Worlding – CULTURE/PEDAGOGY/BELONGING

August 29, 2026August 29, 2026

Why Students Can’t Simply “Choose” Engagement

David Trend

In recent years campuses everywhere have been reporting alarming levels of absenteeism and underperformance. It’s certainly something I hear a lot from colleagues at UC Irvine, many of whom are left scratching their heads about exact causes. And of course, it’s typical to lay the blame on students rather than anything relating to instruction or the university itself. Affect theory can help in finding better answers.

Let’s start with how faculty talk about engagement. The typical focus is nearly always on learners themselves. Students choose to scroll or skip class. They take shortcuts or use AI. Of course these behaviors frustrate educators. But they are little more than symptoms of what’s really going on. Most learners have studied hard to get into college and borrow heavily to remain there. The vast majority want to do the work, care about the material, and value courses. But they still can’t bring themselves to fully function. They may show up, take notes, say the right things, and yet still feel nothing. That is not simply a decision. It ‘s a mental state. And often a defensive one.

Classrooms operate as affective machines, creating a vast array of feelings and physical reactions in students. While many educators blame educational problems on motivation or attention lapses, they in fact stem from the systemic creation of negative affect by policiesof the kind critiqued in these pages. Meritocratic institutions produce conditions of “affective scarcity,” in which success, recognition, and belonging are limited resources to be fought for individually rather than collectively. Learners internalize beliefs that their struggles stem from personal deficits and nothing else. The resulting shame is so normalized that failures become quietly accepted, making studentsagents of their own oppression. They focus on improving themselves, measuring their success through performance metrics, and aligningwith institutional standards. Today’s pervasive culture of mistrust adds to the degradation of students’ learning experiences. Learners are monitored by LMSs tracking online behavior, exam proctoring software, and AI-detection algorithms presuming dishonesty.

Busy faculty can miss these subtleties because they read behavior as a transparent matter. They suspect that students procrastinate because they don’t care. Missing class means they must be lazy. An anxious appearance signals fragility. AI use is simply cheating. While these interpretations may make a certain kind of sense, they can misinterpret the learner’s internal experience. Students don’t simply react in the moment. Rather they anticipate the classroom, act on their fears, prepare for potential outcomes. Their bodies react when instruction generates anxiety and defensive reactions, often in unconscious ways.

Freud called education an “impossible profession.” In saying this, he didn’t mean that that education is ineffective. Freud was describing the often unknown and uncontrollable outcomes of learning encounters, many of which aren’t fully transparent to students themselves. This means that faculty can’t always know how students will react to their teaching.^[i] Learners don’t begin courses as blank slates. They arrive with minds preloaded with prior experiences of judgment. Add to this the current mood of campuses today (exhaustion, surveillance, competition) along with the uncertainty of the world outside, and it’s clear that for many students there is no way to see learning as an invitation. Many see college as a test of their worth. A term like “motivation” hardly can account for all of this in suggesting that students simply need more desire to learn. What learners actually require is less fear and risk of failure.

July 31, 2026July 31, 2026

Present But Absent: The Affective Disconnect

David Trend

What kind of problem stays visible for years and still has no name? The sorting machinery of merit accounts for part of it, and the refusals that machinery provokes account for more. Something still lingers in a room after both have finished explaining themselves. This chapter looks at the roots of the missing vocabulary, the background issues beneath the disconnect. Faculty notice it first as an odd kind of restlessness. Students seem distracted, but not in typical ways. They’re present in the room but emotionally absent. There’s an undercurrent in the group dynamic, which lingers despite best efforts. When asked about their feelings, students report being stressed or preoccupied, but nothing quite describes what’s going on.

At issue is something more fundamental in the culture of higher education. On one level, it comes from a mismatch between who students are and the character of the institutions they inhabit. Gone are days of carefree learners confident that college was a ticket to a better life. Today’s student population finds itself on contested terrain, while often juggling a myriad of responsibilities in addition to studies, facing a future in which technological change and attitudes towards higher education itself present novel uncertainties.^[i] The National Institutes of Health has further documented how intersecting factors of financial insecurity, political turbulence, and doubts about college are wreaking havoc on student mental health^{^[ii]}

Shifting demographics tell much of the story. Nearly half of all learners now work full or part-time while at college, often caring for family members or dependents, while struggling to finance tuition and fees. Besides these responsibilities, this new population is older, more diverse, and predominantly female. Yet for its part, the university has remained relatively unchanged, it’s teaching practices, student expectations, and administrative policies mired in habit and institutional inertia. This dynamic creates forms of emotional dissonance in the learner experience of higher education. Feelings of inadequacy and disconnection grow more common among individuals, while also fostering a culture of collective exhaustion and alienation. Because the structural effects of the resulting “affective economies” don’t easily translate into conventional metrics, they are often misinterpreted as performance deficits or resistance, as discussed in the last chapter.^[iii]

