Healing the Crisis of Isolation in Higher Ed

On today’s show, we’re flipping the script. Producer Sara Gabler interviews Monday host, Douglas Haynes, about his new book, Teaching Toward Slow Hope: Place-Based Learning in College and Beyond.  If you listen to this show regularly, you know that Haynes is a Professor of English and cares deeply about the state of higher education in Wisconsin and beyond. His book is an ode to the hopeful and resilient educational practices at work across the Midwest in places like UW-Madison, UW-Milwaukee, UW-Oshkosh, Northland College, and Kalamazoo Valley Community College. 

As college students experience rising rates of mental health disorders, food and financial insecurity, and eco-anxiety, some educators are turning to place-based learning to prepare students for a changing world. Whether through urban mapping projects, culinary and food share programs, or novel interdisciplinary outdoor learning cohorts, the classes Haynes’ profiles are prioritizing deep listening, reciprocity, collaboration, and embodied cognition. And they’re successful and popular. 

Haynes shares anecdotes from his research into the five place-based learning projects in the book and how they are changing students’ lives by reducing the separation between education and ordinary life, combining disciplines from the humanities to the sciences, centering Indigenous knowledges, and taking students emotional needs as seriously as their intellectual ones. Contrary to the extractive model of education which treats students like consumers and parades AI as the next horizon, place based learning is human-centered and teaches students the crucial skills of relationship building, resilience, and self-efficacy. 

Teaching Toward Slow Hope: Place-Based Learning in College and Beyond will be published tomorrow by Johns Hopkins University Press. 

Douglas Haynes teaches environmental humanities, creative nonfiction and poetry writing at the University of Wisconsin–Oshkosh. He’s also written a poetry collection called Last Word and a nonfiction exploration of inequality and the climate crisis called Every Day We Live Is the Future: Surviving in a City of Disasters, about two Nicaraguan families’ quests to reinvent their lives in Managua, one of the world’s most disaster-prone cities.

Featured image of the cover of Teaching Toward Slow Hope.

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