teaching and learning
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Practices and Practicing (2024), Part 6
And now, at last, the conclusion to “Practices and Practicing in Human Moral Development.” VI. Postscript on the Practice of Mimetic Pedagogy So much for the formal conclusions of this brief investigation of human moral development through the lens provided by Merlin Donald. Questions remain, of course, especially concerning how a “mimetic pedagogy” might actually… Continue reading
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Practices and Practicing (2024), Part 5
The heading of this installment declares it to be the conclusion of the paper, but this isn’t the last installment of “Practices and Practicing in Human Moral Development.” A postscript – or maybe a coda? – is yet to come, with some initial thoughts on what a “mimetic pedagogy” for ethics might look like. V.… Continue reading
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Practices and Practicing (2024), Part 1
Following hard on the heels of “The ‘Tuning-In’ Relationship” was a second paper on the intertwining of human music-making, human social life, and moral development, this time with an evolutionary twist. In particular, I pick up from and/or expand upon the last section of the previous paper, on practices. There were some loose threads I… Continue reading
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Learning and Enjoyment
“It is a sign of wasted effort if an activity from which students are expected to learn is not enjoyable for them. It means that they are only learning the wrong things, namely that they can’t succeed in learning what they are trying to learn – and also, probably, that they don’t really want to… Continue reading
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Courses with the Lid Off
I’ve started to have panic attacks about my summer teaching. The Spring term ended last week and Summer term begins next week, so I’m in the midst of a too-quick turn-around. Still, I think I have enough time to get my syllabi and other documents in order before I step back into the classroom on… Continue reading
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Doing New Things in Teaching (with more words added later)
(Explained using only the ten hundred words people use the most often, just like at that one not-real place I found with my computer. I wrote this using a thing the guy who makes that not-real place made to help people to write more simply.) I work at a big college (the kind that has… Continue reading
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Scaffolding: The Utility Template
As previously noted, scaffolding is an important element in problem-based learning: it is an external and somewhat artificial version of a thinking process that is usually carried out internally. The idea is to direct students’ attention from the outside until they learn to direct their own attention themselves, from the inside For drawing students’ attention… Continue reading
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Where Have I Been?
Well, most recently, I’ve been at the Annual Meeting of the Society for Ethics Across the Curriculum, just up the road in Greenville, SC. Some conversations I had there made it clear that there might be good reason to resume posting to this blog, if only because people expressed interest in seeing updates on my… Continue reading