None of this is accidental. Campuses are functioning much as they were designed, many clinging to the status quo in the name of standards and tradition. Meanwhile, schools are sustaining an emotional/affective atmosphere that today’s learners find increasingly hard to tolerate.^[iv] Colleges founded to educate young men from privileged backgrounds were built on traditional pedagogies and power structures. As student populations diversified, these feeling-structures were slow to change (if they changed at all), resulting in forms of exclusion and discomfort for anyone not fitting in. The psychological toll now seen in campus counseling centers is but one indication of the growing numbers of students who feel like outsiders on their own campus.^[v] Recognizing this disconnect means taking a closer look at what happens in classrooms, as well as perceptions of how a putatively “normal” student experience is depleting an entire generation of learners.

June 25, 2026June 25, 2026

The SAT Measures Money Not Merit

David Trend

In recent weeks, more than 1400 University of California faculty signed a petition to reinstate the ACT and SAT, starting with a math exam for STEM applicants. Humanities faculty soon followed and the system’s Academic Senate began a review. The commotion started with a UC San Diego report showing entering students had been testing at a middle school level since 2020. The numbers are genuine and the worry is sincere. But the conclusion is where the trouble begins. A faculty panic over a three hour exam is being framed as a return to rigor, and it plays well in the press as a cultural symbol to reassure nervous professors and administrators that student difficulties can be remedied by resurrecting an old barrier.

The promise of relief rests upon an illusion. The SAT has never been merely a measure of academic ability. Rather it was a tool used to categorize the varying experiences of children throughout their lives into one numerical value that represented “merit.” Removing this one factor allowed for more diverse forms of measuring achievement, such as course work completed by each student, all four years of grades, the students’ environment or community context, and examples of how much the student learned through time. The plan to reinstate the test would be detrimental to this progress and would obscure an expansive demographic disaster as a simplistic morality tale with a single factor. Like most single-issue panics concerning education do, this story is clean and well defined but misleading. It confuses the obstacle for the structure behind it.

What do all of these tests really measure? SAT scores are essentially a reflection of how U.S. schools are structured, geographically located, funded, and how unequal students’ access is to higher-level courses. While the SAT does not produce racial inequity, it does launder racial inequity. It takes the existing social structure and creates an arbitrary numerical measurement that can be interpreted as if there were some objective basis for those numbers. A student’s household income affects their ability to perform on the SAT at virtually every point along the way. Wealthy families can afford to purchase private tutors, prep courses, study guides, professional guidance services and most importantly time; something working class families cannot afford. Data from Brookings Institute reveal that the black/white score differential has remained relatively consistent for nearly two decades, with the exception of a slight decline (from .91 SD to .79 SD). In reality, the apparent proof of individual merit that exists in many people’s minds demonstrates little more than an intergenerational transfer of advantage. However, the one thing that the test clearly demonstrates is the infrastructure surrounding a child since he/she entered kindergarten.

May 2, 2026May 3, 2026

Flipping the Script: Using AI to Motivate and Inspire

David Trend

Every new information technology has sparked fresh panic about the future of teaching. Plato warned that writing itself would destroy memory and learning. The printing press set off fears that books would undermine scholarly authority. Thomas Edison said that motion pictures would replace schoolbooks. Radio, television, and personal computers each drew the same anxious forecasts, followed in the 2000s by a wave of predictions that online courses would empty out campuses. None of it happened. Each technology reshaped instruction while leaving the teacher-student relationship intact.

Generative AI has now joined the parade, and once again the loudest voices are asking the wrong question. The issue isn’t whether AI will replace faculty. It’s how instruction must adapt so that the human work stays at the center of teaching.

A good place to start is a recent Forbes interview with Ben Gomes, Google’s Chief Technologist for Learning and Sustainability, in which he made one simple point. The hardest problem in education is motivation. And it’s a problem AI will never solve. “Technology can improve how you learn and the details of it,” Gomes put it, “but the why you learn is a very human thing.”^[1] That sentence should sit at the heart of every conversation about reforming college instruction. AI can deliver content, flag errors, generate practice exercises, and personalize feedback faster than any human. None of that addresses the prior question of why a student would bother engaging in the first place.

