Tag: Teaching

  • The Collaborative AI Classroom: Teaching Students to Work With, Not Against, AI Tools – Faculty Focus

    The Collaborative AI Classroom: Teaching Students to Work With, Not Against, AI Tools – Faculty Focus

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  • Reaching (Not Just Teaching) Today’s Students: A Communication Cheatsheet – Faculty Focus

    Reaching (Not Just Teaching) Today’s Students: A Communication Cheatsheet – Faculty Focus

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  • Ky. Prof. Calling for War Against Israel Pulled From Teaching

    Ky. Prof. Calling for War Against Israel Pulled From Teaching

    Since Oct. 7, 2023, scholars and members of the broader public have debated whether Israel’s war against Hamas in Gaza actually constitutes a genocide of Palestinians. Fights have erupted over scholarly association resolutions, course descriptions and assignments calling it such.

    Ramsi Woodcock, a University of Kentucky law professor, says it’s a genocide. On his website, antizionist.net, he says that the ongoing genocide—combined with his expectation that Israel would violate any future ceasefire and continue killing—creates a “moral duty” for the world’s nations.

    That duty, he writes in the “Petition for Military Action Against Israel,” is to wage war on Israel until it “has submitted permanently and unconditionally to the government of Palestine everywhere from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea.” He asks fellow law scholars to sign the petition, adding that Israel is a colony and war is needed to decolonize.

    This month—just after Woodcock says he was promoted to full professor—the university removed him from teaching. In a July 18 message to campus that doesn’t specifically name Woodcock, UK president Eli Capilouto wrote that legal counsel was investigating whether an employee’s “conduct may violate federal and state guidance as well as university policies.”

    “We have been made aware of allegations of disturbing conduct, including an online petition calling for the destruction of a people based on national origin,” Capilouto wrote. Woodcock told Inside Higher Ed that characterization of his petition is “obviously defamatory, creates a hostile environment for me and makes me potentially physically unsafe.” He said he’s considering suing Capilouto and the university for defamation.

    Capilouto further wrote that the petition, which the unnamed university employee seemed to be “broadly” circulating online, “can be interpreted as antisemitic in accordance with state and federal guidance.” Woodcock responded that “what Palestinians resist, and what those who advocate for them resist, is colonization, apartheid and a currently unfolding genocide—they are not opposed to any particular religion or any particular people.”

    But Shlomo Litvin, chairman of the Kentucky Jewish Council and rabbi for the Chabad at UK Jewish Student Center, told Inside Higher Ed that “calling for the establishment of a state that is free of Jews in a land that currently has seven million Jews is calling for the death of seven million Jews,” including “families and relatives of [Woodcock’s] students.”

    “What he’s calling for is a second Holocaust,” Litvin said, adding that “this idea that there is a possibility of the Jews coming to some imaginary country and being safe there is a fantasy that not even he believes.”

    Woodcock countered, “Rabbi Litvin is trying to distract us from an actual second Holocaust that Israel is committing right now in Gaza and which only immediate military intervention will stop.”

    Woodcock has become another example of pro-Palestine faculty across the country being investigated for their writing or speech about the conflict while they aren’t teaching. During the Biden era, investigations at other universities led to discipline and terminations. The current Trump administration has stripped universities of federal funding and punished them in other ways for allegedly failing to address campus antisemitism. And Woodcock’s case continues the debate about when denunciations of Israel or Zionism are or aren’t antisemitic.

    But why UK began investigating Woodcock now remains unclear.

    ‘Not Academic Discourse’

    In a July 18 email obtained by Inside Higher Ed, UK’s general counsel, William E. Thro, wrote to Woodcock that “recently, the university became aware of your writings on certain websites, your conduct at academic conferences, and your postings on American Association of Law Schools [sic] list serves [sic], and other actions.”

    “These activities may create a hostile environment for Jewish members of the university community or otherwise constitute harassment as defined by the Supreme Court,” Thro wrote. “The university has concerns that your actions may violate Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the equivalent state laws, and various university policies.”

    Title VI prohibits discrimination based on shared ancestry, including antisemitism.

    But the letter didn’t provide further details, such as what conference conduct or writings the university was concerned about, or how university officials became aware of this expression. A UK spokesperson said, “At this time, we are not going to comment beyond [Capilouto’s] statement, as there is an active investigation.”

