tiger c. roholt

value of education (trends)

Huffington Post on Montclair's Engaged Teaching Fellows Program

I'm currently a Fellow in Montclair State University's Engaged Teaching Fellows Program, which is headed by Ken Bain, author of What the Best College Teachers Do. Today, there is an article about the program in the Huffington Post. In the article, Ken is quoted describing the program:

 

"We work on implementing practices that are proven to encourage deep learning, eliminating what doesn't; we focus on motivation, how to avoid the boring lecture, the redundant PowerPoint, the unread and costly textbooks. We explore new technologies, consider social factors on motivation and learning, investigate how to create syllabi that invites and incites the student to learn, experiment with how to create active learning experiences that allow for disciplinary practice, how to use formative assessment of learning, rather than summative. All of this leads to an extreme change in teaching strategy and learning outcomes, which the Fellow must prove through a complete course re-design and total syllabus reconstruction."

 

The Humanities and Innovation

A short MSNBC interview with Harvard's president Drew Faust on the benefit of majoring in the humanities. *Nice points about innovation and creativity.*

 

 

 

Music, Anti-Scientism (& Interdisciplinarity)

I’ve just contributed a short piece on music and anti-scientism to the Creative Research Center blog at Montclair State University. The piece considers an aspect of the music theorist Thomas Clifton's view and its connection to Martin Heidegger's readiness-to-hand. The CRC project at MSU is new, and has had a very promising beginning, well guided by Neil Baldwin (a Professor in the Department of Theatre and Dance at MSU). The blog is definitely worth a look, even if you are outside the MSU community—especially if you are interested in interdisciplinary academic experiments.

I’ll reprint below the Overview/Philosophy of the CRC (this is a quotation from the CRC Welcome page):

The Creative Research Center (CRC) is a born-digital, dynamic, nimble, open-source, collaborative space -- a Web forum to stimulate, reinvigorate, promote and publicize Very Large-Scale Conversations.

While the CRC lives in the College of the Arts of Montclair State University, the arts are not the sole proprietors of imaginative thinking. The reason-for-being of the Creative Research Center, thus, is to inspire discussion of shared commonalities of imagination and creativity across all fields of knowledge, including (but not exclusively) the expressive arts. The environment of Montclair State as an aspirational public university, therefore, is the ideal place to incubate such a Center.

The CRC has far-reaching curatorial, editorial and outreach intentions including breaking down "silos" which frequently exist among academic . . .

Tenure, RIP

From the Chronicle of Higher Education: "Tenure, RIP: What the Vanishing Status Means for the Future of Education"

"Over just three decades, the proportion of college instructors who are tenured or on the tenure track plummeted: from 57 percent in 1975 to 31 percent in 2007. The new report is expected to show that that proportion fell even further in 2009." 

Why is this an undesirable trend?  One reason: "A couple of dozen studies over the last decade have shown that as the proportion of professors off the tenure track rises, the proportion of students who return to college the following year and eventually graduate declines."

Revisiting the Canon Wars

That is the title of an essay in the NY Times Sunday Book Review (9/16/07) reconsidering the impact of Allan Bloom's The Closing of the American Mind, and the value of the Western canon for American undergraduates.