Gomes grounded the point in a lifetime of watching learners. He observed that high-achieving people almost never credit a book or a tool for unlocking their potential. They credit a person. A teacher who said something, who treated them differently, who made them feel that the work of learning mattered. Once that feeling took hold, the student could run forward on their own, and the tools became accelerators. But the ignition was always human. Decades of educational research echo the finding, with thousands of studies placing teacher-student relationships and instructor clarity among the strongest predictors of learning, well ahead of any technology.^[2] If motivation comes from relationships rather than from content delivery, then any reform that pushes instructors further from their students is moving the wrong direction.

March 3, 2026March 3, 2026

For Ulysses

This was from the day Ulysses and I drove down to UCI to close up his office, a bittersweet moment that still stays with me. He had just retired after nearly three decades, stepping away, as it happened, at almost the exact moment the art world was finally giving him his due, with a major retrospective making its way in 2022 from Philadelphia to the Hammer. There was something very Ulysses about that timing: unhurried, unbothered by recognition that arrived on its own schedule. I can still hear Alice Coltrane’s “My Favorite Things” playing as we looked over all that history that afternoon.

Those years at UCI were just one chapter in a remarkable career. Born in Los Angeles in 1946, Ulysses had been making video art since 1972, when the medium was brand new, picking up a Portapak when most artists hadn’t yet imagined what moving images could do in the hands of someone determined to tell different stories. Working as what he termed a “video griot,” he drew on oral storytelling traditions, structuring his work around music, poetic recitation, and dynamic performance to interrogate race, representation, and the power embedded in popular culture.

Part of what made him singular was how early he grasped what networked media could become. During the 1980s he worked with the Electronic Café, a grassroots arts group pioneering collaborative telecommunications that connected communities through interactive video, audio, and shared screens, accomplishing this decades before Skype and Zoom. Through his conceptual art band Othervisions, he explored the relationship between spoken word and lyrical content, and as artistic director of Othervisions Studio he brought that same Afrofuturist sensibility to an interdisciplinary practice that kept evolving for fifty years. He joined UCI in 1993 and spent nearly three decades shaping generations of students who went on to cite him as a foundational influence.

In the years that followed we got in the habit of having breakfast at Pann’s near his place every few weeks, as Ulysses became a regular part of my life. The staff adored him and always greeted him by name. I think the idyllic atmosphere of that diner was a kind of antidote to the exhausting ritual of dialysis that took up so much of his last few years. As we were sitting in Pann’s just a couple of days before he passed, he looked across the table and remarked, “This place. All these different kinds of people, together, getting along, in times like these. It’s so wonderful.” Never one to complain very much, Ulysses would often muse this way. He was one of the most relentlessly positive people I knew and at the same time one of the most brilliant. Celebrated in recent years for his visionary understanding of media and politics, Ulysses had that rare gift of intuiting novel ideas. As I was dropping him back at home that day, a different kind of mood hung in the air. Call it a premonition or something else, but I felt I had to tell Ulysses how much his friendship meant to me, both now and across the decades. Looking back now, I realize that he had been extremely frail that day. We even spoke about it briefly and he said he planned more walking. I guess I thought he would bounce back yet one more time.

February 17, 2026February 17, 2026

The Assessment Crisis is Bigger than AI

The last few months have seen my campus scrambling to get back to in-person assessment and to reopen testing centers. Like many universities that quietly had deemphasized such exams during the COVID years, now at UC Irvine there is rising faculty demand to quickly change course. Many worry about the validity of take-home and online assessments, as campus officials search for rooms or even build new ones. Meanwhile, already stressed students feel increasingly desperate over high-stakes tests that can make or break academic success. While the crisis seems recent at UCI, what’s really happening predates the rise of generative AI and won’t be fixed with more exam rooms.

Much of higher education now sees online assessment as an arms race it can’t win, with over 150 institutions planning to end it this year. Earlier this month, the Law School Admission Council (LSAC) announced t it would return the LSAT to in-person testing by summer 2026, citing “security concerns,” “score inflation,” and “the misuse of technology to facilitate cheating.”^[1] All Ivy League schools also are reverting to standardized tests for admissions after eliminating them during the last decade. Complicating matters further is the reality of cash-strapped schools facing infrastructure bottlenecks because they’ve repurposed or sold off testing centers.^[2] Driving this frantic backtracking is the logical but incorrect belief that assessment is losing meaning at a time when ChatGPT can generate answers in a few seconds. Hence the current retreat to blue books, testing rooms, and internet-free conditions.

