Teaching

Welcome to Teaching, a free weekly newsletter from The Chronicle of Higher Education. This week:

• Beckie describes how some colleges and professors are using Michele Norris’s Race Card Project as a teaching tool.
• Beth shares readers’ examples of engaged scholarship.
• We point to some recent articles you may have missed.

From Discomfort to Acceptance

When librarians at Wayne State University learned about the Race Card Project, Kristen Chinery, a reference archivist at its Walter P. Reuther Library, was excited.

As chair of the Wayne State libraries’ diversity and inclusion council, Chinery thought that participating in the project, which collects people’s six-word submissions about their experience or observations of race, would spark good discussions at the public university in Detroit. “Why don’t we have a wall in every library on campus?” she thought.

Cards posted at the university’s five libraries and its archives included “Black Lives Matter! Act Like It!,” “DNA is what connects us all,” and “Deporting my mom is not ok!” You can view more examples here.

Reading candid messages from students, professors, staff members, and people from the community about their experience with race, Chinery said, can be uncomfortable. But “from that discomfort and that questioning, it can help us move to a place of tolerance and accepting others’ viewpoints.”

A number of professors gave students the option to submit cards for extra credit, she added.

The project is the brainchild of Michele Norris, a former host of National Public Radio’s All Things Considered. “I’m thrilled that people find utility in the project,” Norris said. “And I’m honored that’s happening in institutions of higher education, because that’s often the most diverse environment we as individuals find in our lifetimes.”

In addition to its use at institutions like Wayne State, the project has been taken up as a teaching tool by individual professors elsewhere.

Among them is Michele Elam, a professor of English at Stanford University, who said the cards provide a mechanism for connecting scholarly understandings of race to students’ lives.

Elam teaches “Mixed Race in the New Millennium: Crossings of Kin, Faith, and Culture,” one of several intensive pre-term courses that rising sophomores can apply to take.

Typically, college sophomores are coming into their own, she says, and are seeking ways to understand their experience. The way she uses the Race Card Project in her course dovetails with this impulse.

First, Elam has students write their own Race Cards. Then she has them conduct related research. A student who is biracial, for instance, learned that one of her great-grandfathers had owned slaves. Elam pointed the student toward memoirs by writers who had similar family histories and to other research on the topic.

Projects like these, she said, help students understand the role that humanities scholarship can play in making sense of the world — something that’s not always self-evident to them.

Have you found a good way to tie students’ identities or personal experiences to scholarship in your field? Tell me about it at beckie.supiano@chronicle.com, and your example may appear in a future newsletter.

**A paid message from: TCU

Restorative in nature, the university offers counsel and second chances when doling discipline to foster a successful and healthy environment.

What Engaged Scholarship Looks Like

Last month, in a post about colleges contributing to the public good, I asked readers to tell me what engaged scholarship — bringing the outside world into the classroom — looks like on their campus. I want to highlight a few of the many responses to show the variety of programs at work.

Michigan State University runs a residential college focused on arts and humanities for the common good. The curriculum and the residential experience are organized around long-term community partnerships, says Stephen Esquith, dean of the college: “We don’t want to just helicopter into a community, provide them with a positive experience, and walk away.” What helps sustain this structure, he notes, is that faculty members are hired directly into the college, and their commitment to engaged scholarship is evaluated as part of the hiring process. Being part of the college also allows them to take a different approach to their research. “What often happens is the whole class is committed to uncovering the story of urban renewal or the history of civil-rights leaders in the area,” says Esquith. In other units on campus, by contrast, faculty members rely primarily on graduate research assistants to help them with their scholarship.

The University of Oregon is part of the Educational Partnerships for Innovation in Communities Network (EPIC-N). Member institutions join with a city or other community to work together on a problem for which the community needs additional capacity or expertise. Today, says Marc Schlossberg a professor at Oregon and a founder of the university’s Sustainable Cities Institute — which serves as the basis for the EPIC model — 30 courses across 10 disciplines at Oregon are engaged in such work. This approach works, he says, because the community helps fund a campus-based program manager to handle some of the logistical headaches that come with applied coursework, such as finding clients and getting data sets. That financial contribution also ensures that the community projects on which students and faculty members work are of value, which in turn motivates students.

At Bates College, the Harward Center for Community Partnerships runs the Publicly-Engaged Pedagogy (PEP) Faculty Learning Community, which helps early-career faculty members introduce engaged-scholarship projects into their coursework. Participants meet monthly over the course of a semester to receive training and share ideas. The center’s staff members, who have deep connections in the community, help find appropriate partners. Since the program started, in the fall of 2016, says Darby Ray, director of the center, 25 community-engaged-learning courses have been created. The biggest challenge, she says, is finding and then sustaining the right partnership for a particular course and professor: “We’re not throwing cash at this at all. What we have invested in is staff in our center, and our attention to relationship-building.”

ICYMI

• What will the planned merger of the textbook publishers Cengage and McGraw-Hill mean for colleges? Our colleague Goldie Blumenstyk walks through the possibilities.
• The free tools offered through the Empirical Educator Project could be a game-changer for professors who want to improve their teaching, writes Michael Feldstein — whose company, MindWires LLC, convened the project — in an opinion piece for Forbes.
• Could teaching students to think like fact-checkers prevent them from falling for misinformation online? Beckie explored new research that suggests the approach has promise.

Thanks for reading Teaching. If you have suggestions or ideas, please feel free to email us, at dan.berrett@chronicle.com, beckie.supiano@chronicle.com, beth.mcmurtrie@chronicle.com, or steve.johnson@chronicle.com.

—Beckie and Beth