I’m an adjunct professor of history at Fairfield University in Connecticut who’s moving south to Maryland this summer, where I’ll keep teaching my usual courses, only this time online. My keys skills lie in research and teaching, and my key interests span pretty much everything. Especially interesting to me now, in the professional arena at least, is how to use technology in teaching and research. I took a free course for faculty on this at Fairfield this spring, and put to use several apps in my post-COVID classrooms to good effect. Students much preferred them to Zoom, Zoom, Zoom. I also found it refreshing to read and evaluate Adobe Spark Pages, for instance, over 2,000-word papers. My learning goals for this course are to expand this fresh knowledge about digital technologies in teaching, and to note where the two courses overlap and diverge. Pedagogical theory, of which I read plenty when training to teach high school a while back, interests me much less than practice.
As for professional goals and positions, I wouldn’t say that adjunct is my American dream. But in the end it’s teaching, and I enjoy teaching. So as long as my spouse can pay the mortgage, I may just stick with it and try to get new gigs at Maryland/DC schools. But a specialization in how to teach online is certainly appropriate to the present moment, and could boost me from adjunct to associate adjunct.
In that spirit, here’s a shot of me after my daughter tied up my post-COVID hair a week ago.