“Generative AI did not create assessment issues. It revealed them,” according to Emma Ransome of Birmingham City University.^[3] Ransome explains that traditional measures like timed exams, standardized tasks, and recall-based tests historically have done poorly in evaluating skills universities claim to instill such as critical thinking, ethical judgement, and synthesizing ideas. Generative AI has made the disconnect between what is being measured and what is being taught even more apparent.

January 25, 2026February 2, 2026

AI Thrives where Instruction Falters

Old-fashioned instruction based on the recitation of facts is driving students to AI tools like ChatGPT.^[1] When learning is reduced to scores and “answers,” students naturally seek the most efficient paths to get them This has become especially common in courses relying on grade coercion and threats of failure to drive motivation. Such effects of teacher-centered instruction are particularly harmful to the growing numbers of students working while in school or juggling other responsibilities.

The equity side of this is hardly is incidental at a time when AI competence has become widely recognized as a vital job skill and an key component of civic literacy. Institutions that fear and discourage AI are contributing to growing knowledge gap between those with the intellectual tools to critically assess truth claims and others more likely to accept directives from authoritarian figures.

Not helping matters are latent attitudes that cast suspicion on today’s increasingly diverse population of college students. Amid a rising moral panic within the U.S. academia, recent surveys show an alarming 78 percent of U.S. faculty believing that cheating is on the rise and that AI is to blame. According to Beth McMurtie in the Chronicle of Higher Ed, “Virtually all of those surveyed — 95 percent — fear that students will become over-reliant on these tools. And 83 percent think it will decrease students’ attention spans.” ^[2] Early in the 2020s a torrent of news reports warned of an “epidemic” of dishonesty in online learning, with some surveys showing over 90 percent educators believing cheating occurred more in distance education than in-person instruction.^[3] New technologies often have stoked such fears, in this instance building on the distrust many faculty hold toward students, some of it racially inflected.^{^[4]} Closer examination of the issue has revealed that much of the worry came from faculty with little direct knowledge of the digital classroom.

All of this is fueling an academic culture that drives students to seek answers at any cost while simultaneously criminalizing unauthorized methods for finding them. Behind this mindset is what can only be described as a commodified approach to knowledge as a precious and rare commodity that can only be exchanged regulated ways. While institutions rarely want to admit this explicitly, the message is that only certain kind of people can create and circulate wisdom.

December 28, 2025December 28, 2025

Outsourcing Effort: How AI Affects the Pleasure of Learning

A quiet transformation is taking place in higher education. Students now turn to artificial intelligence not only for answers but for motivation. At the same time, a new generation of effort-sensitive technologies promises to monitor engagement, track persistence, and infer whether learners are truly trying. These systems are beginning to redefine what colleges count as effort and, by extension, what they count as learning. The goals behind these tools are understandable. Designers hope adaptive systems will make education more equitable and responsive by giving students insight into their habits and struggles. At Carnegie Mellon University, for example, Conrad Borchers created Effort-Sensitive AI for Learning to help students visualize their study patterns before frustration sets in. The intention is reflection rather than surveillance.

But once activity is translated into data, the data begin to influence the behavior they claim to measure. A brief pause can register as disengagement. Rapid typing can signal focus. Students eventually realize that unseen systems are interpreting their actions and may begin performing for algorithmic approval instead of thinking for themselves. What used to be an exchange between learner and teacher becomes a loop between student and machine. This shift matters because effort is no longer understood through experience but through metrics. In a traditional classroom, effort lived in rereading, revising, and wrestling with ideas. In digital spaces, it gets recorded as keystrokes, session length, and completion rates. These numbers are useful but incomplete. They capture what is visible and overlook what is internal. Confusion, insight, doubt, and breakthrough moments rarely leave a trace.

Yet once metrics appear on dashboards, they start to define achievement. Courses are compared. Instructors are ranked. Automated interventions are triggered. What cannot be measured slowly stops being valued. Md. Kamrul Hasan has described this shift as the loss of the joy of effort. Writing in the Annals of Medicine and Surgery, he argues that learning’s pleasure comes from its difficulty. Struggle activates the brain’s reward system and strengthens motivation. When AI tools deliver instant solutions, that developmental cycle gets bypassed. Hasan calls the result cognitive outsourcing, a quiet erosion disguised as progress.

