recent posts
- Hello, World!
- At Play in the Classroom for Thirty-Five Years: Recollections and Recommendations for Keeping Our Spirits—and Our Students—Soaring
- Reaching every student in your General Education class
- Classroom Stories: Teaching Astronomy to Primarily Non-science Students in Group-setting Activities, by Sandi Brenner (Bryant University)
- JWST Carina Nebula
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In this four-part series, Dr. Stacy Palen will discuss her own journey toward recognizing and addressing issues of equity in the Astro 101 classroom. We encourage this to be an open communication and discussion through the comment section below. To read the previous post, follow the link here. Addressing Equity in Astronomy III: One More…
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By Stacy Palen Well, this isn’t going the way we planned! Goodness! As you may recall, I was already teaching in a substandard environment for the semester and now everything has moved online. Raise your hand if you were ready for that to happen! Yeah, me neither! We were about four weeks away from the…
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By Stacy Palen I teach at an open-enrollment university with a very large number of non-traditional students: nearly all of my students have jobs with large time commitments. Many of them are parents of young children. More than half of them are married. This semester, something interesting has been happening that has not happened before and…
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By Stacy Palen Perhaps I should not have been surprised to find out that many of my students see Bill Nye (the Science Guy) as a personal hero, but I was. It’s probably got something to do with the bow ties…or the lab coat…or something. I was too early for Bill Nye, but I was young…
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By Stacy Palen As I was working on the first draft of Chapter 3 for the fourth edition of Understanding Our Universe, I ran across this wonderful summary article about ‘Oumuamua by Steven Spence of GotScience Magazine. You probably remember that ‘Oumuamua is the first interstellar object that we’ve observed in our Solar System. This article…
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By Stacy Palen My students came in talking about this, and so I thought I’d pass on a couple of resources that I used while answering questions in class! I felt I needed to put the new image in context, with respect to M87 and all its fascinating parts. This photo has the angular sizes labeled,…
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By Dr. Bradley W. Carroll We live at a unique point in history. For the first time, we humans know the entire story of our species, at least in broad outline. We know how the universe expanded from the initial Big Bang, how generations of stars manufactured a periodic-table’s worth of elements and then dispersed…
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Stacy Palen has created 23 videos on key topics to accompany her textbooks, Understanding Our Universe and 21st Century Astronomy, that instructors can assign as pre-class activities or show in class. A mixture of live demos and mini lectures, these videos explain key concepts in an understandable and compelling way. In the angular momentum video,…
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By Stacy Palen A few weeks ago, Colin Inglefield wrote a guest post about his uses of trade books in the classroom. Over break, I finally had a chance to read Glass Universe by Dava Sobel, and I think this would make a great book to use in this context. The book is about the early…
Teaching Astronomy by Doing Astronomy 