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Breanne Fahs, associate professor of women and gender studies at Arizona State University, has an unusual way to teaching students about defying gender-specific norms. She offers extra credit to all female students who opt not to shave any body hair below the neck, and to male students who shave all of their body hair below the neck. Students must shave (or not shave) throughout a 10-week period and keep a journal related to their experiences. “There’s no better way to learn about societal norms than to violate them and see how people react,” said Fahs in an Arizona State article about her teaching technique. Read more...

The U.S. House of Representatives subcommittee that oversees the budget for the National Endowment for the Humanities on Tuesday proposed legislation to reduce that agency’s funding by more than 5 percent in the coming fiscal year. Read more...

By Asad Haider. In the Ivory Tower, labor organizing is no easy task. Teaching assistants, who have recently unionized at New York University and the University of Connecticut, don’t have factory floors where collective bonds can be readily formed. We’re scattered throughout classrooms spread over vast campuses, each grading for different professors and advisers, with different and often incommensurable working conditions. Read more...

By Justin Reich and Mitchell L. Stevens. When the teacher and poet Taylor Mali declares, “I can make a C+ feel like a Congressional Medal of Honor and an A- feel like a slap in the face,” he testifies to the powerful ways teachers can use emotions to help students learn and grow.  Students -- and their parents -- put a great deal of trust in college educators to use these powers wisely and cautiously. This is why the unfolding debacle of the Facebook emotional contagion experiment should give educators great pause. Read more...

By Carl Straumsheim. A massive open online course instructor was removed from his own course last week -- or was he? As confusion brews among students in the half-finished, suspended MOOC, some observers are asking if the instructor orchestrated a social experiment without permission -- or a farce. Paul-Olivier Dehaye’s three-week course, “Teaching Goes Massive: New Skills Required,” reportedly launched without controversy. Read more...

By Paul Fain. The portion of first-time U.S. students who return to college for a second year has dropped 1.2 percentage points since 2009, according to a report that looks like bad news for the national college completion push. Read more...

By Doug Lederman. This month's edition of The Pulse podcast looks at what's on the horizon in digital learning instruction. In it, Rodney B. Murray, the host of The Pulse, discusses some of the trends in eLearning teaching and technology. He explores the 2014 Horizon Report and trends in pedagogy, among other things. Read more...