November 29, 2025November 29, 2025

Dismantling the Academic Hunger Games

Many of higher education’s conflicting values have to do with competition, as the promise of opportunity often collides with the reality of failure. This dilemma has driven a shift in learner attitudes, with many young people viewing the college experience through a lens focused on grades, rankings, and future earnings potential. The ramifications of this shift extend far beyond individual campuses, resonating throughout society and shaping the fabric of our collective future. The intensification of competition in higher education, viewed by some as the great equalizer, has become a powerful engine of stratification. Such competition, often unacknowledged in institutional rhetoric, serves to magnify existing disparities, creating a system where success becomes increasingly elusive for those facing challenges and disproportionately attainable for those with abundant resources and support. ^[i]

Consider First Gen learners, navigating a labyrinth of academic expectations and cultural norms sometimes with little familial guidance. For these learners, the playing field may not be level. While some of their peers might seamlessly transition into campus life, buoyed by generations of accumulated social capital, First Gen students can encounter unfamiliar customs and unspoken rules. Even though present throughout academia, these dynamics get worse at elite institutions.^[ii]

The tragic reality is that many learners fail without fully comprehending the forces arrayed against them. They may have earned their place through merit, their admission apparent proof of their potential, yet find themselves struggling against invisible currents. These are not isolated cases of individual shortcomings but rather symptoms of a system ill-equipped to support the diverse needs of a changing student body. Richard Arum and Josipa Roksa’s work in Academically Adrift underscores learning losses occurring among students, suggesting a broad failure to engage and educate learners effectively.^[iii] Their research raises alarming questions about the true value of a college education in its current form and the epistemic damage that may be occurring for learners and the broader society.

October 29, 2025October 29, 2025

Never Good Enough: Learning in a Culture of Perfection

With the start of classes this fall, it’s become increasingly clear that college students find themselves caught in a perfect storm of social pressures, political upheaval, and economic uncertainty, all conspiring to transform the college experience from a time of intellectual growth and self-discovery into a crucible of anxiety and self-doubt. This transformation, while affecting learners across the board, has cast a particularly heavy shadow over those already grappling with systemic inequities and material difficulties. Indeed, the modern university campus, with its manicured lawns and ivy-covered buildings, has become a battleground where students wage war not just against challenging curricula, but against stress and the ever-present specter of failure.

Gone are the days when a solid academic performance and a modicum of extracurricular involvement were sufficient to secure a bright future. In their place, learners increasingly feel expected to excel in every conceivable arena, from maintaining a stellar GPA to cultivating a curated social media presence, all while navigating the intimidating waters of an increasingly competitive job market. This pressure cooker environment disproportionately affects students from under-resources schools, who may lack the financial and social capital to keep pace with their more privileged peers.

This pursuit of perfection is fueled, in no small part, by the ubiquitous presence of social media in students’ lives. Platforms like Instagram and LinkedIn have been transformed from mere communication tools into virtual stages where young people feel compelled to perform their best selves 24/7. Every achievement, no matter how minor, must be broadcast to the world, while moments of vulnerability or failure are carefully hidden from view. This constant comparison to one’s peers, or rather, to carefully scripted versions of their peers, has created a toxic environment where learners feel they can never measure up, no matter how much they achieve.^[i] For those already struggling with issues of belonging or imposter syndrome, this digital landscape can exacerbate feelings of inadequacy and alienation.

September 26, 2025October 29, 2025

The Unwritten Rules of College

The syllabus looks simple enough. Standard language about learning objectives, assignments, and grading policies. Nothing obviously threatening or biased. But beneath those neutral-sounding lines is a web of taken-for-granted assumptions favoring some learners over others. This is the realm of what scholars term the “hidden curriculum” to describe the unspoken rules, norms, and background knowledge that institutions use but never explicitly teach.^[i] The hidden curriculum works through everyday academic practices, such as expecting learners to use formal language in essays, prioritizing, punctuality, and meeting deadlines, and assuming learners have access to quiet spaces for studying. Students who arrive at college already fluent in these unspoken codes (typically those from privileged backgrounds) navigate faculty expectations with ease. Their success appears natural, even inevitable. Meanwhile, anyone lacking this insider knowledge struggles against invisible barriers, their difficulties rarely attributed to systemic flaws.

Take something as basic as class participation. Most instructors value learners who speak up quickly, offer spontaneous comments, and keep discussion moving. These expectations make sense until one realizes how they privilege a narrow set of behaviors. Students who need more time to process information, prefer to write their thoughts first, or engage best through one-on-one exchanges may appear “disengaged” when they are actually participating in ways the structure of the class doesn’t recognize. The hidden curriculum turns learning differences into markers of academic deficiency. The insidious nature of this system lies in its ability to mask privilege as merit and to personalize any successes or failures. When affluent learners do well, their achievements get credited to individual talent, hard work, or “natural ability.” When an under-resourced student struggles, the blame likewise falls on their own lack of motivation, preparation, or ability. This dynamic effectively launders systemic advantages through the language of personal responsibility, making structural inequities appear like natural outcomes.

