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An interesting approach to the way an institution's design affects the kind of education it delivers. Considering Kenyon's ongoing consideration of general education requirements, I'll exerpt here the last paragraph as a prompt for discussion: "General education is often thought of as a means to expose students to a broad range of "essential" knowledge and to provide a historical context for the culture in which they live. These are valid, but insufficient, goals. The purpose of general education should be to produce graduates who are skilled in communication, imbued with quantitative reasoning skills, instinctively collaborative, inherently transdisciplinary in their approach to problems, and engaged in their local and global communities-broadly educated individuals with an informed perspective on the problems of the 21st century and the integrative abilities to solve them."

The way you state policies and practices on a syllabus communicates quite a bit about the classroom environment you're trying to shape. In this column, Mark Sample talks about revising his accessibility statement to best communicate his goals of academic success and inclusion.

A TED talk from Kenyon alum John Green about the ways online learning communities support lifelong curiosity.

In the summer of 2015, from July 26 to August 2, a partnership of 23 liberal arts institutions will host ILiADS, the Institute for Liberal Arts Digital Scholarship, at Hamilton College in Clinton, New York. ILiADS offers participants two ways to engage the community of liberal arts practitioners and pedagogues: a team- and project-based approach and a more traditional conference structure.

For better or for worse, email is a vital communication channel in Kenyon's culture, but not in pre-college teenage culture. How do you address this gap?

This is an interesting discussion about vulnerability, trust, and power in the classroom (and outside it). It comes from the Connected Courses community, which focuses on teaching courses with a large public online component, but the discussion is applicable to any class where students are asked to take risks. It's an hour long, but well worth it. (It's also an interesting case study in bringing material from the backchannel into the foreground.)

Kenyon is part of the "Turning the Tide" initiative, which aims to change college admissions by prioritizing community engagement and depth over breadth of extracurricular achievements. If this changes our student body, how will it change our classrooms?

"When the same source always sends bad news, or phrases messages only in the imperative case, it becomes tempting to tune it out." How do your course or departmental emails measure against that standard?

How do joint enterprise, mutual engagement and shared repertoire play out in your classes? (This is from the GLCA/GLAA Center for Teaching and Learning, which solicits your contributions.)

Moving from the use of open educational resources (OERs) to an "open educational practice" helps students to understand themselves as knowledge creators in a community, and not just as information consumers. This article focuses on class projects to edit Wikipedia articles, which is only one example of an open educational practice, but an easy one to start with.

Xavier University of Louisiana uses the "deliberative discussion" framework in a public speaking class to facilitate community conversations about current political issues.

Peter Rutkoff reflects on his Deweyan philosophy of teaching and the way it is enacted in community-based learning in an article for the GLCA/GLAA Consortium for Teaching and Learning.

Might be a good template for communicating with your students about preparing for the end of the year.

We include a question about what the student could do to improve their learning in a course in our mid-semester GIFT sessions, but there are more explicit ways to think about how classes function as communities of discourse.

What if you asked students to answer an open-ended question as a way of taking attendance? "When we trace back the meaning of attend through Old French (atendre) to its Latin root (attendere), we can see that when we attend, we are "stretching our mind toward" something. The attendance question gets students to pay attention through inviting them to stretch their minds toward a question which has no right answer."

"From love letters to pen pals, families, relationships, friendships, professional and creative collaborations, and the brilliant sudden intimacy between new acquaintances, correspondence over distance has sustained us for ages uncounted." Hopeful thoughts about pen pals, chain letters, and "writer's letters" from Sean Michael Morris.

"What does it look like to do this kind of work online? How do we walk our virtual campuses to address accessibility concerns? Where do we hold the necessary town hall meetings to address hard questions about inclusivity?"

Terrific, concrete examples of activities you can use to help form classroom communities. I appreciate the framing that these are not necessarily one-and-done "icebreakers" but might be repeatable through the course.

Francis Su delivered this address as the MAA Haimo Teaching Award Lecture. In it, he talks about the role which grace plays in teaching.

Suggests some different broad approaches to preparing students for civic engagement--and mentions a few pitfalls to watch out for.