• Skip to primary navigation
  • Skip to main content
  • Skip to primary sidebar
  • Skip to footer

Heather Mitchell-Buck

teaching, technology, & medieval stuff

  • Heather Mitchell-Buck
  • about me
    • Heather is…
    • cv
    • teaching
    • research
    • dossier
  • a 21st-century education
  • teaching with technology
    • online, hybrid, & bimodal teaching
    • teaching during major disruption
    • tech in the classroom
      • iPad app recommendations
    • inclusive teaching w/ technology
    • digital storytelling resources
  • medieval resources
    • general medieval info
    • language & literature
    • medieval feasting
  • other resources
    • history of english resources
    • writing & literary lingo
    • drama resources
  • blog
You are here: Home / blog

August 8, 2019 by Heather Mitchell-Buck Leave a Comment

learning, teaching, living

What I believe learning and teaching are – and ought to be

an incomplete, hastily-composed, and perpetually-under-consideration set of thoughts
inspired by Rajiv Jhangiani’s 5R’s for Open Pedagogy

image by Mediamodifier from Pixabay

ACTIVE…

Learning is not about absorbing something, letting something wash over you. It is about participating. For students, I want them to understand that they have agency, that they feel brave enough to take the lead and let their voices be heard (not all of the time, but at least some of the time). For me and for my fellow teachers, that means we can’t just let inertia get to us. We have to keep revising, reimagining what education is and what it should be.

HUMAN…

We are not brains in jars. We are whole people. This means we have good days and bad days. We have things outside the space of the classroom that cannot and should not be put aside when we enter. Each perspective, each voice is valuable – and for that to be fully true, we have to acknowledge and sit with each other’s humanity. Even and especially when it makes us uncomfortable or takes us and our ways of thinking out of the center of things.

COLLABORATIVE…

You can’t sit inside your bubble and not interact with others if you want to learn. You just can’t. You need other voices and other truths. You need to embrace the messiness of group work. You need to make space for others in your learning and you need to feel that others are making space for you. We should see ourselves as co-learners. Who’s a “teacher” and who’s a “student” can and should shift. These are not fixed roles, no matter what an institution or a contract may say.

INCLUSIVE…

Real life shit shouldn’t get in the way of anyone’s education. No voices or experiences should be excluded because of a lack of accessibility or inclusivity. If you are able-bodied, white, cis, straight, tenured (fill in the blank that puts you in a position of privilege) this means you have to do more work to make it possible or easier for others to learn. Suck it up. Your extra time is well-worth it and usually not much effort when compared to the barriers that your co-learners may be facing just to be there. Get over yourself.

EQUITABLE…

Meet everyone where they are at. Don’t make assumptions. Don’t roll your eyes about things that “aren’t the way they used to be” from your perspective. Embrace the broad range of learning styles and experiences that greets you when you step foot in a classroom. That diversity enriches our learning spaces and makes them stronger and more meaningful.

KIND…

In the Middle English sense, but also in the modern sense. Be true and real to yourself. Be naturally you. Treat others (and yourself) with grace and gentleness. This doesn’t always mean “being nice” or that people shouldn’t argue and butt heads and disagree. There’s nothing “kynde” about false smiles. Be genuine. Be sincere.

BRAVE…

This isn’t easy. It shouldn’t be.

Learning is about leaving your comfort zone. It should be a bit risky, like you’re standing at the edge of something. If it doesn’t feel that way, you’re doing it wrong.

This harder for some folks than others – and that shouldn’t be, either.

Filed Under: teaching Tagged With: DPL2019, teaching

August 27, 2018 by Heather Mitchell-Buck Leave a Comment

thoughts on a new academic year

I gave Hood’s Convocation address this year. Here are my thoughts on beginning the new academic year…

It’s very tempting, standing up here on this podium in my fancy robes, to follow the example of Hogwarts Headmaster Albus Dumbledore. His idea of how to kick off the academic year was to say: “a few words. And here they are: Nitwit! Blubber! Oddment! Tweak!”

But lest you all think I’m just as mad as Harry thought Dumbledore was when he encountered him for the first time, I do feel like I ought to say just a bit more than that.

It’s hard to give advice, and maybe even harder to take it. So I’m going to ease us into it by starting with a little trivia.

My favorite form of wordplay is what we word nerds call “portmanteaux.” If you’ve ever been hangry, worn jeggings, taken a staycation, petted a labradoodle, done any cosplay, watched a sitcom, or read a blog about Brexit (or Brangelina), then you know what a portmanteau is: it’s when you take two words and smoosh them together to make a new one, and the results are usually pretty darn satisfying.

