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Teaching

The Freedom to Teach

The freedom to teach includes the right of the faculty to select the materials, determine the approach to the subject, make the assignments, and assess student academic performance in teaching activities for which faculty members are individually responsible, without having their decisions subject to the veto of a department chair, dean, or other administrative officer.

Freedom in the Classroom

Report assessing arguments made in support of recent legislative efforts to regulate classroom instruction.

Statement on Teaching Evaluation

Statement outlining proper teaching evaluation methods and their appropriate uses in personnel decisions. This statement confines itself to the teaching responsibilities of college and university professors and is not intended as the definitive statement on reviewing and weighing all aspects of a faculty member’s work.

State of the Profession: Freedom in the Classroom—and in the Trump Era

By Michael Bérubé

Faculty Forum: Live and Unplugged

By James Bernard Murphy

Teaching Palestine

By Rana Jaleel

Campus Activism, Academic Freedom, and the AAUP

By Emily M. S. Houh

Eight Actions to Reduce Racism in College Classrooms

By Shaun R. Harper and Charles H. F. Davis III

MOOC Platforms, Surveillance, and Control

By Paul-Olivier Dehaye

Graduate Student Academic Freedom and the Apprenticeship Myth

In fall 2009, my university’s newly hired director of programs in professional writing circulated a survey asking business writing instructors to note which of the long list of tasks, skills, and assignments they taught in their classes. Many of us blithely responded to the survey: what harm could come from his desire to know the overlaps and discontinuities amongst the program’s instructors, many of whom had been teaching these courses for years? By early spring 2010, we learned that he was not simply gathering information. He announced that he “likely [would] define the core content” of the two major business writing courses, a move that would impose “an instructional core ... of ten weeks.” The survey apparently had been either our only major opportunity to help shape this core or flimsy evidence to justify changes the new director already had planned. His e-mail did assure us that “the program is not proposing or adopting a single pedagogy for all sections”; he merely was dictating 70 percent of what we would teach.