The classroom or lecture hall other than a nap-site is becoming a more hospitable place for haters. So unlike the trolling because of issues common to poor students (and poor teaching), RWNJs have become more organized in doxxing college faculty. And then there’s the abuse of smartphones and their cameras...
Beyond the usual poor-grades revenge on affirmative action (#BeckyWithTheBadGrades) and anti-authoritarian vindictiveness — the ethno-nationals’ gripe list’s featured enemies are mainly untenured POC and female professors.
It’s as if a watchlist of anti-conservative professors could, like TSA, prevent one from learning those “liberal ideas” from the college experience. How quaintly the stuff of medieval scholasticism is not dissimilar to that oh-so dangerous secular humanism. And how so high-quality the self-declared “Christian colleges” are than ones not so self-identified as sectarian.
The reality is quite the opposite and only the fantasy of RWNJ reactionaries wanting to control public education or at least transfer its funds to the private sector. The 2016 election proved that we’re in an era of post-truth, rendering useless “the quest” of such RW interest groups like
“Accuracy in Academia, is a nonprofit watchdog group,[1] and think tank that describes itself as "want[ing] schools to return to their traditional mission-the quest for truth".[2] The AIA promotes academic freedom and is particularly critical of what it describes as a left-wing bias in American academia.[3] The AIA characterizes such bias as liberal or communist"indoctrination", and aims to stand up for the rights of politically conservative students and faculty.
Its latest millennial/gen-Z incarnation is
The Professor Watchlist is a project of Turning Point USA.
The mission of Professor Watchlist is to expose and document college professors who discriminate against conservative students, promote anti-American values, and advance leftist propaganda in the classroom.
Since launching Turning Point USA three years ago, Eagle Scout 21-year-old Charlie Kirk—an Eagle Scout who still lives in his mom’s house (Kirk still sleeps in his childhood bedroom in Wheeling, Ill.—has built his organization, Turning Point USA, into the go-to group for reaching young conservatives)—has built an organization that has a presence on 800 college campuses and registered thousands of voters in 2012. Since January, Kirk’s non-profit has raised $1 million and it appears to only be gaining more momentum.
Gaining some notoriety in 2012 after he published an article on liberal bias in textbooks, which landed him an interview on Fox Business, Kirk began to raise money for what he envisioned would be a conservative version of MoveOn. org geared toward reaching young voters. Beginning with some start-up funds from millionaire investor Foster Friess, Kirk has been able to attract a number of key backers to create what Bloomberg describes as the “go-to group for reaching young conservatives."
www.truthrevolt.org/...
As of 2016, Turning Point USA also operates a website called Professor Watchlist in order to "expose and document college professors who discriminate against conservative students, promote anti-American values, and advance leftist propaganda in the classroom."[9]
It essentially includes a list of professors students dislike for their political beliefs, whether those beliefs are acted upon in the classroom or not, and has been characterized as a witch-hunt.
FSM-forbid that actual issues of college affordability get discussed or even the process of college teaching as perhaps now pedagogically anachronistic rather than the ideological delusions of the usual haters, some of whom are not even involved in higher education.
Having to put up with the usual racism of students whose personality disabilities really cannot (because of those Trumpist parents and well, culture… see Dylann Roof) abide diversity in the professoriate makes one want to rethink how teaching in higher education is “delivered”.
Given the post-truth rantings of Orange Gasbag one needs to be reminded of alternatives to rhetorically persuasive speeches as actual educational lectures. One alternative to lecture/discussion is “peer instruction”, although it is always fascinating to see who can and cannot abide multicultural or even mixed-gender learning situations, as if it could all be delivered online or even in Facebook.
Eric Mazur now teaches all of his classes using a "peer-instruction" approach. Rather than teaching by telling, he teaches by questioning. Mazur says it's a particularly effective way to teach large classes.
Here's how he does it: Before each class, students are assigned reading in the textbook. Pretty standard for a lecture class, but if you talk to college students you'll find that many of them don't bother with the reading ahead of time. They come to class to figure out what information the professor thinks is important, then they go to the textbook to read up on what they didn't understand.
"In my approach I've inverted that," says Mazur.
He expects students to familiarize themselves with the information beforehand so that class time can be spent helping them understand what the information means.
To make sure his students are prepared, Mazur has set up a web-based monitoring system where everyone has to submit answers to questions about the reading prior to coming to class. The last question asks students to tell Mazur what confused them. He uses their answers to prepare a set of multiple-choice questions he uses during class.
Mazur begins class by giving a brief explanation of a concept he wants students to understand. Then he asks one of the multiple-choice questions. Students get a minute to think about the question on their own and then answer it using a mobile device that sends their answers to Mazur's laptop.
Next, he asks the students to turn to the person sitting next to them and talk about the question. The class typically erupts in a cacophony of voices, as it did that first time he told students to talk to each other because he couldn't figure out what else to do.
Once the students have discussed the question for a few minutes, Mazur instructs them to answer the question again.
Then the process repeats with a new question.
What Mazur has found over nearly 20 years of using peer instruction is that many more students choose the right answer after they have talked with their peers. And it's not because they're blindly following their neighbor's lead. By the end of the semester, students have a deeper understanding of the fundamental concepts of physics than they did when Mazur was just lecturing. Students end up understanding nearly three times as much now, measured by a widely-used conceptual test.
In addition to having a deeper grasp of concepts, students in Mazur's classes are better at solving conventional physics problems, despite the fact that Mazur no longer spends class time at the board doing problems. He says this shows something that may seem obvious.
"If you understand the material better, you do better on problem-solving," Mazur says. "Even if there's less of it done in class."
Peer instruction has proven effective in a range of subjects from psychology to philosophy.
americanradioworks.publicradio.org/…