We humans are always making up new words; our language is always changing, and that’s exactly as it should be. Things would get pretty boring otherwise. As someone who studies the long history of the English Language, I can tell you with absolute certainty that this is in no way a new phenomenon. Languages are living entities – they have to change to meet the needs of the people who speak them, and the world that they inhabit. If languages don’t change, they die.

Language change works because it happens within an established pattern and within a set of known parameters. You can’t just make up a random set of syllables and expect people to know what you’re trying to say. If I were to say to you: “yulika, shedagit, mifesush, urorasu” … then what? (If nothing else, you’d probably be thinking that “nitwit, blubber, oddment, tweak” was making a heck of a lot more sense than it did a couple of minutes ago!). Or even if I took two words that you know – for example, “minimize” and “conclude” – and just stuck them together with no context or reason, it still wouldn’t work (Conclize? Miniclude? NOPE).

But what does any of this — fascinating though it may be—have to do with y’all sitting out there, about to begin a new year at Hood College?

It’s simple: like our language, if we want to survive and succeed, we have to evolve. We can’t stay in our comfort zone. We can’t limit ourselves to what we’re already good at, whether that’s math or writing or soccer or drawing or binge-watching The Office or eating a whole pint of Ben and Jerry’s in one sitting. We have to try new stuff. If you’re generally a quiet person, you still need to find ways to make your voice heard – maybe you should think about taking a theatre class (that’s what helped me!). If you’re usually the first one to raise your hand in class, you have to also learn how to make space for others in a discussion and listen to what they have to say. Otherwise, you’re just treading water.

For most of us, change is difficult. It feels risky, and it makes us uncomfortable. But even Latin, which arguably hasn’t had a native speaker in hundreds of years, is getting new vocabulary for the 21st century. And if someone can figure out how to say jelly doughnut in Latin (in case you’re curious, it’s libum transatlanticum baccarum conditura confertum), then yes, you can change, too.

The good news is that a liberal-arts college like Hood is an ideal place to take those risks and work through that discomfort—not just because you’re part of a community here at Hood, and we’re all growing and changing together—but also because that’s exactly what a liberal arts education is for. If you’ll allow me one more teensy bit of Latin, the artes liberales are the skills we need to be free people, able to think independently and contribute to our society. A liberal arts education isn’t so much about the content of what you’re learning; it’s more about the skills (the artes) that you develop as part of the learning process. To riff off of Peter Abelard (who was an amazing teacher and scholar from the 12th century), a liberal-arts education teaches us how to develop the skills of inquiry and critical thinking that allow us to push beyond the boundaries of what we already know in order to create new ways of understanding the world

Today’s employers sound a lot like Peter Abelard – they’re looking for folks who can think critically and creativity, who can work with a team, who can solve problems, and who can deal with uncertainty and ambiguity. That last one is super important because none of us knows what the future holds. We don’t know what the career landscape is going to look like 10 or 25 years from now. So we have to be ready for change.

But if we want these changes and evolutions in our lives to succeed, they need to have a strong foundation. Just as with languages, we need a set of parameters to work within. You can’t just decide to run a marathon tomorrow if you’ve never run a mile (don’t forget that the original dude who tried that back in Greece in 490 BCE collapsed and died at the end of the run). So I’m going to conclude my comments today with one last portmanteau that I think can help you establish those parameters and make a space in your life for productive, lasting, and slightly-less-scary change.

That portmanteau is habitude, which is (as it sounds) a combo of habit and attitude. Credit here goes to Angela Maiers; she points to a set of habitudes that make the difference between a person who’s content to be “good enough” and one who’s determined to push for excellence. So what are they?

adaptability, courage, perseverance, self-awareness,
curiosity, passion, and imagination

These aren’t just qualities that you’re born with. They require practice, discipline, and cultivation.

So my challenge to each of you here today is to look inside yourself and decide which of these habitudes might be your foundation for change. Here’s the list again in case you missed it the first time: adaptability, courage, perseverance, self-awareness, curiosity, passion, and imagination. You’re probably already good at practicing some of them, so that means it’s time to start cultivating the others. (For example, I’m not necessarily the bravest person out there, so I’m cultivating the habitude of courage by standing up here today and talking to all y’all!)

These habitudes are kind of like a superpower for achieving long-term success, rather than just winning at short-term goals.

