Climate Action Pedagogy, Everything is Coming Up Strawberries, and Attn: Friends in DC Area
Must be June!
Welcome to Newsletter Nineteen of Once More, With Feeling.
BE THE SPARK - Thoughts on Teaching and Learning
Last week I had the great pleasure of attending a co-working session on Climate Action Pedagogy led by the wonderful Karen Costa. The co-working session was a debut for her course on the same topic offered through OneHE.
Karen often quotes adrienne maree brown: “small is all,” and this course embodies that principle in asking faculty to create one small learning artifact to help address climate change—an assignment, an essay prompt, a course module.
For inspiration and resources she referred us out to several great examples and resource collections: Regeneration, All We Can Save, and Climate Action Venn Diagrams. These resources include videos, essay prompts, zines, punch lists, and more.
Attendee Sybil Preibe shared her own learning artifact here, an assignment which lets students choose their own climate topic and learning product.
Personally, I worked on a possible new assignment for my Motivation and Emotion psychology course that asks students to set a personal climate action goal using climate action Venn diagrams (see Ayana Elizabeth Johnson’s TED talk on the topic here) and also the principles of effective goal setting we’ll be covering in the course already.
With Karen’s permission, I also hope to be running an educational development workshop for Simmons faculty using some of these same prompts and materials.
OUR MONSTERS, OURSELVES - Uncertainty, Challenges, Mental HealthW
On June 1st I held a launch event for my new book on supporting student mental health. I’d like to thank the ~150 people who showed up on Zoom or in person for what was certainly a heartwarming event for me. Thank you deeply for all of your support. An especial thanks to Beacon Press, Trident Bookseller, my publicist Bev Rivero, and all of my Simmons University community for supporting the event—especially our Center for Faculty Excellence Executive Director Jennifer Herman.
Here is a link to my presentation and here is a link to a folder containing a PowerPoint version of my slides with alt text, image attributions, and my book reading script in the Notes field.
Of course you can always get a copy of the book!
If you missed that event but happen to live in the Washington, D.C. area, come on out to Busboys & Poets (Brookland location) to hear me and the amazing Abigail Marsh in conversation about the youth mental health crisis. You can register here and check out her gripping book The Fear Factor.
I’ll be in town attending an NSF Summit for research coordination networks in undergraduate biology education—more on that next newsletter.
EMOTION & MOTIVATION - Feeling and Striving
Psychologist Neil Lewis has won pretty much every award we give in the field, and he further proves why in this important new paper for the Annual Reviews: Cultivating Equal Minds: Laws and Policies as (De)biasing Social Interventions.
Read some backstory and his thoughts on the paper here on LinkedIn, and the open access version of the paper here.
HIVEMIND - Our Synchronous Selves
The very prolific Jay Van Bavel and colleagues just published a preprint for a new article summarizing the state of the literature on the effects of social media on morality (including a lot of his team’s work).
They conclude that “social media often acts as an accelerant for existing moral dynamics – amplifying outrage, status seeking, and intergroup conflict, while also potentially amplifying more constructive facets of morality, such as social support, pro-sociality, and collective action.”
I was gratified to see this conclusion, as this accelerant idea is consistent with the conclusions I drew about the more general effects of social media on well-being and sociality in my 2019 book HIVEMIND. Identifying the benefits and drawbacks of certain patterns and habits of social media use and thoughtfully encouraging and engaging behaviors associated with better outcomes is a much more reasonable task than banning social media and binning the smartphones.
Let’s get on it.
INCIDENTALLY - I Have Your June Dessert Recipe Right Here
Last weekend I had the gift of escaping to the ocean for a brief spell with a group of cherished women, and (the best cook I know) Julie Sargent made the most stunning strawberry galette with farm strawberries from our CSA Red Fire Farm. It may have been the fact that we ate it with our hands under the stars by a campfire, but it was among the most delicious things I’ve ever tasted.
You can find the recipe here.
Happy June, newsletter friends.