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Using the Psychology of Color Schemes to Create an Appreciative Advising Environment
No full textOne of the hallmarks of the Disarm phase of Appreciative Advising is creating a safe, warm, and welcoming environment. Color has a dramatic impact on our moods and emotions. Yet, many higher education classrooms and offices are painted white or yellow. This has a negative impact, as white has been shown to evoke feelings of boredom while yellow causes feelings of anxiety. The purpose of this paper is to examine the psychology of color schemes, the emotions that colors elicit, and how advisers can use this information to enhance their interactions with students. The impact of color choice on logos and publications are also discussed
Volunteering as Othering: Understanding A Paradox of Social Distance, Obligation, and Reciprocity
Get PDFThis article challenges the notion of border crossing through volunteer work, arguing that recent literature on volunteer/service learning tend to assume that difference between volunteers and the community they work in is a given. Based on interviews of volunteers in a college alternative spring break trip in March 2013, this article shows that such difference is socially constructed through the naming of certain work, but not others, as volunteer work. The common interview answer was that volunteer work is something done for people distant from oneself—when one helps family or friends, it is not called volunteer work. Focusing and closely analyzing interviews of three volunteers, this article argues that calling certain work volunteer work is an act of othering the people one is helping as strangers. Advocating acknowledgment of this aspect of labeling volunteer work and seeing the benefit of the work not in border crossing but in re-imagining connections with various individuals, this article discusses ways to overcome the othering aspect of volunteering
What Kind of Community? An Inquiry into Teaching Practices that Move beyond Exclusion
Get PDFDemocracy, to be fully realized as inclusive and participatory, requires public spaces in which different views are able to be spoken and heard, and where opinions are formed and informed through interactions among people with diverse interests. This article considers how a multi-institutional/community collaborative course set out to both teach democratic thinking and model democratic processes. In doing so, we consider how the curriculum, teaching style, and activities in one course, Reclaiming Democracy, have been designed to resist the many forms of exclusion that exist both in higher education and community settings. Just as the course has been developed in partnership with six professors, a community organizer, and past students, so too has this article been created, written, edited, and revised by the six faculty members of the teaching team; hence, it is a multi-vocal presentation representing the goals, values, and outcomes of this way of teaching. We focus on what political philosopher Iris Marion Young calls the greeting, rhetoric, and narrative as communicative features that could improve the quality of public discussion and deliberation. Pairing that understanding with Westheimer and Kahne’s three models of citizenship and the curricular models designed to foster them, we specify a number of our own pedagogical choices, offer some examples of student responses, and consider other examples of democratic inclusiveness from the course. Taken together, we argue that these practices make for a rich, democratically engaging and fun experience and may effectively motivate students to seek out and form other democratic communities throughout the course of their lives
I Am Not Trying to Be Defiant, I Am Trying to Be Your Partner: How to Help Students Navigate Educational Institutions That Do Not Value Democratic Practice
Get PDFBased on our experiences together, we advocate for a model of education through Democratic Practices. Using Iris Marion Young’s discussion of the limitation of the distributive paradigm, we argue that justice requires taking into account decision making procedures, specifically, in the form of a less hierarchized division of labor in the defining and executing of tasks. We argue that a model of education that is more just to the students must make use of, and work to develop, their abilities to do task-defining work. After articulating some ways this can happen in classrooms and the democratic thinking that makes this possible—and emerges from this work—we show how, having taken on an identity as one who can and should be included in task-defining work, students may become frustrated and angry in educational settings where this desire is forestalled and they are taken as defiant. Finally, we argue that, if students return to their faculty partner in this situation, together they can work to help the student through democratic thinking to understand the context in which this problem occurs, the student’s own values and how those matter, and, finally, to move towards task-defining and towards action.
The ethereal library: Thinking creatively when you have no space to think
Get PDFHow do you go from a full service library to one with only space for staff? Learn how the Kresge Business Library at The University of Michigan made the transformation to an ethereal library
Focused Inquiry: Freshman Discovering the Modern and Postmodern
No full textThis essay describes the Focused Inquiry Program’s pedagogy at University College at Virginia Commonwealth University through one professor’s perspective. The writer first explains the intent and purpose of the two-semester, themed, freshman-level, core courses and his handling of the courses. After describing his earlier merging of his pedagogy and that of the program, the writer (and professor) takes the title seriously and describes in detail a two semester sequence when students focus on two words from their popular definitions to various disciplinary definitions. The professor uses Freire’s teaching style, Jerome Bruner’s ‘spiral curriculum,’ and workshop strategies from Bard College’s Thinking and Writing Institute for a transparent pedagogical foundation to teach Albert Camus’ idea of the absurd and a socio-neurology idea of empathy via Daniel Batson and others. These two concepts in conjunction with a graphic novel, literary fiction, and film bring the class to concepts by Jean-Francois Lyotard and Slavoj Zizek. Using various teaching methods for reading, thinking, and writing, the writer demonstrates how one might take freshmen from rudimentary understanding of the era in which they live to a more nuanced level that that begins to give students the language for understanding the historical and literary times known as modern and postmodern. The writer contends that the students leave the courses with ‘foot holds’ for later disciplinary reading and writing
Practicing critical literacy in second language reading
Get PDFDisillusioned with educational approaches which encourage students' passivity and conformity to the wisdom transmitted to them, critical pedagogues focus on improving students’ critical consciousness and self-seeking. This outcome can be achieved by encouraging and helping learners to be critical consumers of texts and reconstruct them in ways that are more consistent with their own local experiences. In this paper, I present and elaborate on some steps to practice critical literacy in second language reading instruction. I also discuss challenges involved in practicing this approach as well as some solutions based on my teaching experience. At the end, I highlight the significance of adopting a self-reflexive approach to conceptualizing and practicing critical literacy.
Bringing Organizations Back In: Perspectives on Service-Learning, Community Partnership and Democratic Thinking in a Voter Engagement Project
Get PDFThe potential of service-learning to foster democratic thinking is often unrealized. The absence of political learning in service-learning has been a subject of particular concern. Drawing on student reflections, pre- and post-test surveys and the perspectives of two faculty members and a community organizer, this article examines the ways in which a year-long, interdisciplinary voter engagement service-learning partnership between a community-based organization and a public university promoted democratic thinking and democratic action. The project helped students understand issues of inequality situated in voting rights, race and class; strengthened relationships between the community and university; and contributed to voter participation. Students came to see organizations, activism and public policy as important antidotes to political inequality. We argue that partnerships with advocacy groups to support political change constitute an important aspect of educating for democracy; these collaborative endeavors challenge views of politics that negate the importance of government, political participation and collective action.Keywords: democratic thinking, voting, organizational partnerships, inequalit