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“Students as Producers” Course Design Institute
May 8-10 The CFT invites Vanderbilt faculty members to apply to its 2017 Course Design Institute on the theme of “Students as Producers.” During the three-day institute (May 8-10, 2017) participants will design (or redesign) courses that engage students not only as consumers of information, but producers of knowledge. As articulated by DIVE, design thinking (also called human-centered design) consists of five steps: empathize, define, ideate, prototype, and test. Learning and applying this process can help students tackle open-ended problems, hear and value the perspectives of others, and develop creative confidence in the face of failure. For Course Design Institute participants who opt into the design thinking track, the institute will provide an introduction to design thinking and assistance in crafting course assignments that feature human-centered design. All participants, whether or not they choose the design thinking track, will leave the institute with plans for courses to be taught in the following academic year. Additionally, each participant will receive $500 in research funds to be used to enhance their teaching. Applications are due Sunday, March 12th.
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| Microaggression Teaching Workshop March 12
This session aims to create an active learning community wherein current and future educators can build their capacity to respond effectively to microaggressions in the classroom. After offering some guiding principles for effective interventions, the facilitators will lead participants through a skill-building sessions that draws from participants’ own experiences and questions.
Date: Thursday, March 16h
Time: 1 - 3:30pm
Location: CFT Classroom
Facilitators: Lydia Bentley & Amie Thurber
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| Assessment, Implicit Bias, and the Impact on Student Learning, Grad Student & Postdoc Workshop Implicit bias, in its simplest form, describes prejudicial judgment that affects social behavior. Despite its relatively unconscious nature, it is still possible to identify specific attitudes that reflect our predispositions toward socially marginalized groups. In this workshop, we will discuss the ways in which implicit bias, when left unchecked, can adversely affect our teaching and the outcomes of student assessments. Participants will collaborate with one another to formulate best practices for detecting implicit bias and adopting fair assessment measures. Date: Wednesday, March 29h
Time: 3 - 4:30pm
Location: CFT Classroom
Facilitators: Alexis McBride and Michael R. Fisher, Jr.
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| Blackboard Drop-in Sessions for March
Blackboard Support at the CFT will be offering drop-in training and support for the spring 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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Latest Podcast Episode on Ed Tech in Higher Education
In the latest episode of the Leading Lines podcast we feature an interview with Tim Foster, a graduate student in Vanderbilt’s Department of Spanish and Portuguese. Tim is an active member of the digital humanities community at Vanderbilt, and he has worked at the Center for Teaching, the Center for Second Language Studies, and the Vanderbilt Institute for Digital Learning.
Last fall, Tim was on a panel at Vanderbilt that focused on teaching with Wikipedia, where he shared a class project in which he worked with his students to write for the Portuguese language version of Wikipedia. Derek Bruff spoke with Tim about this project, as well as a few of Tim’s other experiments in educational technology.
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| Junior Faculty Spotlight:
Jessica Oster
Global climate change is among the most serious and complex issues of our time, especially as it is projected to cause serious but uncertain changes in the stability of global water and food supplies. Productive engagement with the problems posed by climate change requires a sound understanding of climate science, but also careful consideration of the socioeconomic, political, and personal dimensions that surround this issue. My goal as an educator is to help students develop a firm grounding in climate science that is rooted in knowledge of Earth’s history, and an understanding of the scientific process and methods that will enable them to think critically about scientific research, the social and political implications of climate change, and the portrayal of these issues in the scientific literature and in the media. In each of my courses, I introduce students to the inquiry and uncertainty involved in scientific research. One way I do this for the first-year students is by assigning two short articles from the same issue of a scientific journal that present somewhat opposing ideas on a topic –for example, climate records from west Antarctica that reach somewhat different conclusions on the role of global warming in recent ice melting. The students are often surprised that two sound studies could reach different conclusions. They question why a scientific journal would publish both papers when one must be “right” and the other “wrong”. This exercise provides a great jumping off point for discussing the research process – how scientists don’t set out aiming for one right answer, but rather want to do rigorous work to answer questions they are passionate about – and how good work often raises as many questions as it answers. Through teaching and my own experiences as a student, I understand that students will retain more knowledge if they are given opportunities to make their own observations, do their own research, or try to explain a concept in their own words. For this reason, I apply a diversity of teaching styles in each course, from undergraduate courses for non-majors to graduate courses. In each of my courses, I employ a mixture of lecture, group work, discussion, flipped classroom modules, and project-based learning, and in all classes, students have opportunities to become experts on certain topics and teach their classmates. Learning how to communicate scientific information both orally and in writing to a variety of audiences is also a central theme in each of my classes. With my first year students, the focus is on learning how to digest scientific writing and translate it to a more general audience. With graduate students, the focus is on learning how to communicate at a professional level in classroom and conference settings.
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| Summer Intensive Grad and Postdoc Programs at the CFT The Center for Teaching is happy to announce that we are offering two Summer Intensive programs this May for Vanderbilt graduate students and postdocs. The first Summer Intensive program is for the Certificate in Humanities Teaching & Learning (CHTL) and is open to humanities graduate students and postdocs. Similar to our academic year-long version of the CHTL, this Summer Intensive program is comprised of a condensed sequential seminar and practicum. Participants will explore and develop teaching skills that promote learning within a diverse student body across a variety of settings—with an emphasis on the particularities of teaching historically underrepresented populations, including first-generation college students and students of color, and a specific humanities discipline as part of a liberal arts curriculum on small private and/or historically black campuses.
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| For the first time, we are also offering a Summer Intensive program for the Certificate in College Teaching (CiCT). The Summer Intensive program is comprised of a condensed sequential seminar and practicum that explores foundational topics in teaching and learning and inclusive teaching, and is open to all Vanderbilt graduate students and postdocs. This may be especially attractive for those graduate students and postdocs who cannot attend the weekly Fall and Spring sessions of the regular CiCT program, which maintains a waitlist.
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| Learn About Vanderbilt's New Course Management System
In these hands-on workshops, participants will learn about Vanderbilt’s new course management system, Brightspace. Bring your own laptop computer so you can explore and build content in our test course! By the end of the session, users will be able to:- Confidently navigate the different areas of a Brightspace course
- Post, edit, and copy content for students using a variety of tools
- Communicate with students about important Brightspace tools
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Introduction to Brightspace
(for faculty teaching courses in Brightspace
spring or summer 2017)
Date: Tuesday, March 21st
Time: 9:30-11:00
Location: Center for Teaching
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Introduction to Brightspace
(open to all)
Date: Monday, April 3rd
Time: 2:15-3:45
Location: Center for Teaching
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Introduction to Brightspace
(open to all)
Date: Tuesday, April 4th
Time: 2:15-3:45
Location: Center for Teaching
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