:This article details a personal narrative about participating in a community writers' circle in the neighborhood of East Harlem in New York City from 2009 to 2014. A writers' circle emphasizes a flexible and nonhierarchical approach to writing and publishing. The author benefited from the writers' circle and saw others benefit from it as well. This article encourages writers and educators to explore the free or low-cost community writers' circle as a space that is particularly adaptable to diverse group members and supportive of emerging writers.","PeriodicalId":138207,"journal":{"name":"Transformations: The Journal of Inclusive Scholarship and Pedagogy","volume":"34 9","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2019-12-24","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"120857308","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Eating Climate Change with Making the Best of It Dandelion: Collaborative Public Art as a Mode of Future-Oriented Learning","authors":"K. Cadieux, Marina Zurkow, Sarah Libertus","doi":"10.1353/TNF.2019.0017","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/TNF.2019.0017","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT:Long-term public art projects that engage public audiences in collaborative learning can be powerful venues for exploring public pedagogy and for investigating the mechanisms that allow people to learn and change. In the iterative and exploratory modes such projects usually require, we can learn a tremendous amount from interactions over time among the many audiences and networks that these projects involve—creative teams, production crews, performance staff, volunteers, participants, onlookers, and viewers of documentation. This article discusses a year-long public art project designed to engage diverse audiences in imaginative consideration of their future agency in the face of a changing climate. The project was carried out in a range of settings—public art festivals, university symposia, community meals, seminars and large lecture classrooms, and online—and the process provided many opportunities to learn about the methodology of developing and carrying out participatory future-casting events. The varied frameworks of this project provided practice with a range of interaction mechanics, and also provided participants with the chance to learn, with others, how to leverage the familiar in order to address the strange. We consider how this project maintains a focus on inclusive and equitable process in future building, and particularly how explicitly focusing on play, silence, beauty, stress, and the more-than-human contributes to successful learning, and to moving beyond some of the barriers we commonly experience in sustainability-oriented teaching and social organizing.","PeriodicalId":138207,"journal":{"name":"Transformations: The Journal of Inclusive Scholarship and Pedagogy","volume":"39 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2019-12-24","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"134533370","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"What One Course Can(Not) Do: Research Proposal Writing in an Urban Development Master's Program","authors":"D. Drucker","doi":"10.5325/trajincschped.29.2.0142","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5325/trajincschped.29.2.0142","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT:This article focuses on the application of English as the Medium of Instruction (EMI) theory and techniques to a research proposal writing course with a majority of non-native English-speaking students. The course, taught from 2016 to the present, takes place in the second semester of a two-year master's degree program in urban development at a German technical university and requires that students complete a series of scaffolding assignments culminating in a master's thesis proposal and oral summary presentation. The essay uses EMI theory, the course syllabus, descriptions of in-class and out-of-class activities (both graded and ungraded), and student course evaluations to identify the extent to which the course meets student needs. An analysis of the course indicates that its current structure reaches the course goals effectively for most students but needs adjustment to support the students with weaker English skills. This article concludes with recommendations for future versions of the course directed at instructors, the program administration, and central university administration.","PeriodicalId":138207,"journal":{"name":"Transformations: The Journal of Inclusive Scholarship and Pedagogy","volume":"57 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2019-12-24","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"125379624","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Shame and Loathing in Academia: For-Profit Education and the Adjunct Crisis","authors":"Nasreen Khan Clark","doi":"10.5325/trajincschped.29.2.0136","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5325/trajincschped.29.2.0136","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT:The job market in higher education is in shambles. The ratio of contingent faculty to full-time and tenure-track jobs is deeply skewed. The introduction of for-profit education has introduced a new and costly element to the situation. This article narrates the author's recent experience of teaching at a for-profit school and illuminates the ways in which the rise of for-profit education is entangled with the adjunct crisis. The article also examines the politics of shame at work in many educational work places that keep contingent faculty from talking about the financial and psychological toll of part-time work in academia—including the perceived disgrace surrounding employment at for-profit institutions.","PeriodicalId":138207,"journal":{"name":"Transformations: The Journal of Inclusive Scholarship and Pedagogy","volume":"25 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2019-12-24","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"116732924","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"You Don't Get the Show: Entrepreneurialism at the Crossroads of Critical Pedagogy","authors":"Ryan King-White","doi":"10.5325/trajincschped.29.2.0128","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5325/trajincschped.29.2.0128","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT:Those promulgating a contemporary critical pedagogy have suggested that educators must \"meet students where they are.\" Thus, if our students are fully inculcated within the realm of the neoliberal mindset–whereby the ideology, governmentality, and public policies of revenue production, little governmental support, radical individualism, and the commodification of everyday life is \"where they are\"—then, I would argue, in order to produce a culturally relevant \"pedagogy of the privileged\" some of us must cross over into the fundamentally grey area that is academic entrepreneurialism. For the past three years I have led a course entitled \"Sport Event Management\" within which my students and I led a number of fundraising and programming initiatives that helped provide fiscal support for students studying abroad, faculty development, guest speakers, and the \"privatized\" maintenance of the Towson University Sport Management Program. In this article I will discuss the challenges, successes, and failures of trying to lead such a course as a self-proscribed critical pedagogue. Oftentimes my students and I were confronted with moral and ethical decisions that made each class different, exhilarating, exciting, and exhausting. In the end, I walked away from the course because I could no longer handle the pressures of dealing with administration hell bent on doing things the \"neoliberal way.