Dead Ideas in Teaching and Learning

Dead Ideas in Teaching and Learning


You Can’t Ignore That a Pandemic Happened with John Warner

September 22, 2022

John Warner, educator and author of the Inside Higher Ed blog, “Just Visiting”, wrote in a May 2022 post titled “You Can’t Ignore That a Pandemic Happened”: “I am concerned that the understandable desire to get beyond the extreme challenges of trying to educate in the midst of the worst period of the pandemic is interfering with some deeper questions, some more nuanced conversations we should be having about teaching and learning.” In our first episode of the fall semester, we discuss with John the debate over the “return to normal,” and what will happen to the practices that teachers engaged in as we move away from pandemic teaching conditions.


John Warner is a writer, editor, speaker, researcher, consultant, and author of eight books, including Why They Can’t Write: Killing the Five-Paragraph Essay and Other Necessities (Johns Hopkins UP) and The Writer’s Practice: Building Confidence in Your Nonfiction Writing (Penguin), which is widely used in writing classrooms from middle school through college. John has become a national voice on issues of faculty labor, institutional values, and writing pedagogy. John is an affiliate faculty at the College of Charleston, and his most recent book, Sustainable. Resilient. Free.: The Future of Public Higher Education (Belt) is now available.