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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. Proposals for museum acquisitions written by students in a course on African-American art. MRI machines built by engineering students in a design course. A class podcast on the latest healthcare policy research. Video documentaries created by future teachers to explore social and philosophical aspects of education. These are just some of the products of student learning created in courses taught by Vanderbilt faculty who have adopted the “Students as Producers” approach to course design. Through this year’s Course Design Institute, the CFT continues its efforts to support instructors in building these high-impact teaching practices into their courses. Course Design Institute participants will… - Learn and apply a process for designing courses in which learning objectives, activities, and assessments are aligned;
- Enhance their understanding of how students learn and apply that understanding to teaching in their disciplines;
- Design assignments that foster deep learning by engaging students in meaningful, generative work; and
- Expand their network of fellow Vanderbilt educators, connecting with peers with similar teaching interests.
Participants will leave the institute with plans for courses to be taught in the following academic year. Additionally, each participate will receive $500 in research funds to be used to enhance their teaching.
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| "A lot of us come in to teaching positions without a lot of teaching experience. It’s intimidating, but the Course Design Institute gave me a lot of resources to connect with my students.”
Gilbert Gonzales, Assistant Professor of Health Policy, 2016 participant
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| “The Course Design Institute is a really great way to get back into contact with teaching pedagogies in a short, quick, easy to digest three-day period.”
Rebecca VanDiver, Assistant Professor of the History of Art, 2016 participant
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Applications are due Sunday, March 12th.
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| Brown Bag Lunch Series: LGBTQI Inclusivity & Allyship in Learning Spaces
This month-long series of 4 workshops aims to create an active learning community wherein current and future educators can build their capacity to personally enact and support LGBTQI inclusivity & allyship in postsecondary academic contexts. Topics include, but are not limited to, the following: LGBTQI resources on campus and beyond, information on the contemporary LGBTQI community, gender expression, classroom gender norms, trans inclusivity, and inclusive classroom pedagogy. This series is co-sponsored by the Vanderbilt Office of LGBTQI. Dates: Every Wednesday in February
(2/1, 2/8, 2/15, 2/22)
Time: 12PM-1PM
Where: CFT Classroom
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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.
Facilitators: Lydia Bentley & Amie Thurber
Date: Thursday, March 16h
Time: 1 - 3:30pm
Where: CFT Classroom
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| Teaching, Difference, and Power: Class Matters
This semester, the CFT continues this year’s learning community on the many dimensions of social class as part of our ongoing series of discussions of teaching, difference, and power. The purpose of the learning community is to have a wide ranging discussion of both the many issues that arise when teaching a student body of varied class identities, and how the many dimensions of class may be taught effectively. There will be two meetings this semester, one on February 3rd focused on inclusive teaching strategies around class, and one February 24th on fostering an inclusive and class conscious campus life, both meeting from 10:00am to 12:00pm.
The learning community is open to both faculty and graduate students. It will be helpful if participants can attend regularly to form a supportive intellectual community and to work collaboratively to develop courses, lesson plans, or teaching portfolios.
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| Blackboard Drop-in Sessions for February
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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Learning Communities Provide Ongoing Support for Educators The Center for Teaching hosts a number of learning communities, groups designed for faculty who are interesting in meeting on a regular basis to discuss the craft of teaching and the specific challenges that come with different types of learning environments. Now in its third year, the lab pedagogies learning community consists of people who spend at least part of their professional time thinking about how students learn effectively in a credit-bearing lab setting. Because credit-bearing labs are present in such a range of subjects, from physics to biomedical engineering to Earth and environmental sciences, participants are able to compare and collaborate between, as well as within, disciplines. Marianna Sharp, CFT Communications Intern, recently talked with Cynthia Brame and Susan Verberne-Sutton to learn more about the goals and benefits of the lab pedagogies learning community. You can read the article on the CFT’s blog. The lab pedagogies group is just one of several learning communities the CFT is hosting this year. Other groups are centered around podcast creation, coordinating introductory language courses, and the connection between teaching and social class.
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| Junior Faculty Spotlight:
Jessie Hock
Each month, the CFT Newsletter highlights the work of our Junior Faculty Teaching Fellows. This month we feature Jessie Hock, assistant professor in the Department of English. Her teaching and research interests revolve around Renaissance and early modern European literature, particularly poetry, classical reception history, and the history of science, and she is currently writing a book about atomist science and early modern poetry. At Vanderbilt, she has taught classes such as Introduction to Poetry, Renaissance Poetry, Early Modern Women’s writing, and Shakespeare: Representative Selections, and is developing courses on early modern science and literature, race and literature in early modernity, theories of the lyric, and more. In the past, her pedagogy has centered on developing students’ critical reading and writing skills, and while this continues to be an important focus, this year she is turning her attention to making her classrooms more student-run and bringing discussions of pedagogy into the classroom. She is particularly interested in how to structure syllabi so that the interests and needs of her students guide the trajectories of the courses she teaches.
