Anna Lännström

I avoided teaching our gen ed Catholic intellectual tradition courses for years at my small Catholic college in the Northeast. I’m not a theologian. I’m not Catholic. And teaching these courses sounded challenging because our students’ impressions of the Church are both negative and muddled: “The Church is ...

Having practiced on my first-year students for a few years [Race in the Classroom #1   Race in the Classroom #2], I felt brave enough to add several readings on race at once to my junior level course, Is God Dead? It was a good time to do it because I was revising ...

Talking about race in the classroom makes me nervous. What if a white student says something awful and I don’t know how to handle it? What if I don’t know the facts? What if something blows up and I end up in big trouble? And isn’t it ...

I’m teaching about race more and more these days. That wasn’t my plan. My training is in ancient Greek philosophy and I used to love teaching Aristotle and Plato. But things changed. Ten years ago, the ancient thinkers were great at helping the first-year students at my small ...

One of our most time-consuming and dreaded tasks as humanities faculty is grading student papers. We’re making it worse by writing too many comments. Some of my colleagues correct every single grammatical error. Others fill the margins with thoughtful suggestions, noting all the misunderstandings of the text, the lapses ...