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The CFT is accepting proposals for its Senior Faculty Fellows program. Fellows will identify teaching and learning challenges in their departments or programs, then work to address those challenges in collaboration with colleagues.
Senior Faculty Fellows will be partnered with CFT professional staff, who will assist in facilitating the learning communities, and each Fellow will receive $3,000 in research funds to support the work of their learning community.
If you have received tenure or have been at Vanderbilt at least seven years, you are eligible to apply!
For more on the Senior Faculty Fellows program, please see the program website
Application Deadline Friday, January 6th
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Teaching in Response to the Election The November election was the culmination of a very heated and uncivil electoral season, and the results have been the subject of both intense reaction and wide-ranging analysis. This is especially true among our students, many of whom have sought guidance in understanding the outcomes. To help you in responding to student issues or concerns, Joe Bandy, Assistant Director of the CFT, wrote a blogpost, “Teaching in Response to the Election," that offers some guidance and curates some of the CFT's most useful resources. We hope they are helpful.
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| Blackboard Drop-in Sessions for December
Blackboard Support at the CFT will be offering drop-in training and support for the fall semester for faculty, graduate students, and staff using Blackboard. Come get technical and pedagogical support from a team of Blackboard specialists during our drop-in support hours. Feel free to bring any questions or issues you want to resolve.
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| SAVE THE DATE! Graduate students: interested in working with the Center for Teaching?
The CFT offers multiple employment and professional development opportunities every year for graduate students. From Graduate Teaching Fellow to CiCT Facilitator, each position is an opportunity for graduate students from across campus to become more involved with the Center for Teaching, support fellow graduate students in their teaching professional development, and deepen their own understanding of the scholarship of teaching & learning. Application deadline is Wednesday,
February 22nd.
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| From The CFT
Stacks
Harnessing America's Wasted Talent: A New Ecology of Learning
by Peter Smith
School failings are no longer confined to the school and its students, but have consequences in the social, civic, and economic realms. Endeavoring to redefine effective teaching and learning for today’s students, this book submits three critical ways that traditional colleges block access to opportunity for students and ultimately waste their talent. The author presents a new paradigm of learning that depends on the use of technology and online tools to personalize education to meet the needs of every learner.
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| Junior Faculty Spotlight:
Jessica Greenfield
My first year language courses range in demographics from native/heritage speakers to the incoming first year student who selected the course because it fit his schedule while upper level courses can draw from all over the university and often include some of the most diverse groups of students. My greatest challenge, therefore, is to create a stimulating and challenging environment for all students in the class – those who consider themselves motivated or gifted language learners and those who do not. My other challenge – and the arguably more important one – is to create an ambiance where students feel comfortable enough outside of their own comfort zones and to really “buy into” the study of language and culture and allow it to shape how they look at human and educational interaction moving forward. My teaching philosophy incorporates a flipped classroom and relies heavily on student engagement with technology which allows the face to face time to be filled with a cultural exploration of language, traditions, and new and different social phenomena. Students are asked to engage with authentic materials ranging from short literary passages, videos, pen pal letters, and even blogs and videos created and collected by Vanderbilt students abroad. Additionally, integrated performance assessments, self-evaluation of participation and engagement, and scaffolded activities allow students to actively drive their own learning. Student choice is my most valued component in student success, particularly for those students who struggle with the language acquisition element of the courses. Allowing students to find something that interests them, explore it, shape it, and then present it in a way that that celebrates their learning and also allows their peers to learn something new in a new way are always my most successful and rewarding activities. My favorite class to teach is my ITA 3803: Mediterranean Culture class, which is offered as a Maymester abroad course. This course incorporates all of my favorite things into one rich, intense, rewarding month in Sicily: introduction to language, the study of cultural and social influence throughout the Mediterranean, and food food food! Even students who do not have the opportunity to participate in the Maymester program and/or do not study abroad in Italy, are exposed to the experiences from their peers through a course website whose construction is ongoing. Personal and group observational blogs, site tours, video clips, and interviews are posted each summer and are woven into the first three language semesters back on campus. Therefore, students at all levels are contributing to this innovative and student-centered collection of materials, helping to shape the curriculum for their future fellow students. Additionally, we are able to participate from afar, but reap some of the same benefits of immersion learning. My current research focuses on curriculum redesign, networked learning and participatory pedagogy, and andragogy vs pedagogy.
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New Podcast Episode on Ed Tech in Higher Education
In this episode, we feature an interview with Zoe LeBlanc, a sixth-year doctoral student in history at Vanderbilt University. Zoe studies networks, ideas, and spaces in modern history, and her dissertation examines the role of Cairo, Egypt, as a hub for anti-colonial activism in Africa during the Cold War. Zoe has been a graduate fellow at the Vanderbilt Center for Teaching, the Vanderbilt Institute for Digital Learning, and at the Vanderbilt Center for Digital Humanities. She helped launch a “Conversations on Digital Pedagogy” series at Vanderbilt, and continues to build and enrich the digital humanities community at Vanderbilt and elsewhere. We talked with Zoe about her experiments in digital pedagogy, her approach to using educational technology, and her career path as an aspiring digital historian.
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