\"","PeriodicalId":138207,"journal":{"name":"Transformations: The Journal of Inclusive Scholarship and Pedagogy","volume":"13 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2019-12-24","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"125599374","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Teaching Culture in a Globalized Era: Strategies from a Postcolonial Feminist Classroom","authors":"Debotri Dhar","doi":"10.5325/trajincschped.29.2.0153","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5325/trajincschped.29.2.0153","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT:This \"Methods and Texts\" essay examines the theoretical and pedagogical challenges of teaching culture in contemporary women's studies university courses in the United States. In striving to reject essentialist understandings of culture, instead framing culture as historical and variously interpreted, with cultural identities and practices being marked by both continuity and change in our globalizing present, classrooms run up against centuries-old colonial histories of domination over the \"Third World,\" even within feminist discourses. These challenges may then be exacerbated by reductive understandings of globalization, the limitations of our own teaching, and complex classroom dynamics. Drawing from feminist pedagogy's emphasis on intersectionality, experiential learning, student voices, and participation, and deploying a postcolonial feminist framework that posits neither a hierarchy of cultures nor an unproductive cultural relativism, the article offers various textual resources, curricular tools, and pedagogical strategies to combat reductive understandings of culture in the classroom. Ultimately, it deploys culture and cultural identity as productive categories whose nuanced framing can help promote postcolonial, antiracist transnational feminist theory and praxis.","PeriodicalId":138207,"journal":{"name":"Transformations: The Journal of Inclusive Scholarship and Pedagogy","volume":"27 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2019-12-24","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"133300840","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Alternative Assessments, Unintended Consequences: The Promise and Peril of Digital Badges","authors":"Lauren Zucker, Troy Hicks","doi":"10.1353/TNF.2019.0008","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/TNF.2019.0008","url":null,"abstract":"abstract:Many educators are looking for alternative ways to encourage and recognize student learning, yet new approaches bring forth new challenges. This article recounts a high school teacher's efforts to implement a digital badging (micro-credentialing) program in the English Language Arts classroom as an alternative to traditional forms of assessment. After participating in an open, online professional learning experience for educators, the Connected Learning Massive Open Online Collaboration (CLMOOC), Lauren Zucker hoped to bring some of its playfulness and sense of community back to her classroom through a digital badging program that she co-developed with students. In the process, students were invited to submit their classwork as evidence to claim peer-designed digital badges to document and reward newly-acquired curricular skills. Shortly after one student questioned the initiative, other problems with the badges program quickly exposed themselves related to motivation, autonomy, and the badge-issuing process. Situating this teacher's experience within an educational context that offers numerous alternatives to traditional instruction (e.g., gamification, flipping, project-based learning), and within institutions that still depend heavily on traditional methods of assessment (e.g., summative exams and essays), the authors reflect on the challenges of providing authentic choices to students while maintaining a balance between teacher-led and student-driven pedagogy.","PeriodicalId":138207,"journal":{"name":"Transformations: The Journal of Inclusive Scholarship and Pedagogy","volume":"41 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2019-09-06","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"124869682","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Shakespeare Reading Groups: Education Without the \"Academy\"?","authors":"Adam Hansen, Tony Prince","doi":"10.1353/TNF.2019.0001","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/TNF.2019.0001","url":null,"abstract":"This paper grows from a contention the authors developed independently of each other, but that they shared (and which is shared and informed by others); namely that the neo-liberal marketization of education, including higher education, is a disaster for students, scholars, and the communities they are part of and serve. In a world of crisis capitalism where we are told ‘there is no alternative’, we seek to critically evaluate whether one of the alternatives we were trying to build – Shakespeare reading groups beyond the academy – really was or could be alternative, or whether our efforts simply reproduced the corrosive contradictions of current hegemonic models. So this paper considers the ways our reading groups focussed on Shakespeare might or might not offer a way to find common ground, and break down distinctions, between always contingent, problematic and provisional categorisations of ‘teacher’ and ‘learner’, ‘educator’ and ‘educated’, ‘client’ and ‘provider’. In so doing, we hope our practice, and how we theorize it here, can present a way to reflect on a context of which higher education is, or should be, an integral part.","PeriodicalId":138207,"journal":{"name":"Transformations: The Journal of Inclusive Scholarship and Pedagogy","volume":"23 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2019-09-06","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"115951875","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"My Big Teaching Mistake: Losing Sight of Pedagogical Success","authors":"J. Neuhaus","doi":"10.1353/TNF.2019.0006","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/TNF.2019.0006","url":null,"abstract":"abstract:In this article I discuss how failure to regularly acknowledge in an analytical way all the things I do effectively has sometimes impeded my pedagogical skill. Drawing on my own experiences and on some of the relevant scholarship on teaching and learning, I argue that many college instructors need to more deliberately cultivate an ongoing reflective practice that includes paying closer attention to pedagogical success.","PeriodicalId":138207,"journal":{"name":"Transformations: The Journal of Inclusive Scholarship and Pedagogy","volume":"2 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2019-09-06","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"122308217","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Silence in the Classroom: From Reacting to Rapport","authors":"John Currie","doi":"10.1353/TNF.2019.0005","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/TNF.2019.0005","url":null,"abstract":"abstract:Why do I view silences during in-class discussions as negatives? In this article, I employ narrative knowing to braid my personal teaching experience with a reflective reading of Mary Reda's Between Speaking and Silence: A Study of Quiet Students. Reda argues that a negative view of student silence is rooted in a cultural narrative of salvation by learning to speak truth to power. I argue that writing can serve as an antidote to silence, and that class discussions work best in supporting the development of the primary dialogic form for which my students and I are gathered. I differentiate between quiet students and quiet classes and recommend building rapport so as to clear the way for motivation and learning to occur.","PeriodicalId":138207,"journal":{"name":"Transformations: The Journal of Inclusive Scholarship and Pedagogy","volume":"35 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2019-09-06","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"130645721","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}