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Tag: critical thinking

Remote Teaching, Difficult Topics, and the Cultivation of Political Judgment: Lessons From the Israel/Palestine Conflict

a red and a blue zipper running across each other

by Daniel J. Levine, Political Science and Religious Studies This post outlines a set of group assignments developed while teaching The Israel/Palestine Conflict (PSC 344) remotely in Fall 2020. I start by outlining the challenges that typically attend teaching on this topic. I then take up the circumstances faced when planning for it late last summer: the transition to remote teaching and an increasingly partisan political climate. Finally, I describe a set of assignments intended to address those challenges, assessing […]

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Let’s Get Digital, Digital (Humanities)! Part One

by Nathan Loewen, Department of Religious Studies The Alabama Digital Humanities Center (ADHC) opened in 2010. At the beginning of my second year at UA, I just now discovered the ADHC and its amazing home in Gorgas Library Room 109A . I arranged for a consultation with Emma Wilson yesterday. We enjoyed a vibrant discussion about how my teaching might deploy a digital humanities project. I really appreciated the upshot of our time together: pedagogy and learning objectives should inform whatever digital […]

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Modern Binaries

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In his post “This Modern Life,” from Practicum: Critical Theory, Religion, and Pedagogy, Russell McCutcheon recalls teaching a lesson on binaries and how his students came to recognize their own cultural, historical, and linguistic categories: Of course, such an analysis isn’t possible without using binaries of our own — we’re all swimming in the soup of history, culture, language, etc. — but not every pair carries with it the same implications. Getting students to recognize that the goal is not […]

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“On the Road” with Jeff Melton

Jeff Melton

Instructor: Jeff Melton Course: On the Road (AMS 412) Audience: Undergraduates Part cultural history, part literature/film survey, “On the Road” examines the enduring narrative that emerges when Americans take to the open road behind the wheel of a car. Car culture is arguably the most definitive characteristic of late-20th century American social structure, and the cultural productions that emerge from it reveal the culture at large like no other component. What are your goals for this course?   My overall […]

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