Friday Fragments, March 5th
Offering students choices, Harvard's new $150M Center for Cities, expansion of SNAP for students, and using assessments for learning.
What I’m reading…
In Would You Rather: Designing with Choice in Mind, Catlin Tucker asks instructors to offer choices, noting: “Our goal should be to investigate, experiment, tinker, and learn to ensure that the learning experiences we are designing meet our students’ diverse needs.”
I’ve done a few presentations this semester focused on offering students choices (like, imagining what else they can do besides a traditional paper ) and how important these choices are to helping students feel welcomed and successful.
In Rich Colleges Should Give Money to Poor Ones: Wealth transfers, not symbolic gestures, are the best path to equity, Matthew Yglesias critiques the “symbolic gestures” towards diversity and inclusion at wealthy colleges and universities.
If you’re affiliated with an elite college and are concerned with social justice, you owe it to yourself and the world to think a little more critically about the core functioning of your institution…The basic fact is almost anything you could do with money would be a more reasonable social-justice priority than spending it on students at fancy colleges.
Less than a week later, Harvard announced a $150 million investment by Michael Bloomberg in a new Center for Cities. Twitter has…opinions. Many wondering why Bloomberg wouldn’t choose a New York university, particularly one with a commitment to serving the urban communities around it, over a school with a $40+ billion endowment.
Expanded SNAP Benefits Help Food Insecure Students. But It’s Only the First Step New guidance from the USDOE expands access to SNAP benefits for students, an important step in fighting food insecurity. Carrie Welton, director of policy and advocacy at Temple University’s Hope Center for College, Community, and Justice, explains: “in a job market that increasingly requires a college degree, the program shouldn’t differentiate between workers and students for food benefits.”
A helpful infographic from Todd Finley about using assessment to promote learning.