On Teaching (and Maps of Fantasty Lands)
on August 23, 2006 at 12:00 amA number of articles (listed below the fold) with notes that ranged form brilliant to Marxist clap-trap. So-so. I want to highlight one because I know it will be of special interest to Catholicgauze
I asked him if he worked with maps in geography. He did. So I suggested that he do his paper on maps and fantasy, and I brainstormed ideas with him. Maps, like fantasy, are neither objective nor value-free. They are someone’s vision of reality, a combination of the imagination and the intellect. I had read a fascinating book on maps by Peter Whitfield (1994). He argued that the act of representing reality in maps was not too different form the act of representing it in art or literature. It was the same impulse to crystallize, comprehend, and therefore to control aspects of reality.
A number of fantasy texts in the course had maps or theories voyaging — for example, Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels, Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings, the film Casablanca, and a discussion of Galileo. The geography student’s essay included Gulliver’s Travels. He argued that maps mirror the minds of the society or the individual from which they spring. The visual space of maps reflects a navigational, scientific, religious, political, national, or colonizing cosmology. He connected the rationality and irrationality of maps to central themes in the novel and the fantasy course. He analyzed the ways in which the implication of voyaging in maps related to the transformation of character, whether individual, scientific, or national, Gulliver, the Royal Society, or England. ” (Cooper-Clark 172)
The rest are, of course, below the fold.
Cooper-Clark, D.(1996). A story waiting to be told: Narratives of teaching, scholarship, and theory. In J.K. Roth (Ed.) Inspiring Teaching: Carnegie Professors of the Year Speak. Bolton, MA: Anker Publishing Company, Inc. (pp. 166-175).
Dawson, J.D. (1996) Relations of mutual trust and objects of common interest. In J.K. Roth (Ed.) Inspiring Teaching: Carnegie Professors of the Year Speak. Bolton, MA: Anker Publishing Company, Inc. (pp. 44-53).
Halonen, J.S. (2002). Classroom presence. In S. Davis & W.Buskist (Eds.). The teaching of psychology: Essays in honor of William J. McKeachie and Charles Brewer. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Inc. (pp. 41-55).
Halpern, D.F. (1994). Rethinking college instruction for a changing world. In D. Halpern (Ed.) Changing College Classrooms. San Francisco, CA.: Jossey-Bass. (pp. 1-10).
Roth, J.K. (1996). What teaching teaches me: How the Holocaust informs my philosophy of education. In J.K. Roth (Ed.) Inspiring Teaching: Carnegie Professors of the Year Speak. Bolton, MA: Anker Publishing Company, Inc. (pp. 199-210).
Royse, D. (2001). The mental groundwork. In D. Royse (Ed.). Teaching Tips for College and University Instructors: A Practical Guide. Needham Heights, MA.: Allyn & Bacon. (pp. 1-24).
Ruiz, T.F.(1996). Teaching as subversion. In J.K. Roth (Ed.) Inspiring Teaching: Carnegie Professors of the Year Speak. Bolton, MA: Anker Publishing Company, Inc.(pp. 158-165).
“Creating a Sense of Community: Students have a more enjoyable and more profitable learning experience when they feel connected to each other and to the faculty member. To build a community of learners, students need to know something about each other.” (Royse 6)
“d. Use role-playing, simulations, or hands-on experiments.” (Royse 11)
“In a very real sense, teaching must be subversive; that is, it must include a willingness to question and criticize, and at times even undermine, established orthodoxies.” (Ruiz 159)
“This approach to learning reflects the values of a capitalist economy, of the market place: How well can I do by working and learning as little as possible?” (Ruiz 160)
“True, good teaching depends on the spoken words, but inspiring teaching also depends on silence, on sensing when not to speak, on recognizing that in some times and places keeping silence is the best one can do.” (Roth 203)
“Students need to write in different ways, but my teaching introduces students to the discipline of writing short, reflective essays. In a less-is-more-style, these essays encourage students to gain mastery and perspective on the substantial reading we always do, to explore their own angles of vision, and to see that every answer leads to other questions, which is a discovery that can teach us, among other things, to take nothing for granted.” (Roth 207)
“Teacher and learner help one another actualize their potentialities in their relationship with one another. All teaching is collaborative learning; all learning is collaborative teaching.” (Dawson 47)
“Intense scrutiny by the members of the class is not disturbing to extroverts. These teachers see a class as a perfect vehicle by which they can relax and connect with their students. For them, there is a seamless connection between the self that they experience in the classroom and the self in other contexts; class is simply a comfort zone.” (Holonen 45)
“Students also expressed appreciation for teachers who make a point to appeal to a broad range of learning styles. The liberal use of visual aids, the incorporation of learning strategies that encourage participation and reflection, and other learner-centered practices (cf. McKeachie, 1999) can help students stay connected to the important ideas offered by teachers.” (Holonen 49)
“Of the many obstacles to moving teaching ahead, the antiteaching prejudice that pervades higher education is the most pernicious. This prejudice is particularly deleterious because it confers second-class citizenship on professors who work ‘too hard’ on their teaching. University professors are rewarded for visible and easily quantifiable activities such as publishing, making presentations at scholarly conferences and societies, receiving grants, consulting with private industry, or engaging in other activities that bring money into our cash-strapped universities.” (Halpern 5)