August 30, 2025August 30, 2025

American Anti-Intellectualism Fuels the New War on College

American higher education finds itself under siege, facing unprecedented political attacks that threaten its fundamental mission and autonomy. What makes these assaults particularly devastating is not just their intensity, but the fertile ground of public sentiment that has enabled them to take root and flourish. The convergence of deep-seated anti-intellectual currents with a dramatic erosion of trust in universities has created the perfect conditions for opportunistic politicians to weaponize higher education as a cultural and political battleground.

Once seen as sites of personal and social betterment, universities and colleges nationwide now struggle with a profound crisis of confidence. This shift in perception is hardly anecdotal. Recent surveys reveal that but 36 percent in the U.S. feel positively about higher education, reflecting serious concerns over the institution’s efficacy and fairness.^[i] Moreover, a growing partisan divide complicates the erosion of trust. While 59 percent of Democrats express confidence in higher education, a staggering 81 percent of Republican voters now view the institution unfavorably. This chasm speaks volumes about the politicization of education in America, with college increasingly seen as a battleground for antagonistic ideologies.^[ii]

A pragmatic shift in educational preferences complements this rift. Mirroring student attitudes is the reality that most Americans now regard trade schools and vocational training as equivalent or superior to four-year institutions in delivering practical education. This pivot reflects changing educational values and an indictment of the entire enterprise of higher education. The growing appeal of alternative educational paths suggests a fundamental reevaluation of what constitutes valuable knowledge and skills in today’s rapidly changing job market. The roots of this mistrust are multifaceted, extending beyond mere economic calculations to encompass broader socio-political undercurrents. Often associated with privilege and intellectual elitism, higher education increasingly is viewed through a lens of class-based suspicion.

July 31, 2025July 31, 2025

Emotional Intelligence in the Classroom

Higher education has a problem with feelings. Walk into any classroom and you’ll witness the elaborate dance of affective suppression that defines modern education. Students learn to hide frustration behind blank stares, to swallow anxiety whole, to perform engagement even when drowning in confusion. Faculty become adept at sidestepping emotions until they become “disruptive,” at which point they’re quickly pathologized or punished. This affective hide-and-seek isn’t merely unfortunate. It’s academically devastating in ways that most educators are only beginning to understand.

The recognition that emotion fundamentally shapes learning has deep roots in psychological research, though it took decades to gain educational traction. Howard Gardner’s groundbreaking theory of multiple intelligences, introduced in the 1980s, challenged narrow definitions of cognitive ability by identifying “personal intelligences” as distinct forms of human capacity. These included both intrapersonal intelligence (understanding oneself) and interpersonal intelligence (understanding others), categories that opened space for recognizing emotional and social skills as more than personality traits.^[i] Gardner’s framework provided crucial legitimacy for educators who suspected that success required more than traditional academic skills.

June 27, 2025October 29, 2025

Resistance is Not Futile

The interpretation of student resistance has undergone dramatic transformation over the past century, reflecting broader shifts in how we understand human behavior, learning, and institutional power. This evolution reveals as much about our own assumptions and blind spots as it does about student behavior itself. Historically, educational institutions approached resistance through a distinctly moralistic lens. Students who failed to comply were seen as suffering from character defects and thereby lacking discipline, respect, or proper upbringing. This perspective, rooted in patriarchal authority structures and commodified approaches to knowledge, positioned educators as moral arbiters whose job was to correct wayward youth through punishment, shame, and rigid behavioral expectations.^[i] Resistance was seen as willful disobedience requiring forceful correction rather than thoughtful analysis.

The rise of behaviorism in the mid-20th century brought a different but equally reductive approach. Resistance became reframed as a technical problem representing a failure of stimulus-response systems that could be solved through better classroom management techniques. B.F. Skinner’s operant conditioning principles dominated educational psychology, suggesting that resistant behaviors could be eliminated through appropriate schedules of reinforcement and punishment.^[ii] This scientific veneer made the approach seem more sophisticated, but it still treated resistant learners as broken mechanisms needing repair rather than human beings with complex inner lives and legitimate concerns about their educational experiences.