Because success is all about the long game, y’all. You can’t just focus on what’s next. I know it’s tempting in college to move from one class to the next, from studying for this test to writing that essay, from meeting to work on this group project to driving across town to that internship. It makes the long march from your first day of college to your first “real” job after graduation feel a little less daunting. But it will all be way more meaningful if you don’t just move automatically from one thing to the another. If you want to make the most of every opportunity that you have, then you have to find the points of connection among all of your different experiences, and to allow those connections to take you down a detour if that’s what’s needed. College is about more than just that first job: it’s about building a life that is productive, and thoughtful, and engaged with the world we live in. You can’t be so focused on the next step that you lose sight of your real destination. And that means that you have to be open to change, whether that’s changing your course schedule, changing your major, changing what you usually do on Friday nights, or even changing your worldview if that’s what you need to do when the time comes.

But just remember that change doesn’t have to be scary (well, not JUST scary). Cultivate your habitudes by allowing yourself to make time for curiosity and imagination, by being brave, by resolving to keep going when things get tough, and by knowing what drives you. The habitudes will ground you and remind you of who you are, even in new situations. They will be your tether when everything around you seems to be shifting. In fact, they can actually help to make you into your own kind of portmanteau, bringing together the Pre-Change You and the Post-Change You. And as with other portmanteaux, the results will probably be pretty darn satisfying.

Filed Under: teaching Tagged With: learning, liberal arts, success

August 2, 2018 by Heather Mitchell-Buck Leave a Comment

DPL, meet Xia

I set myself an ambitious day today: I was trying to finish two different digital story projects. (And participate in some discussions. And help out some of my fellow DPL folks. And attend a workshop!)

Well, so it turns out that I only finished one project. The other is still in progress, and even though it won’t be done til after I’m home from Digital Pedagogy Lab, I do want to finish it and share it here!

But without further ado, here’s the challenge project I chose:

And you can find my finished project  here

A special shout-out to Nefarei on deviantart for the awesome artwork I used for Xia’s profile pic, and of course huge thanks to Jim Henson and Brian Froud. You’ll see why once you read the story. 😉

Filed Under: digital storytelling Tagged With: conferences, DPL2018, learning, technology

August 1, 2018 by Heather Mitchell-Buck Leave a Comment

London soundscape

My favorite part of today’s Media Exploration Day in Digital Storytelling at DPL 2018 was this project.

I did a slightly modified version of a prompt asking us to record sounds from a particular space and create a 5 minute soundscape of that space. But here’s the thing: for storytelling to feel real and important to me, it has to be rooted in a place (or issue, memory, etc) that’s meaningful to me. Even though I’m having a great time at this conference, I don’t have enough of a connection to the University of Mary Washington to feel like crafting a soundscape here would be an authentic thing for me to do. I needed to find a different place, and I chose London.

A little online research brought me to the London Sound Survey and their Creative Commons-licensed collection on archive.org.

I’m pretty happy with the results – I’ve never really done much audio work, and haven’t touched Audacity in years. In the spirit of full disclosure, I spent about 2 hours getting myself oriented in the software, choosing my sound files, and creating the soundscape. I hope that you are able to discover some different aspects of London than you might be expecting, and to experience several different parts of the city all at once – something that can only happen through the magic of digital storytelling.

Filed Under: digital storytelling Tagged With: conferences, DPL2018, learning, technology

  • « Go to Previous Page
  • Go to page 1
  • Go to page 2
  • Go to page 3
  • Go to page 4
  • Go to page 5
  • Interim pages omitted …
  • Go to page 13
  • Go to Next Page »

Primary Sidebar

Heather is…

…an Associate Professor of English at Hood College

…an Apple Distinguished Educator

…a humanities advocate

…a taiko player

…a tea drinker

…a fan.

Recent Posts

  • the beauty of short video projects
  • keeping the backchannel going!
  • a dubious anniversary
  • using self-graded tests & homework
  • organizing online content

Tags

architecture assignments backchannel birthdays chat college conferences content organization discussions DPL2018 DPL2019 encouragement England Trip funny gif Hood College how-to humanities hybrid teaching influence map iPad iPad stuff jobs learning liberal arts literature medieval medieval churches online teaching open pedagogy Peeps projects Richard III Shakespeare St. Martin-cum-Gregory success teaching technology the economy ungrading video vlog what I'm reading York York Minster

Categories

  • digital storytelling
  • more than just an academic
  • research
  • teaching
  • videos
  • website

Find Stuff…

Footer

Find Stuff …

Find Me …

  • Email
  • Facebook
  • Flickr
  • Instagram
  • LinkedIn
  • YouTube
CC-BY
Content on this site is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license.

Handcrafted with ♥ on the Genesis Framework · by TerryBuckArt