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Free Online Courses on Evidence-Based STEM Teaching The CFT, in collaboration with the CIRTL Network, is offering two free online courses on evidence-based STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) teaching this spring. Both courses launched Monday, January 30th, but it’s not too late to enroll.. If you are a current or future STEM faculty member at Vanderbilt or elsewhere, you are invited to enroll in one or both courses! “An Introduction to Evidence-Based Undergraduate STEM Teaching” is an open, online course designed to provide future STEM faculty, graduate students and post-doctoral fellows with an introduction to effective teaching strategies and the research that supports them. Topics include learning principles, learning objectives, assessment, active learning, and inclusive teaching. Enroll in “An Introduction to Evidence-Based Undergraduate STEM Teaching” on edX. “Advancing Learning through Evidence-Based STEM Teaching” will provide graduate students and post-doctoral fellows in the STEM disciplines who are planning college and university faculty careers with an introduction to “teaching as research”—the deliberate, systematic, and reflective use of research methods to develop and implement teaching practices that advance the learning experiences and outcomes of both students and teachers. Topics include teaching as research, learning through diversity, active learning, and the flipped classroom. Enroll in “Advancing Learning through Evidence-Based STEM Teaching” on edX.
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| Come Work at the Center for Teaching! Each year the Center for Teaching (CFT) hires a number of graduate students as part of its efforts to mentor and train graduate students, including those serving as teaching assistants or instructors of record here at Vanderbilt as well as those interested in developing teaching skills for future faculty careers. The CFT has several types of positions available for graduate students for the 2017-2018 academic year. Graduate Teaching Fellows – GTFs lead sections of the Certificate in College Teaching program; consult with graduate students about their teaching; facilitate workshops for graduate students at TA Orientation and throughout the year; and assist CFT senior staff with various ongoing and short-term projects, including the creation of online resources for the Vanderbilt teaching community. Learn more about the GTF Program. Teaching Affiliates – The primary responsibility for Teaching Affiliates is to lead a cohort of incoming TAs through a day-long workshop at August’s TA Orientation. These workshops familiarize new TAs with the challenges and opportunities of working at TAs at Vanderbilt and help prepare TAs for the first few weeks of class. Cohorts are divided by discipline, and so the CFT seeks Teaching Affiliates from a wide variety of disciplines on campus. The Teaching Affiliate position is an 70-hour position, with most of those hours occurring in August 2017. CiCT Facilitator – The CiCT Program facilitator will, alongside the Graduate Teaching Fellows, lead a section of the CiCT program. The facilitator will read and prepare lesson plans, lead class sessions, and attend weekly meetings with the GTFs. When the CiCT program is in session (6-8 weeks per semester), the approximate workload will be between 5-10 hrs/week. These positions are great opportunities for graduate students to refine their teaching and presentation skills and network with graduate students outside of their department or program. Applications for all three types of positions are due by 4pm on Wednesday, February 22, 2017.
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| CFT Hosts Talk on Service Learning by Randy Stoecker
The Center for Teaching is very proud to host a presentation and discussion entitled, “Liberating Service Learning,” by Randy Stoecker, Professor of Community and Environmental Sociology at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. We hope you can attend. The talk will be February 8th, 1-2:30pm, at the Center for Teaching (1114 19th Ave South, 3rd Floor).
Randy is a highly published scholar in the area of service learning and community engagement, including Research Methods for Community Change: A Project-Based Approach (2005), The Unheard Voices: Community Organizations and Service Learning (2009, co-edited with Elizabeth Tryon), The Landscape of Rural Service Learning, and What It Teaches Us All (2016, co-edited with Nicholas Holton and Charles Ganzert), and dozens of articles on community movements and development, qualitative methods, and social change.
His most recent book and the subject of the talk is Liberating Service Learning and the Rest of Higher Education Civic Engagement (2016), which is a personal and highly critical reflection on the many possibilities and limitations of service learning. In it he expands upon his previous work by sensitively exploring the contradictions of service learning pedagogy, and how when “liberated” from its institutionalized forms, it might help transform higher education and our broader world.
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Latest Podcast Episode on Ed Tech in Higher Education
In the latest episode of the Leading Lines podcast we feature Kathryn Tomasek, associate professor of history at Wheaton College. Kathryn is interviewed by Cliff Anderson, Associate University Librarian for Research and Learning at Vanderbilt. Last summer, Cliff met several of Kathryn’s undergraduate students at a private seminar that she held in the lead up to the 2016 Alliance of Digital Humanities Organizations conference in Krakow, Poland. Kathryn’s work focuses on transcription and mark up of historical texts, and she and her students are active in TEI, the Text Encoding Initiative. In the interview, Kathryn discusses her experiences getting started with text encoding, the value of teaching all students how machines talk to each other, and the role that text encoding can play in helping students engage in the kind of close reading that’s critical for historical analysis.
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