    Woodcock said he made a statement about “Israel’s genocide of Palestinians” at a conference over a year ago. He later shared a link to his antizionist.net site on Association of American Law Schools online discussion forums, triggering “really lively debate about whether Israel has a right to exist.”

    “Nobody wants to talk about that question, and as soon as you bring it up, you see how hungry people are to debate it,” Woodcock said.

    He says he created the antizionist.net website late last year but didn’t share it broadly until the start of this month. It’s a site for what he dubs the Antizionist legal studies movement.

    “Israel is committing genocide against Palestinians in Gaza,” Woodcock wrote on the site in December. “No genocide in the 20th century ended without armed intervention. For more than a year now, the international community has been in denial about the implication of these two facts.”

    He listed various failed international efforts to stop the genocide, ending with “Even the most outspoken international lawyers dare not speak the name of the only thing that history suggests might actually stop Israel. That is, of course, war—by the international community against Israel.”

    Woodcock says he wants Israel defeated and replaced with a Palestinian state, and he doesn’t insist the vast majority of Jews be automatically allowed to remain. He says Palestinians should get to decide. His definition of “antizionist legal scholars” includes that they oppose “any right of self-determination for Jewish people as such in Palestine.” He does say that “the tiny minority of Jewish people whose ancestors lived in Palestine immediately prior to the arrival of the first Zionist colonizers in Palestine in 1882 … share in the right of Palestinians to self determination.”

    “Palestinian people alone should decide how Palestine should be governed after independence, including the legal status of the colonizer population,” he says.

    The Kentucky Jewish Council and State Sen. Lindsey Tichenor, a co-chair of the state General Assembly’s Kentucky-Israel Caucus, praised the decision to remove Woodcock from the classroom. In a statement, Tichenor wrote that the “reports coming out of our taxpayer-funded flagship university are incredibly disturbing. A law professor calling for the destruction of Israel and against the right for the Jewish people to have self-determination is not a policy disagreement, but a call to violence.”

    “That is not academic discourse. It’s antisemitism and racism and abuse of his power, plain and simple,” Tichenor wrote. She thanked Capilouto “for his strong and unequivocal condemnation of this hateful message” and for reinforcing “the importance of moral clarity and swift institutional accountability.”

    But Capilouto’s message also hinted at the academic freedom concerns at play. He wrote that the situation “compels us to address questions other campuses are grappling with as well—chiefly, where and when does conduct and the freedom to express views in a community compromise the safety and well-being of people in that community?”

    In a statement to Inside Higher Ed, Connor Murnane, the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression’s campus advocacy chief of staff, said, “FIRE is actively investigating this case, and we’re concerned that Professor Woodcock may have been punished for protected activities.”

    Jennifer Cramer, president of UK’s American Association of University Professors chapter, said that “assuming he did not pose a threat in any meaningful way to our campus, I think that the treatment of this case seems outside of the bounds of the norm.” She said that “whether we agree with what he says or not shouldn’t matter, because that’s the point of academic freedom.”

    Woodcock hasn’t stopped calling for war on Israel, posting on X, “Zionists are frustrated that their intimidation campaign hasn’t shut me up.”

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  • Teaching Critiques in an Unsettled Political Time (opinion)

    Teaching Critiques in an Unsettled Political Time (opinion)

    As a university professor, I recently found myself in an awkward spot. I teach a large survey course called Introduction to Cultural Anthropology that enrolls some 350 students. As part of the course, I usually spend one class period every semester lecturing on the anthropology of development. This is a field in which the dominant strains have involved critiquing development projects, most frequently for two sorts of reasons: either for ignoring local cultural practices and priorities, or for exacerbating the very things that development projects are meant to ameliorate.

    In the spring semester of 2025, after I had already finalized and posted the course syllabus, something unprecedented happened in the United States: the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) was dismantled by the Trump administration and Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE). From the standpoint of the standard critiques of development, some of the rationales the Trump administration provided for this unprecedented move were eerily familiar. “Musk and the Right Co-Opt the Left’s Critique of U.S. Power,” The New York Times proclaimed.

    Development isn’t the only topic on which such a critique of power has suddenly shifted politically. Science, another topic on which I spend some class sessions, is similarly fraught. For a long time, many researchers in the anthropology of science argued that the values and beliefs of scientists shape the sciences. The attacks on scientific authority that began during President Trump’s first term and have intensified since amplify these very same sorts of arguments. So how do we broach these topics today, as university professors?

