Teaching

Every course runs on a hidden tax. Somewhere around week two, a reading reaches for terms like hegemony or reflexivity or performativity without pausing, and a portion of the room quietly decides not to ask what those words mean. The reluctance is understandable (and even something that a faculty member can empathize with) — asking what a word means can feel like confessing what you don’t know, in front of the people you least want to confess it to. But the cost compounds over time: readings skimmed, seminars sat out, arguments half-followed. Vocabulary is the cheapest thing in academic life to fix, and the most embarrassing to ask about. I’ve often faced the same issue as a student myself. ...

I just wrapped up T3 (Trimester 3) at Krea University, and my second academic year as an Assistant Professor, and figured I’d share something I’ve been working on. The dashboard below (best viewed by clicking on the link to view it in a new page) pulls together anonymous end-of-course feedback from my three courses this academic year: Introduction to Sociological and Anthropological Thought (SOCL 306), Sociology and STS through Science Fiction (SOCL 346), and Social Media and Society (SOCL 348). In addition to institutional evaluations, I’ve incorporated anonymized information from an open-ended SurveyMonkey survey (that my former Dept. Chair at Nazareth University, Prof. Kim McGann had designed). The dashboard lets you filter by course, read through the student responses, and see some aggregated patterns across a few questions. I’ve tried to keep the interface simple and the methodology transparent (there’s a tab on the dashboard itself that explains how the data was “processed”; and spoiler alert, it’s pretty basic). ...