Chapter Five Bibliographic Essay: Studying Star Trek
Jessamyn Neuhaus http://geekypedagogy.com @GeekyPedagogy January 2019 Chapter Five Bibliographic Essay: Studying Star Trek Supplement to Chapter Five, “Practice,” of Geeky Pedagogy: A Guide for Intellectuals, Introverts, and Nerds Who Want to Be Effective Teachers (Morgantown: University of West Virginia Press, 2019) In Chapter Five of Geeky Pedagogy, I argue that “for people who care about student learning, here’s the best and worst news about effective teaching that you will ever hear: no matter who you are or what you teach, you can get better with practice. Nothing will improve our teaching and increase our students’ learning more than doing it, year after year, term after term, class after class, day after day” (146). I also conclude the book with a brief review of the four pedagogical practices described in the previous chapters, and note that “the more time we can spend just doing them, the better we’ll get at effective teaching and advancing our students’ learning” (148). The citations in Chapter Five are not lengthy and the chapter does not raise the need for additional citations from the scholarship on teaching and learning. There is, however, one area of scholarship that I would like to add to this book as a nod to my favorite geeky popular text: Star Trek (ST). ST is by no means a perfect franchise or fandom, yet crucial to its longevity is its ability to evolve, most notably in terms of diversifying popular presentations. To my mind, “infinite diversity in infinite combinations” will always be the most poetic, truest description of both a lived reality as well as a sociocultural ideal—as a teacher, as a nerd, and as a human being.
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