    In pondering this question in the context of my own class, I came to view the common refrain that the right is “coopting” or “appropriating” the critiques made by the left with some curiosity and a bit of suspicion. Both of these terms carry some connotations of misuse and bad faith. Don’t get me wrong: There certainly is truth to the view that some Republican politicians in the United States have recently lifted and re-deployed arguments simply because they justify a desired end (and achieve a little trolling as an added benefit). But, educationally, “appropriation” in this context is not always a useful refrain. It sidesteps the arguments themselves by drawing pre-determined boundaries around their fair use.

    Further, the view that these migrating arguments are cases of “cooptation” does not always stand up to historical scrutiny. Take, for example, questions concerning the power vested in experts. Today, the right is waging more of a battle against experts and the institutions that house them than the left. This battle is undergirded by several arguments, including claims of insufficient “viewpoint diversity” and elite capture, themselves logics that have migrated.

    This battle against experts is most vociferously waged in the name of a populist view: that the people know what’s best for them. A couple of decades ago, the left was more invested in critiquing the ways that expertise was used to exert control over people who understood their own circumstances and their own needs better than many experts.

    But before that, a similar argument sat at the core of the neoliberal right. The famed neoliberal theorist Friedrich von Hayek made this sort of argument against expertise as part of his case for unfettered markets, which, he argued, aggregated and responded to the locally informed decisions of large numbers of individuals better than any expert ever could. It’s also a mistake to think about the migration of these ideas in terms of a stable divide between left and right: MAGA has instilled in the “right” in the guise of the current Republican party a new hostility toward the free market while the “left” of today’s Democratic party has embraced elements of neoliberalism.

    Instead of simple “appropriation,” the migration of arguments across an array of worldviews should be interpreted as zones of agreement where the depth of that agreement—superficial or comprehensive?—has to be scrutinized. Why and how are different implications drawn from these zones? This entails continuing to think about and teach these critical perspectives rather than shying away from them for fear of exacerbating the attacks they now authorize.

    Ultimately, recognizing that similar critiques cross-pollinate with disparate ideological positions is an invitation to engage even more deeply with the substance of these arguments, both in the classroom and beyond.

    Talia Dan-Cohen is an associate professor of sociocultural anthropology and associate director of the Center for the Humanities at Washington University in St. Louis.

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  • Practical Strategies for Interdisciplinary Teaching in Today’s University – Faculty Focus

    Practical Strategies for Interdisciplinary Teaching in Today’s University – Faculty Focus

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  • Practical Strategies for Interdisciplinary Teaching in Today’s University – Faculty Focus

    Practical Strategies for Interdisciplinary Teaching in Today’s University – Faculty Focus

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  • Student-Led Teaching Doesn’t Help Underprepared Students

    Student-Led Teaching Doesn’t Help Underprepared Students

    New research finds peer instruction models may be less impactful for students with lower standardized test scores than their higher-achieving peers.

    miodrag ignjatovic/E+/Getty Images

     

     

     

     

    Introductory STEM courses serve as a gatekeeper for students interested in majors or careers in STEM fields, and students from less privileged backgrounds are often less likely to succeed in those courses.

    As a result, researchers have explored what practices can make a difference in student outcomes in such courses, including creating sections with diverse student populations and offering grade forgiveness for students who performed poorly.

    A recent research article from the University of Texas at Austin examined the role peer instructors play in helping students from a variety of backgrounds. Researchers discovered that students who were enrolled in an interactive peer-led physics course section had worse learning outcomes and grades than their peers in a lecture section taught by an instructor. Students with lower SAT scores were also less likely to achieve a high grade in the student-taught class.

    The research: Historically, instructors teaching STEM courses have delivered content through lectures, with students taking a largely passive role, according to the paper. However, more active learning environments have been tied to higher student engagement and are largely preferred by learners. A May 2024 Student Voice survey by Inside Higher Ed found that 44 percent of respondents said an interactive lecture format helps them learn and retain information best, compared to 25 percent who selected traditional lectures.

    Interactive lectures can include instructors asking students questions throughout the class period or creating opportunities for them to reflect on course material, according to the paper. Peer instruction is touted as an effective means of flipped classroom teaching, requiring students to finish readings prior to class and reserving class time for interactive activities.

    While previous studies show the value of peer-led courses, much of that research focused on selective, private institutions, where students may have more similar backgrounds or levels of academic preparation, according to the authors of the new study.

