In my last post, “Designing a Course About a Point on the Map: Thinking Locally as a Way to Think Globally”, I described a course centered around a specific location. The spark for that thinking was a purchase I made at an auction recently of a large pottery five gallon churn made by pottery makers Kline […]
Designing a Course About a Point on the Map: Thinking Locally as a Way to Think Globally
A couple of weeks ago I wrote about buying a five gallon Kline and Brown Churn at an auction in North Georgia. Upon doing some research I found that the churn, made in the mid-1880s, was turned at a shop very close where we live and that the clay was very likely dug out of […]
Becoming a Progress Culture: Keeping the College Process in Mind
I have written often in the last few months about the need to create a school Progress Culture. One of the issues that can paralyze discussions regarding how to move schools beyond the perceived safety of “what we have always done” and toward a progress culture, however, is the college selection process whose shadow stretches back […]
Purpose of Education?: “The World Needs You to be Smart”
[Last January I handed the following piece to the seniors in my 21st Century Short Fiction and Poetry Class. We were just about to finish a collection of short stories by Stephen Millhauser (Dangerous Laughter) and begin a poetry collection by Louise Gluck (A Village Life). A contemporary of mine at Sewanee, the author of the piece, […]
Preparing Our Students to be Community Leaders: An Initial Brainstorming
If we want to prepare students to be community leaders with qualities such as humility, decisiveness, passion, vision, and empathy, what should schools do to place their work developing those skills in greater relief? If successful leaders need skills such as the ability to take an unpopular stand, mobilize support for a shared goal, and […]
Thinking About Process Change (Part One): Contextualizing Technology Use in a Progress Culture
From Wednesday to Friday I attended, along with three other Westminster folks, the AASA Leadership Symposium in Boston, led by Alan November, and since we finished, I have been thinking about the cosmetic changes schools traditionally undertake versus the possibility of what November called process change. The conversation we had overlays my ongoing reflection on […]