The Graduate Certificate in College Instruction will host a virtual information session on Tuesday, 3/20/18, from 6:45pm-7:15pm ahead of the April 1, 2018 application deadline for fall 2018 admission. To sign up, email the program’s Graduate Assistant, Kristi Kaeppel, at kristi.kaeppel@uconn.edu.
Author: Kaeppel, Kristi
Three Insights From Feminist Pedagogy
By Kristi Kaeppel In honor of International Women’s Day, I wanted to write a post that explored the contributions of feminist pedagogy. As has been said with other “alternative pedagogies” (such as culturally relevant teaching), feminist teaching is not an outlier approach with radical ideas but rather incorporates sound, evidence-based practices. Many of these ideas, […]
Developing Your Own Teaching Lens
As an instructor, I find the concept of lenses valuable. In teaching, lenses help me and the students see material from multiple angles or make connections between disciplines. They bring concepts, events, and people into focus. I first connected them with my teaching through my Digital Media & Design (DMD) colleague, Professor Clarissa Cegilo. Clarissa […]
Instructional Assistants: How Last Term’s Top Students Help this Term Go Better
By Emma Bjorngard-Basayne and Mitch Green It has long seemed to both of us that talented and experienced undergraduate students are a large but mostly untapped source of inspiration, energy, and leadership for their peers. After a student does well in a course, our first, quite reasonable instinct is to encourage her to go […]
Struggling with Authority as a Young TA
By Manuel Arjonilla-Rodríguez Manuel Arjonilla-Rodriguez is a Spanish Instructor and second year master’s student in the Language, Literature, and Cultures department at UConn majoring in Hispanic Literature, Culture, and the Spanish Language. Before coming to the United States, Manuel lived, worked and studied in France, Germany, and Spain (his home country) and completed a BA […]
2017 Teaching Highlights 🎉
While it’s easy to be cynical about the sentimentality and goal-setting that accompanies the end of a year, we believe reflection and self-improvement are always laudable goals and ones that are at the heart of good pedagogy. Before we turn to thinking about ways can improve our teaching practice in 2018, let’s take a moment […]
Teaching for Your Students (And Not Your Employer) When You are Precarious Labor
By Dr. Raechel Tiffe My last year of full-time teaching was the first time I went into planning the semester thinking about my labor verses only thinking about the student experience. Prior to that, I had never considered what it might mean to assign particular projects in particular classes, in relation to other papers in […]
Breaking the Cycle of Knowledge Gaps
By Andrea Suria Thirty minutes into my lab section, I find myself walking from group to group encountering the same question: How do I dilute this chemical? What was supposed to be a simple first step in a lengthy protocol has quickly become a roadblock throughout the room. Even though I reviewed an example problem […]
Building Classroom Dialogue Using Webb’s Depth of Knowledge
By Andrew Miller Classroom discourse can often be difficult to achieve. Whether you are a teaching assistant, new faculty member, or tenured faculty, getting students to answer and ask questions is a challenge all instructors face. This is especially true in the sciences where students often have anxiety about the subject, little interest, and the […]
Lift as We Climb: Instances of Women’s Peer Support in Navigating the Academy
By Emma Björngard-Basayne and Kristi Kaeppel Last spring, as we made that precarious leap from a school friendship into a full-blown, text-every-day, drink-wine-together-on-weekdays-friendship, a curious thing started to happen. The daily anxieties and feelings of self-doubt that accompany being a graduate student started to weigh less heavily on us. Over coffee, we chatted excitedly about […]