Discipline: Mass Communication
This instructive quote about Death from a philosopher whose name has become associated with, ironically, arguably one of the greatest pleasures of life, eating, might come across as an unconventional start to a journal article. However, such a start has always been my practice as a classroom teacher. With what I perceive as the average college student’s short attention span, I have come to believe that the first two minutes in front of a class is the most crucial, for in these two minutes, one’s listeners are won or lost. One’s listeners are held captive or set free to go on daydreams that have nothing to do with academia.
We likewise have an obligation to our students to open their eyes to issues outside their realm of experience, a move from private problems to public ones, to use C. Wright Mills’ (1991) bifurcation, as it were. While students cannot be blamed for being trapped in the empirical, teachers must be held to a higher standard: we can and should be blamed if we are to be trapped in the theoretical. It is our responsibility as educators to pave the road from abstract theory to concrete application.
It is my and the Editorial Board’s belief that innovative pedagogical and andragogical techniques exist everywhere. It is with this belief that the Editorial Board and I invite our fellow educators to contribute to future editions of Teacher’s Corner.
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