Blogs

The schedule for the 2014 Blended Learning in the Liberal Arts Conference is up! This year's conference has something for everyone, from reports on experiences with flipping a classroom to faculty experiments with using threaded discussion, gaming, mapping and Twitter to achieve pedagogical goals. Speakers were drawn from almost a dozen colleges across the country, and include a range of perspectives -- faculty across a range of academic disciplines, instructional support staff, administration, and students. 
 
A detailed schedule is available here: http://repository.brynmawr.edu/blended_learning/2014/

This year's conference will be on May 21 and 22 on Bryn Mawr College's campus, just outside of Philadelphia. The deadline for registration is May 15:

For more information about the conference and to register, go to our website: http://blendedlearning.blogs.brynmawr.edu/conferences/

Kabul

(Translated by Dr. Josephine Davis)

Ah! How beautiful is Kabul encircled by her arid mountains

And Rose, of the trails of thorns she envies

Her gusts of powdered soil, slightly sting my eyes

But I love her, for knowing and loving are born of this same dust

My song exhalts her dazzling tulips

Exploring Multiple and Intersecting Identities:

Themes and Suggestions for Action

Hummingbird, Kma, and Cece Lee

Introduction

            In Spring 2013, students working with Professors Jody Cohen and Alison Cook-Sather began facilitating focus groups to explore the way Bryn Mawr was supporting and could better support its increasingly diverse student population. This semester the three co-writers of this paper joined those facilitating focus groups as fellow student facilitators. While the groups were originally focused on the experiences of international students, we’ve broadened them this semester to look at all students on campus and their varied identities – acknowledging that even domestically we have a very diverse student population and that all members of our community face different challenges because of the way they identify themselves and feel perceived by others.

Curriculum

Monday

Project Based Learning and its Implications in a Multicultural Mathematics Classroom

When I was a junior in high school, I was placed into AP Calculus. On the first day of classes, I came to that particular class to find that my favorite math teacher, Mr. Best[i], was the instructor for this years AP class. He began the class explaining that we will be preparing for the AP examination in June, as well as preparing a final exit project. He went on to explain that we would be having two assessments: a midterm and a final, as well as this project. Our grade would consist of the two exam grades as well as the project grade, attendance, participation and homework completeness. He began to give us examples of projects that students completed in the past, and told us that literally anything is “fair game” as long as you’re able to describe it using mathematics.

            Racism is defined by Tara Yosso in her study, “Whose Culture Has Capital? A Critical Race Theory Discussion of Community Cultural Wealth”, as “a system of ignorance, exploitation and power used to oppress African Americans, Latinos, Asians, Pacific Americas, American Indians, and other people on the basis of ethnicity, culture, mannerisms, and color” (72). In history, we tend to see racism within the “black/white dichotomy”, but this two-way understanding of racism does not allow for the multiplicity of oppression that is experienced by many others. I believe this is a fitting place to start as I hope to analyze just some of the research surrounding how students of color, particularly 2nd generation immigrants of various countries fair in the education system as well as how they might experience college as a 1st generation college student.

            In David Nurenberg’s article “What Does Injustice Have to do With Me? A Pedagogy of the Privileged” the educator discusses his experience being raised in the upper middle class, while being knowledgeable about the hardships his Jewish family members encountered. He discusses his own accounts of harassment growing up, and brings readers into his struggle of teaching suburban white privileged students multicultural education and social justice education. “I specifically wanted to work with a suburban population, with the young people who would grow up into the college roommates and friends I had known and who had frustrated me… I felt I could act as some sort of bridge between the worlds to which my parents had exposed me to, and the one that produced the CEO’s and policy makers who I believed unwittingly perpetuated this unfair system.” (Nurenberg 53) This paper will act as spokes around this quote and highlight other figures who share this ideology and act as ‘bridges’ in the context of white consumers of Hip Hop industry, and what multicultural education can do for the white, privileged, and impressionable.

Christine Newville

Inquiry Project

Multicultural Education

4/18/2014

                                                I’m Not a Math Person

I struggled to motivate myself to write the problem analysis paper for our education class. This didn’t seem to be for lack of ideas/ problems to analyze, but rather, essay writing itself didn’t feel like the most productive mode for me to express my ideas. When I met with Jody, we determined that instead of writing about a problem, I would address an immediate issue within our 360; in doing so I would be attempting to work oriented toward problem solving and not problem analysis. The “problem” I identified was in a lack of Serendip dialogue. This has been a personal issue for me as well, as I have not been utilizing Serendip in the way that I would like to use it. So in the place of a formal essay and in an effort to “feed our Serendip ecosystem” I have begun responding to our classes problem analysis papers. I will be post links to these comments here so that they are easy to find if you are interested in reading or responding. I have not finished responding, so there are only a few links currently below, but I will update as soon as I post!

Here are the responses I have so far:

Agatha

Kelsey

Teaching in Prison: Challenging Preconceived Notions