Bob Fecho, Professor in English Education

Artists of the Self: Dialogue as a Means of Teaching and Learning in Our Lives

March 5, 2020

What do we mean when we say we are dialoguing, that we teach through dialogue, that we enter into dialogue with others, that we extend dialogically into the world? If Paulo Freire, Mikhail Bakhtin, Dmitri Nikulin, Hubert Hermans and others who argue for the power and possibility of dialogue were all on the same panel, would they agree that what was occurring among them was dialogical? Is all dialogue, by its very nature, inherently conducive to teaching and learning? If not, then what aspects of the many conceptions of dialogical process should we embrace, why should we embrace them, and what does that look like in classrooms and our day-to-day encounters? Finally, if as Nikulin contends, to be is to dialogue, then how do we as educators harness that human condition to help students and ourselves be, do, and become artists of the self?

Ruth Vinz, Professor in English Education

Encounters With Poetry: (Re)figuring the Geometries of Attention

December 5, 2019

What are possible purposes for poems and poetry in our lives, education, and public discourses? In this presentation, we will explore how poems, in subtle yet powerful ways, are textual practices for re-engaging with the world through a pedagogy for pausing—to see again, to un- know the familiar, to encounter Others toward the edges of understanding, to be astonished and surprised, and to recognize silences and gaps as co-generative spaces for imagining, creating, and taking action in the world. How might poems attune us to wondering, questioning, and seeing peripherally and slant? Poems do not express the world but enable and perform the world through aesthetic, cultural, and ethical imaginaries.

Panel discussion with A&H DSS speakers

November 11, 2019

In this interdisciplinary speaker panel in which four former DSS speakers engage in a discussion of questions that have come out of their previous presentations. The panel highlighted issues of critical important to the future of American education.

James E. Purpura, Professor of Language and Education

Questioning the Currency of Second and Foreign Language Certification Exams

October 10, 2019

In his Distinguished Speaker Series, Dr. James E. Purpura questions the currency of traditional approaches to L2 assessment, arguing that present designs limit their capacity to provide examinee information that is needed and valued in the real world. I argue for a learning-oriented approach to assessment as a design framework for constructing scenario-based assessments capable of measuring a broadened array of constructs, and providing better interpretative bases for educational decisions.

 For more on Professor James E. Purpura, visit his Teachers College Faculty page.

Mixing Words and Numbers: A Case for Texture in Research and Evaluation Design

April 10, 2019

All methods of data collection and analysis have advantages and limitations. Different research languages—based in numbers, or words, or images—provide people with alternative ways of knowing. Threaded together, they create research “texture.” Hal Abeles advocates for the use of multiple strategies to take advantage of the strengths of different research approaches and to provide a more thorough understanding of the research questions being examined or the educational program being evaluated. Abeles illustrates the advantages of mixing methods, creating “textured insights,” that speak to multiple audiences, using his research on gender issues in music education and evaluation studies of community arts organizations.

For more on Professor Abeles, visit his Teachers College Faculty page.

Why the Call to Teach Matters

February 19, 2019

Philosophers of education seek to contribute to the ethos of how people conceive and talk about education.  They endeavor to show how this talk is bound up with notions of justice, of goodness, and of beauty.  In an era of ‘alternative facts’ and unprincipled assaults on reasoned communication, their task has become all the more important. In this presentation, David Hansen proposes to counter harmful distortions about the practice of teaching and about what it means to be a teacher, whether of children, youth, or adults.  He will reimagine the familiar, if poorly understood, idea of teaching as a calling.  A vivid sense of calling, Hansen will suggest, positions teachers at all levels of the system to experience a deeply meaningful life while making a very real contribution to society.  He will contrast this image of teaching with problematic conceptions that obstruct if not undermine the work of teachers and teacher educators.  His animating concern is that accounts of teaching and of what it is to be a teacher matter: teachers live, work, suffer, and flourish under particular accounts.  Hansen will argue that the idea of teaching as a calling speaks directly to the passion of teachers, while also constituting an enduring philosophy of education that can inform, sustain, and inspire them to work together in the name of education itself.

For more on Professor Hansen, visit his Teachers College Faculty page.

The Narrative Researcher/Writer: Discomforting Reflexivities and Impossible Composings

November 29, 2018

Qualitative researchers have grappled for decades now with imperatives generated by “the crisis of representation.” Thus, researching and its accompany writings continue to require “reflexivities of discomfort” – that is, interrogations of often habitual preoccupations, expectations, suppositions, fantasies that affect both our researching and the “writing up” of such efforts. But such questionings in no way are intended as means to guarantee “more accurate, truthful, decolonized” narrations of “self” and “other.” Rather, such reflexive practices also compel examinations of historically, culturally and socially contingent influences on all aspects of preparing for as well as engaging in research and its always-fraught representational writing endeavors.

Re-turning, in part, to Roland Barthes and his lectures on “The Preparation of the Novel,” I consider several on-going research projects in light of my entangling socialities, reflexivities of discomfort and (im)possible composings.

For more on Professor Miller, visit her Teachers College Faculty page.

Border Crossings: Threads, Spaces, Networks and New Ideas

October 25, 2018

From STEM to STEAM has become a popular topic of pedagogical theorizing and practice in which the arts engage as threads interweaving the humanities and sciences expanding traditional norms of cognition. This is not a new idea but in today’s world prompts radical re-thinking about the future of schools and the emergence of coalitions that have the power to re-shape culture and re-contextualize education This presentation will argue for a reinscription of the arts in terms of “collaborative envisioning” in which social groups and cultural institutions form networks that highlight reflection, imagination and aesthetic sensibility reformulating ideas about teaching and learning and the sites where they take place.

For more on Professor Burton, visit her Teachers College Faculty page.