Alumni Voices: Adam Golub Writes on High School and College Teaching

Our alumni continually impress us with the work that they do after leaving UT. Today, Ph.D. alumnus Adam Golub, now an associate professor of American Studies at California State University - Fullerton, has published an inspiring and useful essay in Hybrid Pedagogy on how teaching high school prepared him to teach at the college level. We've posted an excerpt below and the full article can be found here.

Teachers in higher education who may be frustrated with an institutional culture that does not always promote formal training or even encourage informal dialogue about pedagogy might helpfully turn to our K-12 colleagues as a resource. The mentoring and instruction I received as a high school teacher provided me with a conceptual vocabulary and a habit of mind with which to approach university teaching and curriculum design. This essay focuses on the pedagogical convergences between secondary and higher education, drawing from my own experience as someone who has taught high school students, college students, and future high school teachers. In the process, I make the case that discussions about pedagogy can constitute a common ground -- a way to bridge the university/secondary divide and engender more productive discourse and collaboration among teachers in both settings. Such dialogue could, I believe, generate more expansive definitions of what teaching means in higher education, definitions that move beyond lecture, discussion, and the use of technology.

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