Education Archives - Page 5 of 32

Education

Teaching and Modeling Freedom

As a Black artist and scholar, bringing my whole self to the classroom teaches students how to live

April 28, 2022 • by Lisa B. Thompson

I teach freedom as both an artist and a scholar. I could have settled on the life of an English professor with an unfinished novel in my desk drawer (next to the half-empty bottle of scotch), but I decided that the world would have to refuse all my dreams. When ...

Education

“‘Look, a Negro’ … in the Academy”

When white students say what they really think, our Black bodies become a battlefield

April 28, 2022 • by Davarian L. Baldwin and Bridgette Baldwin

I was not prepared for the lesson the students would teach me. “Professor Baldwin is the worst professor I have ever had, and she is Black, enough said.” Did I just read that correctly? Am I the absolute worst professor? Is it because I am Black? Is my Blackness a ...

Education

Leading While Black

An introduction to the special issue, “Teaching While Black”

April 28, 2022 • by Dwight A. McBride

Indeed, the sad truth is that many of the slights, insults, and aggressions experienced by the dedicated teachers collected here (I don’t think of the casual ugliness which many of us navigate as “micro-aggressions”) are duplicated within higher education’s administrative spaces....

Education

How They See Us—and How We Learn to See Ourselves

The importance of mentoring for Black students

April 28, 2022 • by Sylvester A. Johnson

Mentorship, in which I reassure students that we inhabit the same reality when it comes to racism, is an especially personal and rewarding aspect of my professional life. I approach mentorship through emphasizing to every student that they have unique potential and absolutely belong in the academic world, regardless of ...

How They See Us—and How We Learn to See Ourselves

Education

Building the House You Want to Live and Teach In

How women’s studies nurtured radical transformation at Spelman College

April 28, 2022 • by Beverly Guy-Sheftall

Even though I was an untenured professor I decided that I would position myself as a “radical” teacher who would try and disrupt some of the “mis-education” that the curriculum which at the time, mirrored the traditional higher education curriculum throughout the United States. ...

Building the House You Want to Live and Teach In

Education

Becoming Un-Disciplined

What it takes to make a university community where Black faculty and students–and all of us—can thrive

April 27, 2022 • by Cathy J. Cohen and Claire Potter

Part of what I find amazing about being a professor at this moment is watching the change that’s coming, not always from institutions, but from young people and their demands on institutions. Their demands for a different type of faculty in terms of demographics. Their demands for different types of ...

Education

Something Like Freedom

What teaching Black literature requires of us

April 25, 2022 • by Ana-Maurine Lara and drea brown

feminist thought, Black is queer and quare, Black is past-present-future, Black ain’t marginal, Black is belonging, Black is bringing the outside in, and Black is making space for what and who among us has been displaced....

K Through 12

The Experiment

An excerpt from Blue Eyes, Brown Eyes: A Cautionary Tale of Race and Brutality

April 20, 2022 • by Stephen G. Bloom

Steven Armstrong was the first to show up in Classroom No. 1O on the morning of Friday, April 5, 1968. “Hey, Mrs. Elliott,” Steven said as he slung his books on his desk. “They shot that King last night! Why’d they shoot that King?” Steven was an alert, savvy kid. The son of ...

Higher Ed

Is Emma Camp Correct That College Students Silence Themselves?

Perhaps she is, perhaps she isn’t. But the core issue may not be free speech, or even education, but more enduring American fears about the dangers of conformism

March 11, 2022 • by Claire Potter

Free speech undergirds democracy. I am uncompromising on this point and dislike being distracted by concocted hysteria about free speech. All the same, a guest essay in the New York Times by Emma Camp engaged me. Camp, a senior at the University of Virginia, argues that students and faculty on ...

Is Emma Camp Correct That College Students Silence Themselves?

Higher Ed

The Problem Is Not Harvard, the Problem Is Graduate School

Sexual harassment is a normal feature of the current power arrangement. What will you do about it?

February 15, 2022 • by Hannah Leffingwell

This is because the system is built to protect, enable, and encourage harassers. Graduate students, whose cheap labor is used by the university to buttress the outrageous salaries of star faculty and senior administrators, are often broke, disempowered, terrified, and exhausted, even prior to being sexually harassed....

The Problem Is Not Harvard, the Problem Is Graduate School

Education

In the Shadow of the Ivory Tower

In this excerpt, Davarian L. Baldwin introduces his new book, The Shadow of the Ivory Tower: How Universities Are Plundering Our Cities

February 15, 2022 • by Davarian L. Baldwin

I never thought a university would foretell the future of our cities. But there I was, on a December afternoon in 2003, stepping out into the brisk South Side air after hours holed away in the University of Chicago’s Regenstein Library. I immediately heard chants of protest and saw people ...

Education

Sincerely, A Very Famous Man

Or, why academics should dispense with letters of recommendation entirely

December 20, 2021 • by Claire Potter

The letter of recommendation also shows us, in microcosm, how elite institutions—universities, foundations, humanities centers, think tanks—gate-keep for each other....