The Andersen Library Blog

Thomas Paine and the Dangerous Word
by Sarah Jane Marsh

New Arrivals Island, 320 Mar

As a longtime American history buff, I still am consistently dismayed by how little I know about many historical personages, and Thomas Paine ranked among them. This very well-documented and engagingly-written children’s book helped me to remedy that in a quick read. For example, I didn’t know that the Englishman arrived in America (deathly sick from typhus) only about six months before the battles of Lexington and Concord that started the Revolutionary War. He published the pamphlet anonymously at first, due to the inflammatory nature of the word “Independence” at a time when most of the public were still seeking reconciliation with Britain, and due to the controversy the first printing of 1000 copies sold out in just 11 days. As the author tells us in an afterward, Adams and other leaders at the time all credited Paine’s pen with enlivening peoples’ spirits to accept the revolution more than any other writer at the time; and Paine’s words have still been used by modern presidents and leaders such as Barack Obama and John Kerry.

I really appreciated how the (first-time!) author used so many of Thomas Paine’s own powerful words in both her text as well as some of the illustrator’s lively illustrations – the words seem to flow vibrantly off the page. It’s easy to see how his Common Sense pamphlet became, proportional to the population at the time, the most widely read best-seller in American history! (according to biographer Harvey Kaye)

If you’re curious, you can read the text of Common Sense online.

Creating Wicked Students:
Designing Courses for a Complex World
by Paul Hanstedt
LB2395.35.H37 C74 2018
New Arrivals Island, 2nd floor

Geared toward an audience of post-secondary educators, Hanstedt offers a fresh lens through which to view and guide our course design. He credits Edmond Ko, an engineering instructor, with using wicked in the context of problems, solutions, and competencies. Since students are often faced with wicked problems, that is “situations where the parameters of the problem and the means available for solving them are changing constantly” (p. 3), they need wicked competencies in order to address them. Years ago, few would have imagined how quickly fake news might spread on social media platforms, legalization of gay marriage, or the Zika virus, for example. How can students learn the content and skills of a course, and enter the post-college world able to apply it, question it, and possibly propose solutions that may lead to reinventing it to address such issues?

Handstedt walks us through how we might rethink our purpose, set goals for our courses and restructure them. Chapters are designed to guide the instructor through assignment creation, creating authoritative exams, and day-to-day teaching methods. Finally, he provides examples of assignments which provide opportunities for assessing wickedness.

For an overview of wicked design and examples, view Handstedt’s presentation or listen to his Teaching in Higher Ed podcast episode.