November 3, 2010 Deepening Public Discussion In all it does, IF tries to both widen and deepen democratic discussion. Widening discussion seems pretty straightforward. But what does “deepening” democratic discussion mean? —The short answer is that...
October 27, 2010 Educational Foundations – If Discussion Report # 2 (October) Last week’s experience in my two 200-level classes led me to re-evaluate the approach to group discussions. Initially, I had asked facilitators to identify a news report somehow related to...
October 27, 2010 First Year Seminar – Reflection #2 (October) Last week I had great plans for our discussion session in my freshman seminar class. I assigned two recent news reports focusing on cyber-bulling – one resulting in a student...
October 25, 2010 Setting up Student Centered Discussio IF Blog Post #1 Setting up Student Centered Discussion This first blog addresses some “basics” of setting up IF discussion in my class. I hope that once the basics are laid...
October 14, 2010 Reason, Emotion, and Exploratory Discussion One of the ways in which the IF discussion process is most distinctive is in how it deals with emotion. Rather than imposing a dichotomy between "emotion" and "reason" and then raising...
October 14, 2010 Interactivities between IF’s Main Activity Areas In my last entry I described some of the main differences among IF's principal activity areas. I also pointed out that some of these differences were sources of important interactivities in...
September 30, 2010 My IF course v. 2.0 Well, I’m back to teaching an IF-course, and for some reason, the same one I taught last year, a first-year seminar. Last fall wasn’t a complete failure, but I did...
September 26, 2010 Educational Foundation – IF Discussion Session #1 This week my two ANTH202 classes started using the discussion process formally (with flip charts & markers); last week they had a trial run. Like in my FYS, most groups...
September 26, 2010 Educational Foundation – Groups & Plans My Educational Foundation classes have about 25 students each; all plan to be future teachers. Both classes consist mostly of females (one has five males, the other four). The ethnicities...