What I’m reading…
Yesterday, I participated in a great talk sponsored by Vanderbilt’s Center for Teaching on “busywork” and thinking about what we assign to students for asynchronous work versus what activities we save for synchronous time. Overcoming the “busywork” dilemma covers some of the points the speakers shared during the talks. Participants/speakers shared other interesting resources - many shared on Twitter under #BusyworkDilemma.
A new Brookings report, HOW WE RISE: How social networks impact economic mobility in Racine, WI, San Francisco, CA, and Washington, DC, investigated “how racial, gender, and income dynamics influence the formation and function of social networks” with particular attention on connections between these social networks and participants’ economic mobility - finding, unsurprisingly, that “[r]ace is the most important and consistent differentiator of social networks.”
Across the U.S., economic mobility is frequently linked with geography. Some places afford poor children the opportunity to do better economically than their parents did, and other places do not. Social networks, providing access to support, information, power, and resources, are a critical and often neglected element of opportunity structures. Social capital matters for mobility.
In a post written pre-pandemic, Catherine Denial asks instructors to consider how we create space in our classrooms for trust and growth to occur. A Pedagogy of Kindness urges us to believe people and believe in people - a message that I think is more important than ever as we grapple with starting a second (third, for those of us who taught in the summer) full semester disrupted by the pandemic.
I gradually learned, through a great deal of trial and error, that this combative way of approaching teaching was counterproductive at best, destructive at worst…It quickly became clear to me that I needed to build relationships, not defensively prevent them from forming, and that trust was a vital part of creating the circumstances under which learning could happen. There was no space for trust to grow in the learning spaces I’d been trying to create, and so I learned to ease up, to let go of rigid control I’d tried to impose upon the classroom, and to make room for the unpredictable and unexpected.
Happy reading!