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Difference, and Power Symposium:
Class Matters
This year, the Center for Teaching hosted a learning community of faculty and graduate students focused on social class, particularly the challenges faced by lower income and first generation students in the classroom, and class-conscious methods of teaching. On April 25th, join the Vanderbilt Center for Teaching for an end-of-year symposium in which we’ll share the year’s work done at the CFT. We will also invite all members of the Vanderbilt community to discuss steps we can take together to develop a more inclusive, equitable, and critical environment for teaching and learning. Date: Tuesday, April 25th
Time: 2:00pm-4:30pm
Location: The Martha Rivers Ingram Commons Multipurpose Room (237)
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| How is the current political climate impacting your interactions with your students? A group of about 35 current and former Junior Faculty Teaching Fellows recently met at the Center for Teaching to discuss this question, looking for ways to promote dialog and learning that can help students navigate our highly polarized world. The participants teach classes across the university, within Peabody School of Education, the School of Engineering, the School of Nursing, and the range of disciplines within Arts & Science. The group identified a number of common goals that these faculty find have a particular importance in our current climate. They also discussed a number of practices that they use to help them reach these goals. These goals and practices are summarized here, along with related resources.
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Apply to be a Junior Faculty Teaching Fellow!
We are now accepting applications for the 2017-18 Junior Faculty Teaching Fellows program. The program is designed to help you: - Learn from the teaching experiences of colleagues
- Develop skills that will enable you to analyze and improve your teaching over time
- Build a teaching community at Vanderbilt
- Learn to balance and integrate your teaching and research
- Develop and improve materials for review and tenure processes.
Junior Faculty Teaching Fellows receive $2000 in research funds each to be used to enhance their teaching.
Tenure-track and non-tenure track, full-time faculty who will be in their second through sixth year in 2017-2018 are eligible to apply. Application Deadline: Monday, May 15th For more details on the program or to apply, visit the JFTF webpage.
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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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| Course Design Grad Student & Postdoc Workshop Many graduate students do not get the opportunity to design their own syllabi or design and organize their courses. This workshop has been developed to assist graduate students in being more aware and intentional about how to design a course and syllabus overall. The workshop will include feedback from faculty in various departments about their thought process on course and syllabus design, discussion and brainstorming, as well as activities to engage participants in the act of course design. It is open to all graduate students, and will most likely consist of an interdisciplinary group to bounce ideas around as we try to identify practices and approaches to consider when developing our own courses.
Date: Thursday, April 13th
Time: 2:30 - 4:00pm
Location: CFT Classroom
Facilitator: Ryan Bowen
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| Junior Faculty Spotlight:
Guojun Wang
As a scholar, I mainly study late imperial Chinese literature and culture. At Vanderbilt, I teach an array of subjects related to Chinese literature. The courses I offer cover both the pre-modern and modern periods in Chinese history (36 centuries), and involve Chinese literature in all its principle genres. Using literature as a lens, I lead students to explore such themes as self and society, gender and writing, and romance and violence. I have two primary goals in teaching: to broaden students’ experiences by learning about China (from the mainland to the diasporic communities), and to improve their abilities to read, to think, to express, and to communicate. I first highlight close reading as the main way to bring students closer to literary texts. In class, I guide students’ attention to the details, fissures, and paradoxes in the readings. I then try to place the texts in the historical contexts and introduce major social issues the texts illustrate. Analytical writing is another focus of my teaching. I have used online posting, response essays, research papers, and other formats to help students generate ideas and express them in writing. I also ask students to participate in multimedia activities such as interactive maps, timelines, and instant surveys to approach literature in diversified ways. I consider my classroom as a space for me and my students to explore together. For that purpose, I give students ample opportunities to communicate with each other through group work, leading the discussion, and different types of presentations. As my students and I have together discovered, Chinese literature is not far away from Vanderbilt campus. Instead, we frequently notice connections between what we read and what is going on around us. In the past decade, I have taught in the impoverished communities in southwest China, schools for the children of migrant workers in Beijing, and elite institutions in the States. I have worked with students speaking different languages, of different ethnicities, and from various social backgrounds. I hold the belief that teaching is a way of communication, one between me, my students, and the ever fresh voices in Chinese literature.
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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
If you have questions about these trainings or would like to schedule training for another time, email us at Brightspace@vanderbilt.edu.
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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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Blackboard and Brightspace Drop-in Sessions for April
The CFT will be offering drop-in training and support for the spring semester for faculty, graduate students, and staff using Blackboard or Brightspace. Come get technical and pedagogical support from a team of 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 Stacey M. Johnson interviews William Pannapacker, DuMez Professor of English and Senior Director of the Mellon Grand Challenges Presidential Initiative at Hope College in Michigan. Pannapacker is a Walt Whitman scholar, and a proponent and supporter of the digital liberal arts. In the interview, he talks about that work, and the program building he’s done at Hope to enable more faculty to teach with technology. He also talks about his own career and the surprisingly limited role technology plays in his own teaching.
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