Notes From The Field

We all craft a syllabus for each class, but honestly what is a syllabus and for whom is it written? I hope to expand our vision. The quick and typical answer is: A syllabus is a plan for how we hope to engage students with content and practices of our ...

We get that email from the library staff asking for our book selections for our upcoming course. We have taught the course before, so the library is kind enough to send the list of books we used the last time. In most cases we use the same books, but from ...

“The essence of metaphor is understanding and experiencing something unfamiliar or an abstraction in terms of something familiar and concrete. Thus, our language is an incredibly intricate web of definitions of one thing in terms of another.”[1] Mary Ylvisaker Nilsen’s expansive definition of metaphor applies to teaching—helping students ...

Vice president of the United States, Kamala Harris is known for wearing Chuck Taylor Converse sneakers and pearls that are emblematic of her historical significance as the first African American and South Asian woman to assume this high office. Girls and women everywhere donned the shoes and pearls to celebrate “...

As the Jewish Studies Professor for my department, I teach an undergraduate course in the Holocaust (Sho’ah) every other school year. The remote format of the course now consists of weekly assigned readings and the edited version of class lectures gleaned from earlier years of in-class instruction. Students submit ...