Teaching durable skills in the humanities


Intentional Teaching's 100th Episode

Episode 100 of the Intentional Teaching podcast is coming up, and I would love your help making it a special one.

There are interviews I've aired on the podcast that I find myself referencing all the time in my work with faculty. All my guests are fantastic, of course, but some managed to share some piece of insight that has stuck with me, changing how I think about teaching and learning. And I bet, if you're a listener, you have similar insights from past episodes that keep informing your work as an educator.

Here’s my ask: What’s one idea or example or question or quote from an Intentional Teaching episode that you keep thinking about? Let me know via email—or record a short voice memo on your phone and send that to me. I’m planning to make the 100th episode a kind of clip show, where I share excerpts from past episodes featuring powerful insights—and your comments about why those insights have stuck with you.

Your deadline for this assignment is September 15th, which is tomorrow!

Teaching Durable Skills in the Humanities

How can humanities courses and majors help students develop the kinds of durable skills--communication, collaboration, adaptability, and more--that employers want?

In the latest episode of the Intentional Teaching podcast, I talk to three University of Kentucky faculty about a program at UK called “Transdisciplinary Educational Approaches to Advance Kentucky,” or TEK for short. TEK helps faculty design courses that help students build those durable skills. One of those courses is called Humanities in Action, and one of the goals of the course is to help students see the ways that studying the humanities can build those durable skills—and help them get quality jobs, in or outside of the humanities.

My guests for this conversation are:

  • Chelsea Brislin, course lead for Humanities in Action and associate director of the Gaines Center for the Humanities at UK. Chelsea has a passion for helping students see the value in studying the humanities, whether or not they major in or pursue careers in the humanities. She also makes a very appropriate Schitt's Creek reference during our conversation.
  • Shawna Felkins, senior faculty consultant at the Center for the Enhancement of Learning and Teaching at UK and community coordinator for the TEK Faculty Fellows program. Shawna helped me see how the transparent teaching framework (especially transparency in purpose and task) applies to this kind of work with students.
  • Jennifer Osterhage, director of TEK and associate professor of biology. Jennifer was a delight to have on the podcast since we go way back. She was a PhD student at Vanderbilt and was one of the first graduates of the teaching certificate program I helped design at the Vanderbilt Center for Teaching.

You can listen to my conversation with Chelsea, Shawna, and Jennifer about the Humanities in Action course here, or search "Intentional Teaching" in your podcast app.

The Norton Guide to AI-Aware Teaching

My new book, The Norton Guide to AI-Aware Teaching, co-authored with Annette Vee and Marc Watkins, is now available as an ebook! It's available through major online retailers like Amazon and Barnes & Noble. It's also free for faculty who have adopted a W.W. Norton textbook, so if that's you, ask your Norton rep. If you want to wait for the paperback, it will be available in late September 2026, and you can preorder it now.

Intentional Teaching with Derek Bruff

Welcome to the Intentional Teaching newsletter! I'm Derek Bruff, educator and author. The name of this newsletter is a reminder that we should be intentional in how we teach, but also in how we develop as teachers over time. I hope this newsletter will be a valuable part of your professional development as an educator.

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Intentional Teaching's 100th Episode Episode 100 of the Intentional Teaching podcast is coming up, and I would love your help making it a special one. There are interviews I've aired on the podcast that I find myself referencing all the time in my work with faculty. All my guests are fantastic, of course, but some managed to share some piece of insight that has stuck with me, changing how I think about teaching and learning. And I bet, if you're a listener, you have similar insights from past...

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