    So researchers designed a study that would compare apples to apples: They looked at the outcomes for students learning physics in one course section taught by a professor versus one taught by fellow students to see which had a greater impact.

    The results: The paper analyzed the learning outcomes of two sections of students in an introductory mechanics course at a large public institution over three years. One section of the course was taught by a peer instructor, mostly in a small-group discussion format. The other section was taught by the professor using interactive lectures.

    Students completed identical homework and midterm exams on the same days and had the opportunity to attend identical tutoring sessions supported by teaching assistants.

    Though the course is designed for physics and astronomy majors, students from other majors participated as well. Each section had between 41 and 82 students, for a total of 367 students taking the course over three years.

    Not only did students in the peer-instruction section have lower grades, but students who had lower SAT scores from high school were less likely to demonstrate learning in fundamental concepts, as well as less likely to earn an A, compared to their peers with similar test scores taught by a professor. However, students with higher SAT scores made smaller gains (less dramatic grade increases or learning demonstrated) in the lecture section compared to students taught by peers, which researchers believe could mean that students with less academic preparation may benefit more from an instructor-led course, while their peers who had a high achievement history in high school could thrive more in a peer-led section.

    The analysis does not provide an explanation for why these differences exist, but researchers theorized that group work or peer dependency could result in some students being less knowledgeable about content matter because they trust others in the class to answer correctly. Creating postdiscussion follow-up questions can lessen this learning gap.

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  • Embracing complexity in writing instruction

    Embracing complexity in writing instruction

    Key points:

    Early in our careers, when we were fresh-faced and idealistic (we still are!) the prepackaged curriculum and the advice of more experienced colleagues was the go-to resource. Largely, we were advised that teaching writing was a simple matter of having students walk through and complete organizers, spending about one day for each “stage” of the writing process. At the end of the writing unit, students had finished their compositions–the standardized, boring, recreated ideas that we taught them to write.

    As we matured and grew as teachers of writing, we learned that teaching writing in such simplistic ways may be easier, but it was not actually teaching students to be writers. We learned with time and experience that writing instruction is a complex task within a complex system.

    Complex systems and wicked problems

    Complexity as it is applied to composition instruction recognizes that there is more than just a linear relationship between the student, the teacher, and the composition. It juggles the experiences of individual composers, characteristics of genre, availability of resources, assignment and individual goals, and constraints of composing environments. As with other complex systems and processes, it is non-linear, self-organizing, and unpredictable (Waltuck, 2012).

    Complex systems are wicked in their complexity; therefore, wicked problems cannot be solved by simple solutions. Wicked problems are emergent and generative; they are nonlinear as they do not follow a straight path or necessarily have a clear cause-and-effect relationship. They are self-organizing, evolving and changing over time through the interactions of various elements. They are unpredictable and therefore difficult to anticipate how they will unfold or what the consequences of any intervention might be. Finally, they are often interconnected, as they are symptoms of other problems. In essence, a wicked problem is a complex issue embedded in a dynamic system (Rittel & Webber, 1973).

    Writing formulas are wicked

    As formulaic writing has become and remains prevalent in instruction and classroom writing activity, graphic organizers and structural guides, which were introduced as a tool to support acts of writing, have become a wicked problem of formula; the resource facilitating process has become the focus of product. High-stakes standardized assessment has led to a focus on compliance, production, and quality control, which has encouraged the use of formulas to simplify and standardize writing instruction, the student writing produced, and the process of evaluation of student work. Standardization may improve test scores in certain situations, but does not necessarily improve learning. Teachers resort to short, formulaic writing to help students get through material more quickly as well as data and assessment compliance. This serves to not only create product-oriented instruction, but a false dichotomy between process and product, ignoring the complex thinking and design that goes into writing.

    As a result of such a narrow view of and limited focus on writing process and purpose, formulas have been shown to constrain thinking and limit creativity by prioritizing product over the composing process. The five-paragraph essay, specifically, is a structure that hinders authentic composing because it doesn’t allow for the “associative leaps” between ideas that come about in less constrained writing. Formulas undermine student agency by limiting writers’ abilities to express their unique voices because of over-reliance on rigid structures (Campbell, 2014; Lannin & Fox, 2010; Rico, 1988).

    An objective process lens: A wicked solution

    The use of writing formulas grew from a well-intentioned desire to improve student writing, but ultimately creates a system that is out of balance, lacking the flexibility to respond to a system that is constantly evolving. To address this, we advocate for shifting away from rigid formulas and towards a design framework that emphasizes the individual needs and strategies of student composers, which allows for a more differentiated approach to teaching acts of writing.

