Lee Skallerup Bessette joins me to talk about how to deal with and manage when stuff get’s out of control in our lives, as well as how to address those situations when it happens to our students.

Podcast notes

Guest: Dr. Lee Skallerup Bessette

• Faculty Instructional Consultant at the Center for the Enhancement of Learning and Teaching at the University of Kentucky
• Dr. Skallerup on Twitter: @readywriting
• Dr. Skallerup on Inside Higher Ed

Digital humanities

… the intersection between technology and what technology can help us do in the humanities. – Lee Skallerup Bessette

• Big data, distance reading, social networking and network graphs
• Digitization and archives
• Making research, primary sources more available
• Computational linguistics and mapping
• Media studies

Digital pedagogy

We have unprecedented access to tools, to information, to interfaces, and the question that digital pedagogy attempts to answer is: ‘So what? What do we do with them?’ – Lee Skallerup Bessette

• EdTech versus digital pedagogy

Often educational technology are almost commercially based, not to say that all of them are. – Lee Skallerup Bessette

• Assignment to define digital pedagogy in 121 characters, an assignment for the Humanities Intensive Learning and Teaching 2015
• Storify of the Humanities Intensive Learning and Teaching 2015 by Lee

#hilt2015 Digital Pedagogy – Making, Bending, Breaking https://t.co/hBI5JSGQOB

— Lee Skallerup (@readywriting) July 27, 2015

Blogs at College Ready Writing on Insidehighered.com

• Doing it Wrong
• On Not Swimming
• Reflections from a New Faculty Developer

Losing control during a course

• Decided how to make this work, but learned some lessons along the way
• Too much focus on “covering” the content
• Disappointing results in students’ un-essay projects

[When things happen outside your control], sometimes you’ve got to let go of some of the coverage [of course content] in order to accomplish the learning goals. – Lee Skallerup Bassette

Finding balance

• Tends to happen in stages/seasons (especially regarding the kid’s ages)
• Husband just got tenure and those demands also needed to be taken into consideration

Blogging was one of the things that I used to try to maintain some sort of balance. It was something I did for me and my own sanity. – Lee Skallerup Bassette

Students losing control

• Worked at diverse institutions
• Had students research the resources available on campus to them during times of struggle
• Cultural aspects to a death in the family

I saw my role as listening, so that they felt heard, and then guiding them to a place where they could be more effectively helped. – Lee Skallerup Bessette

Final advice

Sometimes it’s ok to let go of some of the content. – Lee Skallerup Bessette

Recommendations

Lee recommends:

Cathy Davidson’s blog post – Handicapped by being underimpaired: Teaching with Equality at the Core .

Note: Cathy was a Teaching in Higher Ed guest on episode #028

Perhaps the worst people to teach writing are the best writers. – Lee Skallerup Bessette

Bonni recommends:

Critical Digital Pedagogy Resources and Tools by Andrea Rehn

Lee inspires us for the start to the academic year:

Be hopeful. Be optimistic. And give your students the benefit of the doubt right from the start. – Lee Skallerup Bessette

Closing notes

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