Education and Classroom Learning Magazine Articles




November 25, 2021

Writer:

Corbie Hill

When Faulkner Fox planned her inaugural political-theater workshop for fall 2020, she didn’t predict an imminent summer of activism.

August 23, 2021

Social studies is the lowest-priority core class, always. History is not viewed as being as central or important as math and English, and science got a huge boost with Sputnik, the growth of the U.S. space program, and now the focus on STEM areas. I’ve always somewhat begrudged the lack of attention. History teachers have always banded together in the knowledge that we provide the most important core content; after all, if you don’t know where you’ve been, you can’t know where you are going.

Rap Godz image

December 9, 2020

Writer:

Corbie Hill

In the spring of 2020, JaBria Bishop built her first video game.

It was a 2D side-scroller—think Super Mario Brothers—which she believes she called Lunar Dreamscape. In it, a little girl wakes up in a lost world. Bishop’s idea for this whimsical game was for the players, too, to feel lost, so she designed it accordingly.

“I wanted the player to also feel how the little girl feels,” she says.

September 26, 2020

Writer:

David Malone

A COVID paradox: I haven’t stepped foot on Duke’s campus since March 6. Yet, in the months between the start of remote learning, this past spring, in the face of COVID-19 and the start of the fall semester, I have felt more meaningfully connected to the Duke community than at any other time during my thirty-seven years as a member of its faculty.

Homework

July 22, 2020

Years before COVID-19 turned the educational world topsy-turvy, Douglas Michelman ’82 was concerned about the “homework gap.” Michelman had joined Sprint as the chief communications officer in 2014, and because his portfolio included corporate responsibility, the CEO asked him to reimagine how Sprint could create social impact in a relevant way.

August 12, 2019

Writer:

Andrew Rosen

When I walk across Duke’s majestic campus, I’m sometimes lulled into thinking campus-based universities, beloved for centuries, might continue forever. Duke’s beauty and dynamism make it hard to imagine that the campus model of higher education is heading into long-term decline, to the point where a generation from now it will be the exception, not the rule.

August 7, 2019

Writer:

Madison Catrett

The blue glow of my laptop was the only light in my dorm room. I stared at the screen, my eyes glued to a table ranking twenty-eight methods of suicide based on lethality, time required, and agony. A shotgun to the head would be lethal and almost painless, but there would be a lot of splatter. Jumping would require a building at least 150 feet tall, and there were plenty of those around, but it would also be messy.

May 17, 2019

Writer:

Scott Huler

Outfitted in someone else’s camouflage protective vests and helmets, preparing to walk the perimeter fence of a concrete motor-pool containment of the Third Special Forces Group at Fort Bragg, a half-dozen Duke students give considerable thought to what might happen on their circuit. They’re on a simulation exercise helping the Special Forces figure out how to best get medical care and information to units as they fight, far from support.

May 16, 2019

The sweet release of spring break beckons, but the day is dreary. How dreary? Perfectly dreary. The very definition of dreariness. The ideal, ultimate expression, the Platonic Form, of dreariness.

July 30, 2014

Produced for the Motion Design course taught by Raquel Salvatella de Prada, assistant professor of the practice of art, art history & visual studies, and arts of the moving image.

July 18, 2014

Writer:

Safa al-Saeedi

I grew up in a household where my dad has been always supportive. He always praised women for their minds and for their compassion. I never got the sense from my father that women were inferior; I never felt that I was less than my brothers. Whenever he would see an amazing woman on television, like a scholar or a scientist, he would always tell me to come and watch. My dad supported me in my travels and when I decided not to be a doctor in my career choice.

July 18, 2014

Writer:

Annabel Wharton

Why do most of us love our homes? Because, of course, they are saturated with the memories of how we became who we are. Like the family photographs displayed within them, homes tend to archive good times, not bad ones.

November 12, 2013

In a university of high achievers, class rankings can have real import. That’s why Trinity College and the Pratt School of Engineering are changing the approach to communicating student class rank based on grade point average.

Duke Kunshan

November 12, 2013

More than 800 students from China enrolled at Duke last year, a clear indication of the university’s popularity in the nation. Now, after gaining the approval of the Ministry of Education, Duke will have a formal home in the country.

Sketch of a teacher

July 26, 2013

The new class of Duke Alumni Faculty Fellows includes a pioneer in the field of black popular culture, a law school faculty member who has worked on Supreme Court confirmation hearings, a scholar of applied and theoretical ethics, and a biomedical engineer specializing in biomaterials.

August 8, 2012

 

On the first day of her “Women in the Public Sphere” course this past spring, Rachel Seidman told her students they would be responsible for a single class project, one they would be inspired to continue even after the course finished. But no one imagined just how far that project would go.

August 6, 2012

After twelve years of teaching introductory and organic chemistry at Duke, Stephen Craig ’91 knows many of the most important moments in his students’ learning don’t happen in the classroom.

“They occur at 2:30 in the morning, in the commons room of their dormitory, probably the night before an exam,” laughs Craig, a professor and chair of chemistry. “It’s when students are trying to work through the material together.”

Haiyan Gao is the chair of Duke's physics department.

June 4, 2012

Haiyan Gao, chair of Duke’s physics department, probes inside atoms to study the structure and spin of neutrons. A native of Shanghai, Gao was inspired to pursue physics by her father’s stories about female Chinese physicist Chien-Shiung Wu, who came to the U.S. in the 1930s and helped scientists unravel the chain of reactions needed to create the atomic bomb.

April 1, 2012

It’s rare to see students out of bed at 10 o’clock on a Saturday morning, but East Duke 209 was packed beyond capacity for the opening lecture of “Flamenco Alive!: New Research in the Vital Art of Flamenco.” Perhaps it was the anticipation of the following weekend’s performance by the Flamenco Vivo dance company—or the promise of a master class led by Carlota Santana, Flamenco Vivo’s artistic director— but this was one academic symposium that got people on their feet.

April 1, 2012

At Duke, “anxiety” is hardly an unusual word. But where does anxiety disorder come from? How about schizophrenia? Obsessive-compulsive disorder? Depression?

These questions drive Ahmad Hariri’s course “Looking Inside the Disordered Brain,” which begins its third iteration this coming fall. While the course tends to attract biology and psychology stu- dents, Hariri, a professor of psychology and neuroscience, insists that the sub- ject matter is intended for a broad audience.

April 1, 2012

When a few dozen students and faculty members gathered last fall for the first meeting of Duke’s Neurohumanities Research Group, neuroscience professor Michael Platt welcomed them by acknowledging the fuzzy boundaries of the fledgling discipline. “If you’re wondering what neurohumanities is, so are we!” he said.