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Well, finals have ended, the semester is over, and summer break is officially underway. My composition students finished strong by contributing to a collection of audio essays modeled after the national This I Believe series. I call it This I Know. Check out what my students have to say about their beliefs, and drop them [...]

In the 1950s, William G. Perry developed a model of intellectual development to help understand the “positions” of intellectual and ethical growth that post-adolescent college students go through over the course of their college years. He describes nine different fluid “positions” across four categories: 1) dualism, 2) multiplicity, 3) relativism, and 4) commitment within relativism. When I first learned [...]

My fiction writing class has just completed their “obstructions” project, which is always a hoot (for me anyway). The project is based on the creative methodology demonstrated in the Lars Von Trier film The Five Obstructions. In the film, Von Trier challenges his mentor–veteran film director Jørgen Leth–to remake his 1967 short film entitled “The [...]