May 29, 2025May 29, 2025

Epidemic Loneliness

From Degrees of Difficulty: The Challenge of Equity in College Teaching by David Trend, now free of charge from Worlding Books

In the wake of the U.S. Surgeon General’s advisory on the “Epidemic of Loneliness and Isolation” in America, college campuses have emerged as critical focal points for this growing crisis.[i] More concerning still have been findings that loneliness doesn’t affect all learners equally, with some demographics often shouldering a disproportionate weight of social disconnection. While overall numbers have surged, with over 65 percent of college students reporting feeling “very lonely” in the past year, these aggregate figures obscure significant disparities.[ii] First-Gen learners, students of color, low-income, and LGBTQ+ students consistently report experiencing loneliness at markedly higher rates. Some may find themselves in environments where few others share their identities or life experiences, leading to feelings of otherness and disconnection.

Here again, money pressures can exacerbate matters. Students juggling multiple jobs often have less time for social activities and may feel out of place among those without such responsibilities. This is especially true on college campuses, where social life frequently revolves around activities that come with a price tag. The Surgeon General’s advisory notes that “social connection is generally not something we can do alone and not something that is accessible equitably.”[iii] In this way –– and contrary popular stereotypes ––collegiate environments are especially prone to stress and isolation for students. Ongoing racial injustice, political tensions surrounding LGBTQ+ rights, and increasing polarization can create environments where students fear they must be vigilant, watch what what they say, or even conceal aspects of their identities in social situations. This persistent state of guardedness can impede the forging of deep, authentic connections.

April 25, 2025April 29, 2025

Inclusive Teaching 2.0: The Challenge of Equity in Anti-DEI Times

These days American universities find themselves at a peculiar crossroads. With the stroke of a pen, federal actions have swept away diversity, equity, and inclusion programs at institutions dependent on government funding. Yet in this moment of apparent retreat, one might discern not an ending but a beginning, creating the potential for a more profound transformation in how we understand the art of teaching itself.

equity, diversity, inclusion, DEI, university, teaching, learning, students, learners

The moment demands reinvention, not retreat. For decades now, inclusive teaching has been quietly revolutionizing classrooms, operating not by privileging some students over others, but by ensuring all students can thrive. The principle, though deceptively simple, borders on the radical: every learner deserves access to tools that support their academic growth. This principle can guide institutions toward a universal model of excellence, grounded in research, focused on outcomes, and aligned with the values of higher education.

Never has the need been greater. Today’s college student defies easy categorization. The stereotypical image of young adults attending full-time classes on residential campuses has given way to something far more complex, with students juggling work commitments, family responsibilities, and extended degree timelines to manage costs.^[1] This demographic shift demands nothing less than a pedagogical evolution, one that acknowledges students’ multifaceted lives while maintaining academic rigor.

Enter Universal Design for Learning (UDL), an evidence-based framework offering a compelling vision for the future. UDL is defined as “a framework developed to improve and optimize teaching and learning for all people based on scientific insights into how humans learn.”^[2] Grounded in cognitive neuroscience and educational research, UDL principles encourage educators to present information in multiple ways, offer students various methods for demonstrating understanding, and foster engagement through real-world relevance and autonomy.

March 30, 2025March 30, 2025

The Other Campus Gender Matter

Recent months have witnessed heightened gender-related conflicts in higher education. From debates over transgender athletes to challenges against Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) initiatives, a narrative portraying universities as ideological battlegrounds has gained traction. Political figures, including Vice President J.D. Vance, have amplified this perspective, saying “universities are the enemy” as sites of indoctrination rather than education.^[1]

Beneath these controversies lies a significant but often unacknowledged factor: women’s dramatic ascendance in higher education. The gender gap in college enrollment has reached historic proportions, with female-identified learners constituting approximately 60% of U.S. college students.^[2] This unprecedented shift, a cornerstone of women’s empowerment and presence in the workforces, appears to have become a focal point for those seeking to reshape or constrain the university system.

The gender gap in education begins well before college, with girls outperforming boys in reading and writing during elementary years and making up 60 percent of the top students graduating from high school.^[3] In the 1990s, some universities began giving boys extra points on their applications, owing to concerns that students might avoid gender imbalanced schools. While federal law never sanctioned this kind of affirmative action, a Title IX lawsuit filed against the University of Georgia in 1999 effectively ended the practice.^[4]

The historical context illuminates the significance of this transformation. Before the mid-20th century men made up 80% of college students.^[5] Women’s integration into universities in substantial numbers, accelerating after World War II, represented a profound social change. This evolution challenged established gender norms, created pathways to professional careers for women, and contributed substantially to their economic and social independence.^[6]

The increasing presence of women in higher education stands in direct opposition to reactionary ideologies evident in current university critiques. The Heritage Foundation’s “Project 2025,” with its emphasis on traditional family structures and gender roles, fundamentally conflicts with the educational empowerment of women in contemporary and growing representation in academic leadership.^[7]