    The proposed framework is an objective process lens that is informed by design principles. It focuses on the needs and strategies that drive the composing process (Sharples, 1999). This approach includes two types of needs and two types of strategies:

    • Formal needs: The assigned task itself
    • Informal needs: How a composer wishes to execute the task
    • “What” strategies: The concrete resources and available tools
    • “How” strategies: The ability to use the tools

    An objective process lens acknowledges that composing is influenced by the unique experiences composers bring to the task. It allows teachers to view the funds of knowledge composers bring to a task and create entry points for support.

    The objective process lens encourages teachers to ask key questions when designing instruction:

    • Do students have a clear idea of how to execute the formal need?
    • Do they have access to the tools necessary to be successful?
    • What instruction and/or supports do they need to make shifts in ideas when strategies are not available?
    • What instruction in strategies is necessary to help students communicate their desired message effectively?

    Now how do we do that?

    Working within a design framework that balances needs and strategies starts with understanding the type of composers you are working with. Composers bring different needs and strategies to each new composing task, and it is important for instructors to be aware of those differences. While individual composers are, of course, individuals with individual proclivities and approaches, we propose that there are (at least) four common types of student composers who bring certain combinations of strategies and needs to the composition process: the experience-limited, the irresolute, the flexible, and the perfectionist composers. By recognizing these common composer types, composition instructors can develop a flexible design for their instruction.

    An experience-limited composer lacks experience in applying both needs and strategies to a composition, so they are entirely reliant on the formal needs of the assigned task and any what-strategies that are assigned by the instructor. These students gravitate towards formulaic writing because of their lack of experience with other types of writing. Relatedly, an irresolute composer may have a better understanding of the formal and informal needs, but they struggle with the application of what and how strategies for the composition. They can become overwhelmed with options of what without a clear how and become stalled during the composing process. Where the irresolute composer becomes stalled, the flexible composer is more comfortable adapting their composition. This type of composer has a solid grasp on both the formal and informal needs and is willing to adapt the informal needs as necessary to meet the formal needs of the task. As with the flexible composer, the perfectionist composer is also needs-driven, with clear expectations for the formal task and their own goals for the informal tasks. Rather than adjusting the informal needs as the composition develops, a perfectionist composer will focus intensely on ensuring that their final product exactly meets their formal and informal needs.

    Teaching writing requires embracing its complexity and moving beyond formulaic approaches prioritizing product over process. Writing is a dynamic and individualized task that takes place within a complex system, where composers bring diverse needs, strategies, and experiences. By adopting a design framework, teachers of writing and composing can support students in navigating this complexity, fostering creativity, agency, and authentic expression. It is an approach that values funds of knowledge students bring to the writing process, recognizing the interplay of formal and informal needs, as well as their “what” and “how” strategies; those they have and those that need growth via instruction and experience. Through thoughtful design, we can grow flexible, reflective, and skilled communicators who are prepared to navigate the wicked challenges of composing in all its various forms.

    These ideas and more can be found in When Teaching Writing Gets Tough: Challenges and Possibilities in Secondary Writing Instruction.

    References

    Campbell, K. H. (2014). Beyond the five-paragraph essay. Educational Leadership, 71(7), 60-65.

    Lannin, A. A., & Fox, R. F. (2010). Chained and confused: Teacher perceptions of formulaic writing. Writing & Pedagogy, 2(1), 39-64.

    Rico, G. L. (1988). Against formulaic writing. The English Journal, 77(6), 57-58.

    Rittel, H. W. J., & Webber, M. M. (1973). Dilemmas in a general theory of planning. Policy Sciences, 4(2), 155–169.

    Sharples, M. (1999). How we write : writing as creative design (1st ed.). Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9780203019900

    Waltuck, B. A. (2012). Characteristics of complex systems. The Journal for Quality & Participation, 34(4), 13–15.

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  • Integrating Systems Thinking to Enhance Liberal Arts Curriculum through Learner-Centered Teaching – Faculty Focus

    Integrating Systems Thinking to Enhance Liberal Arts Curriculum through Learner-Centered Teaching – Faculty Focus

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  • Teaching at a Small Private College? Take our Advice – Faculty Focus

    Teaching at a Small Private College? Take our Advice – Faculty Focus

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