As I gave one of my international students feedback at my desk, I noticed he stood too close for my comfort. I inched away from him, and in response, he moved closer. We did this until I could move no further and had to
Like many of our peers, we are fortunate to work at an institution serving individuals from different ethnicities, nationalities, and cultural backgrounds. In this regard, many of us work on campuses with large international populations coming from all parts of the world. Such students
I teach psychology to students who are largely from rural and low-income areas. In my courses we discuss a wide range of topics that have the potential for controversy, such as sexuality and gender, best parenting practices, racism and implicit bias, and the neuroscientific
This article first appeared in The Best of the 2022 Teaching Professor Online Conference (Magna Publications, 2023).
Belonging describes the human emotional need to experience acceptance from a group. As a psychosocial concept, belonging or feeling “part of” allows individuals to develop self-concept or self-identity
In the life of a professor, what’s more satisfying than a successful class discussion? A classroom abuzz with ideas, students who are energized and alert, sinking their teeth into the assigned material, riffing in surprising, productive ways. Isn’t this why we got into the
The academic year may be underway, but it is not too late to make our classrooms and our campuses truly inclusive and safe places for transgender and gender nonconforming students. Making meaningful change (not just talking about it) sounds like a daunting task, but at
Being a good teacher is important to me. How do I know whether I am one? What can I do to become (a better) one? To help answer this question I drew on my expertise as a health psychologist. Being healthy is important to me.
During a keynote address at the 2022 Teaching Professor Conference, I spoke about challenges that exist in higher education, specifically students and instructors who do not have the freedom to bring their authentic selves to their learning or teaching environments. In such scenarios, students might
I find that the terminology used in textbooks in my discipline of applied behavior analysis (ABA) tends to lack any cultural context or descriptors that might connect today’s student to the text in a meaningful way. Textbooks are written by academics and so represent an
We who work in higher education are constantly using and learning academic English, often without realizing it. We may not realize that the way we speak English is quite challenging to many students who don’t speak this way at home. College students who struggle to
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