Community – Active Learning in Political Science ©

In mid-September we started a new series, “Office Hours: Year One”, where four first-year tenure-track professors from different institutions reflect on their experiences throughout the first year. See Part 1 here. We are back with Part 3, and the first semester is officially done done for our cohort. Hopefully, they and our dear readers used the winter break to recuperate and rest (ha!). In this post, we are checking in to see how things went in wrapping up the end of the fall semester, and what sort of priorities are guiding the group’s thinking as we look ahead to the spring semester.

Thank you again to Dr. Brooklyn Walker (University of Tennessee-Knoxville), Dr. Charmaine Willis (Old Dominion University), and Dr. Jennifer Ostojski (Indiana State University) for contributing and letting us get a glimpse at the first-year life.

Inherently, the premise of this blog is to bring like-minded folks together who care about teaching in the social sciences. We share tools, ideas, events, and musings. And I have come to appreciate the people who reach out in comments, mitigating the one-sided way in which this blog-writing largely takes place.

Recently, though, I took my musings into the real world and joined a three-week long pedagogy book club run through my institutions center for teaching and learning. We all (re)read James M. Lang’s “Small Teaching”, and then discussed its parts over three meetings. This post is brief (because not everything has to be a magnus opus), but it is, nonetheless, an appreciation post for 1) talking in real life to others about teaching and 2) going back to the basics.

Tag: Community

Office Hours: Year One (Part 3)

Talking to Others About Teaching