"Inclusion" has become a post-pandemic buzzword in many universities, highlighting historical inequities within a broader crisis in higher education. As universities face record levels of student despair and disconnection, campuses across the country report dropping...
The story we've been told about higher education is changing dramatically. What was once seen as the clearest path to a successful career, the college degree now is being closely examined for its role in deepening inequalities and being out of reach for many...
Educators everywhere remember the pandemic as a period of cataclysmic upheaval, the effects of which are still being felt today. For many longtime educators like me, the events of 2020 meant not just a sudden switch to new modalities but also a reexamination of what...
In 2024, as debates intensify over the legitimacy, fairness, and value of higher education, a new academic movement is bringing analysis and balance to a discourse increasingly vulnerable to partisan posturing. “Critical University Studies” (CUS) looks at the...
Following the graduate student worker strike of 2023, many faculty members like me were caught off guard by the sudden need for alternative instructional support. The term "learning assistant" initially brought to mind images of undergraduates serving merely as...
I still remember one of the first moments of my college orientation at UCLA in the summer before my freshman year. As a first-generation student, this was one of my few times on a college campus—it all seemed so intimidating. I felt nervous as my fellow students and I...
Steve Mang Associate Professor of Teaching Department of ChemistryIn this faculty spotlight blog, I had an opportunity to interview Steve Mang, an Associate Professor of Teaching in the Chemistry department, who teaches upper-division physical and analytical chemistry...
Do you love using Google Docs for creating collaborative worksheets and active learning activities for your students? Great news! Google Docs has recently released a powerful new feature that allows you to create drop-down menus (or what they call drop-down chips)...
Why we should embrace active learning Three good and three bad reasons to embrace active learning, with reflections on a changing world. Many of us have either heard or experienced how active learning is a more effective way to learn compared to passive learning. Yes,...
Spring Quarter 2022 was the first “return to normal” in-person classroom teaching for many of our faculty. However, between the COVID swings and uncertainty in what a “new normal” entails, we continue to face the challenge of student disengagement, feelings of stress...
