Category: News
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Revisiting Boice
I’ve been preparing a one-week summer workshop in humanities pedagogy for a few post-docs starting their positions this fall. My partner in this development is one of our Graduate Teaching Fellows, Jessica Riviere, who just dotted her i’s and crossed her t’s for graduating (or “walking”) in May. The confluence of these events brings me…
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The Continual Unfolding of Our Work
This week was an especially stressful time of the semester. Some of you are looking forward to spring break, but Vanderbilt’s was at the very beginning of March. The week after break–or, as we often call it, “break”–is hard for instructors and students alike. We see the home stretch in front of us, but it’s…
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About Time
This work of mindfulness–in essence, focusing awareness on the present moment–has me noticing more clearly how I experience time. Despite the best efforts of clocks and schedules, time is a subjective, varying, and malleable phenomenon. In October’s “Stories of the Slow Professor,” I wrote about it from the perspective of how we talk about our…
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Busy-Shaming
My Women & Gender Studies class talked about “slut shaming” recently, and I’ve since been thinking about another kind of shaming that worries me–and that I want to be careful to avoid. The flurry of popular media discussions of mindfulness (and other topics) have been accompanied by concerns about how busy every one is. Absolutely. …
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Opening Our Eyes
In the rhythm of academia, right as we began this semester, we also selected our courses for next year. I decided to revisit my course on monsters. Soon after, a friend gave me a book of original Grimm’s fairy tales–a gruesome treasure! I didn’t expect to stumble onto mindfulness while reading through it, but I…
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Daydream Believer
I’ve previously written about the specific kind of meditation that leads to “Inspiration, Creativity, & New Ideas,” but I want to return to this issue. Creativity is a necessary skill in all disciplines, yet it’s among the most difficult to teach. The research on mindfulness offers a few different strategies. In a recent New York…
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Time, the Superbowl, & Bandwagons
This past week brought a kind of harmonic convergence of mindfulness in popular culture. First, Time magazine featured “The Mindful Revolution” on the cover. Then, or perhaps simultaneously, word spread (from ESPN to the blogosphere) that the Seattle Seahawks–then heading for the Superbowl, now winners of the Superbowl–regularly practice mindfulness and yoga. This publicity is a…
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After the Honeymoon
My class is still in the “honeymoon phase,” those carefree weeks in the beginning of the semester when students and instructor alike enjoy each other’s company and insights, before any major papers or exams complicate the dynamic. Smaller, low-stakes assessments have given me a chance to provide early feedback and have documented the their good thinking…
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Doodling & Knitting
Last week, I had a great conversation about class participation with SoTL Scholar Hasina Mohyuddin and my Graduate-Teaching-Fellow partner in teaching the SoTL Scholars Program Andrew Greer (both PhD candidates in the Department of Human & Organizational Development). I also serendipitously asked my students to work together to create a class rubric for assessing participation. …
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Enduring Effects
I recently announced on Facebook that I take requests. My friend and former colleague Marnie Bullock Dresser asked the following question: “I can already tell there are fewer monkeys when I’m in serious monkey mind mode. I can tell my brain is different; I’m just wanting to trust that I’m making permanent changes–so that’s a…
Nancy L. Chick 