French university pedagogy seen by an American

Wednesday, December 2nd, 2009

Something should be said about professor-student relations. For the most part, contact is limited to the classroom, where the student’s ignorance is taken for granted and the professor does all the talking without permitting questions. The theory is that the students haven’t enough background to make intelligent inquiries. At Nice last summer, on the final [...]

Masculine domination and academic discourse, or, do males speak first in the classroom?

Tuesday, January 6th, 2009

This is going to be crude and quantitative, but I want to give a bit of concrete evidence bearing on a trend that, I suppose, must already be subjectively apparent to everyone who pays attention to gender in academic life: the tendency for males to speak first, or in particular, to be the first to [...]