“Don’t be a teacher” said Mrs Small, “if you want to be an artist”. She played Shostakovich and encouraged us to destroy things. Peter Bishop tut-tutted about the standard of painting in the art school and showed me how to stretch a canvas properly. He showed me how to print […]
Abfalter, D., Zaglia, M. E., & Mueller, J. (2012). Sense of virtual community: A follow up on its measurement. Computers in Human Behavior, 28(2), 400–404. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.chb.2011.10.010 Abfalter, Zaglia and Mueller seek to explore the sense of virtual community (SOVC) and test the suitability of Chavis et al.’s SCI2 index for […]
‘The Sage on the Stage’ is a well-worn trope describing the old-style lecturer delivering content from the podium, a revered actor deeming to bestow their knowledge upon grateful audience-students. It represents, we are told, everything that is the worst about education. Why, then, if this model is so terrible, […]
Burke’s 2008 paper, Writing Power and Voice: Access To and Participation in Higher Education has been pivotal for me. How my understanding of the issues raised in this paper will translate into practice remains to be seen, but it demands a radical rethink of my epistemological position. An initial […]
Some of my most interesting insights this session were generated not by my own initiative, but by a student’s questions about Mead’s theory of the social self. We were talking about Mead’s (1934) notion of the social construction of the ‘I’ and the ‘Me’, and comparing these with Freud’s ideas […]
Are you a right-brain or left-brain thinker? And more importantly…. does it matter? For the most part, the right-brain/left-brain idea is at best a handy model and at worst a limiting stereotype. As Kendra Cherry points out in her article on this pop psychology myth, research has often been contrary […]
I wrote a bit of a Tweetstorm thismorning, and decided to turn it into a blog post, given my tendency to ragequit twitter and delete posts. The diatribe was inspired by an NYT Mindfulness article (via James Coyne, whose critique of the fad is always worth reading). David Gelles’ observations […]
There’s an image of ‘traditional’ teaching as filling students up with knowledge, rote learning, absent of any context or interest. Every other day someone dutifully reposts the latest diatribe on social media, exhorting teachers to embrace 21st century values and reject all that old-fashioned, straightjacketed learning. I wonder where, exactly, […]
Is it the perverse love of doing things The Hard Way or the connection with the Old Ways that makes us love discovering age-old paint formulas, dog-eared Herbals and the handwritten pattern for grandad’s Gansey? I was just reading a favorite blog, machen:do – ‘What Did Tolstoy Know About Knitting’ […]
So, one of the key catalysts for my decision to study psychology was an obsession with grave goods. I’ve long been interested in “things”: the physicality of objects, the significance of touch and weight in our perception of the world; our relationship with our belongings, what they mean to us, […]
