2024 Conference Keynote Talks
2024 Conference Keynote Talks
Learn more about the nationally renowned experts scheduled to speak at the upcoming Advising Network Conference.
"Loving Learning, But Maybe Not Schoolishness" - Susan D. Blum
In this talk, Susan D Blum introduces the idea of “schoolishness,” contrasting the sometimes-painful and sometimes-failed learning that occurs in school with the learning that may happen more readily outside school. Centered around contrasts between “alienation” and “authenticity,” the talk includes Blum’s ethnographic research on students’ learning in and out of school, suggesting some less-schoolish practices that many educators are enacting, and ways students may be encouraged to embrace the adventure of learning.
Susan D. Blum is a professor of anthropology at the University of Notre Dame. Her work has roamed around the fields of cultural, linguistic, and psychological anthropology, in the context of China but most recently in the quest to understand the nature of institutional education. She is the author of a trilogy about education: Schoolishness: Alienated Education and the Quest for Authentic, Joyful Learning, which will be published in May 2024; "I Love Learning; I Hate School": An Anthropology of College (2016); and My Word! Plagiarism and College Culture (2009), all published by Cornell University Press, and is the editor of the collection Ungrading: Why Rating Students Undermines Learning (and What to Do Instead) (West Virginia University Press, 2020). She has taught at a range of institutions of higher education for thirty-five years, and at Notre Dame since 2000.