When I was a university student, way back when, I would go to the section in the library that held the collection related to my discipline and run my eyes across the hundreds of volumes, some thin, some thick, that lined the shelves. It seemed to me that if I hunkered down and spent a few weeks that could possibly stretch into months, I would be able to at least scan every one of them. It seemed like a body of work that I could get my head around. If I wanted to venture slightly outside my field, I could rifle through the library’s card catalogue and feel like I had a grasp of the volume of material that existed out there.
But of course, that was before the internet changed everything. Now, the most precisely worded search will yield hundreds of thousands of results, and we still have a sense that there is much, much more out there. More than any one person could even scan in a lifetime. Add to this the certainty that there’s more new knowledge being generated by the second.
We live in paradoxical times. On the one hand, the access to information has never been easier. On the other, most of us feel that we can never catch up with it all.
Yet, as educators, there is no getting away from the need to stay current – with material, methodologies, and mindsets. That’s exactly why we decided to draw on our vibrant network of contributors to offer some insights on how they manage to stay on top of things. What strategies do they use to keep up with the times and to bring a freshness to their teaching, year in, year out?
Read on, to find out… and by the way, Happy Teacher’s Day!