Nancy Lynne Westfield, Ph.D.

Fear is the anxiety that you are about to lose something you love, need, have rightfully earned or deserve. Fear will make you hurt yourself, silence yourself, edit yourself in ways that contradict or disavow your own best pursuits. Since we teach who we are, showing up afraid will only ...

Our attempts to teach towards openness, towards possibility, towards new glimpses of an uncharted future mean that teaching can be demanding, even confounding. One way I learned to embrace this approach was by incorporating rituals in my course designs. The use of rituals in classrooms allows students an experience that ...

My friend Kenneth Ngwa and I have ongoing conversations about impossible questions concerning the current malaise of education. How do you make your way and guide others when there is no clear direction, when what is next is unclear? How do you do what is needed when you do not ...

If you teach long enough, you will teach a course that feels flat, has low morale, or even fails.  While a totally ruined course is rare, there are moments when the sinking, the malaise—yours and that of the students, happens.  We all know this experience. If you have never ...

(And audio recording of this blog may be found here.) Creative teachers are sometimes labelled as people who run wild --- meaning we are people whose boundaries are too wide, whose disciplinary habits and practices are too flimsy, whose appetites look beyond what is safely seen, commonly known, or conventionally ...