February 5, 2025February 5, 2025

Behind the New Diversity Culture Wars

From Degrees of Difficulty: The Challenge of Equity in College Teaching by David Trend, now free of charge from Worlding Books

Underlying current opposition to diversity programs lies the pervasive belief that inequity and bias barely exist in a “post-civil rights, post-feminist” era, and that efforts to redress them have gone too far. This mindset helps explain why, as American universities now face a federal ban on diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) initiatives, a majority of the general public supports eliminating the programs –– with a recent Economist/YouGov poll finding 45% in favor of ending DEI in education over 40% opposed.^[1] Already intense in state legislatures and conservative media, this resistance reflects deeply rooted American ideologies about meritocracy and individualism that clash with efforts to address systemic inequalities in higher education. The resulting political struggle has transformed campus diversity initiatives from administrative policies into flashpoints in America’s culture wars.

The controversies over this are no secret. Recent measures to ban or restrict DEI and the teaching of CRT in educational institutions reflect a longstanding political backlash. Leading up to the November election, 85 anti-DEI bills had been introduced in 28 state legislatures, according to the Chronicle of Higher Education‘s “DEI Legislation Tracker.”^[2] These often broadly worded laws created confusion and fear among educators, while chilling discussions of race, gender, sexual orientation, and disability on campuses.

January 22, 2025February 5, 2025

14 Evidence-Based Teaching Ideas for Academic Equity

From Degrees of Difficulty: The Challenge of Equity in College Teaching by David Trend, forthcoming from Worlding Books

In recent years, the premise of “evidence-based teaching” has emerged as a key strategy in addressing outcome disparities in higher education. Much like evidence-based practices in medicine and social science, this approach draws on empirical research to inform teaching methods, moving beyond practices based on personal experience or intuition. This shift represents a major change in how educators view the art of teaching itself, acknowledging that while intuition has value, it must be balanced with systematic investigation of what actually works in the classroom. The development of evidence-based teaching can be traced to the late 20th century, along with advances in cognitive science and educational psychology. As researchers gained new insights into adult learning and intellectual development, their findings found their way into the university classroom.

The earliest educational research came from simple comparative methods. Researchers typically would divide classes into control and experimental groups, with one cohort receiving standard instruction and the other a modified version. These “split-class” experiments provided the first rigorous evidence that teaching methods could affect learning outcomes significantly. While rudimentary, these early methods established the crucial principle that teaching effectiveness could be measured and improved through systematic study rather than innate talent alone. Educators also relied heavily on pre- and post-testing, administering assessments before and after interventions to measure knowledge gain. Though simple, this proved particularly good for seeing which teaching strategies led to lasting comprehension versus short-term memorization. Besides this, some faculty maintained teaching journals for documenting their own methods and student responses, which later would be shared with others. While lacking the sophistication of conventional educational studies, these varied methods laid the groundwork for an evidence-based teaching movement asserting that teaching effectiveness could be studied and improved.

December 28, 2024February 5, 2025

The Value of Inclusive Teaching

From Degrees of Difficulty: The Challenge of Equity in College Teaching by David Trend, forthcoming from Worlding Books

As awareness grows about the role of structural inequities and systemic biases in student success or failure, many schools are exploring the role of instructional methods and course design in bringing equity to the educational environment. In doing so, institutions are finding emerging teaching practices guided by evidence-based research can broaden learner success. Key to this movement is the practice of inclusive teaching, a pedagogical approach that recognizes the inherent diversity of learners and seeks to accommodate their varying needs. This philosophy is predicated on the understanding that students come from various backgrounds, possess different learning styles, and often face individual challenges in their educational pursuits. In recognizing these forms of diversity, educators can develop strategies catering to the most significant number of learners, ensuring no one is left behind. This also treats classroom diversity as an asset, enriching the learning experience for all students by introducing multiple perspectives and fostering cross-cultural understanding.

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For many faculty like me, the COVID-19 pandemic catalyzed a heightened attention to inclusive principles. The sudden transition to remote learning destabilized my ongoing practices in two significant ways: first, by forcing the adoption of new instructional methods, and second, by making visible latent inequities I hadn’t previously recognized. As mentioned above, this situation led many colleges and universities to scrutinize their teaching approaches and adopt new tools and strategies to enhance fairness, flexibility, and accessibility. The pandemic also highlighted the importance of social-emotional learning and mental health support in education, prompting institutions to integrate these elements into their teaching strategies more fully.