| Apply to be a Junior Faculty Teaching Fellow!
We are now accepting applications for the 2019-20 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 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 2019-2020 are eligible to apply.
Application Deadline: Wednesday, May 15th
For more details on the program or to apply, visit the JFTF webpage.
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| Junior Faculty Spotlight:
Josh Caldwell Each month, the CFT Newsletter highlights the work of our Junior Faculty Teaching Fellows. This month, Josh Caldwell, Mechanical Engineering, talks about his teaching philosophy and interests. I joined the Mechanical Engineering Faculty at Vanderbilt University in May 2017, moving here from the US Naval Research Lab where I had been for the past 12 years. I joined as a tenured Associate Professor, with affiliated status in the Dept. of Electrical Engineering. I received by Bachelor’s I Chemistry from Virginia Tech in 2000, followed by my Ph.D. in Physical Chemistry in 2004 from the University of Florida. My research is focused on identifying materials that can interact with long-wavelength infrared light at nanoscale dimensions, enabling compact optical components, such as sources, lenses and detectors. This could provide the opportunity for on-chip photonics which are highly desirable for applications such as free-space communications or optical computations as well as providing avenues for IR beacons and sources for environmental and medical diagnostics as well as search and rescue.
Infrared spectroscopic and imaging techniques are widely implemented for non-contact measurements of temperatures, chemical identification and medical diagnostics, astronomical studies, and due to atmospheric windows in the 3-5 and 8-12 µm spectral ranges for thermal radiative cooling, free-space communications. In the visible spectral range there is a broad range of materials that offer ideal performance and due to the short wavelengths of light compact optical components, in the infrared, the materials of choice tend to have significant issues such as low transmission, high expense, high reactivity in ambient conditions and/or being very brittle. Furthermore, the long free-space wavelengths mean optical components must be significantly larger. Polaritons, which are quasi-particles of oscillating charges with light (photons), provide the means to circumvent the limitations of these long-wavelengths in the IR and focus the light to nanoscale dimensions. However, identifying the appropriate materials and device concepts that can suitably overcome these limitations is at the heart of my research.
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| Leading Lines Ed Tech Podcast with
Sophie Bjork-James In this episode, we first hear a short, speculative fiction audio story by Vanderbilt undergraduate Sarah Saxton Strassberg called “Hagar Rising” that explores the future of gene editing. Sarah created this piece for a course on the politics of reproductive health taught by Vanderbilt anthropology professor Sophie Bjork-James. After Sarah Saxton’s audio piece, Derek Bruff talks with Sophie about the course and her podcast assignment.
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| Brightspace Help is Available!
Drop-In Hours
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| A Conversation on the Future of Digital Literacies
It’s a safe bet that technology will change. And as technology changes, the ways we create and consume information and media will change, as will the ways we connect and communicate with each other. What will digital literacies look like in five or ten years? And what does the answer to that question mean for the ways we teach digital literacies today? Join us for a wide-ranging and speculative conversation about the future of digital literacies at the Center for Teaching on Wednesday, April 17th, from 3:10 to 4:30pm. Our panelists will be: - Douglas Fisher, associate professor of computer science and faculty head of Warren College
- Corbette Doyle, senior lecturer in leadership, policy, and organizations
- Jaco Hamman, associate professor of religion, psychology, and culture and author of Growing Down: Theology and Human Nature in the Virtual Age (Baylor University Press, 2017)
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| Apply to be a BOLD Fellow!
Want to create innovative online learning experiences? Investigate the impact of the experience on your students' learning and share the results with colleagues?
The BOLD Fellows program helps graduate students from all disciplines design and develop online learning experiences, from building online learning modules to fostering online spaces for their students to interact. Each Fellow works with a faculty member who has identified a teaching “problem” in a particular course, working to develop a potential solution, integrate it into the faculty member’s course, and gather data on its impact on student learning. The program spans two semesters: the Fall 2019 “design and development” semester, in which Fellows receive training and support as they develop their module, and the Spring 2020 “implementation and assessment” semester, in which the Fellows implement the project, gather evidence, and work with the CFT to interpret and present their results.
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Participating in the BOLD program provided me with a unique experience that I was able to draw on during my faculty job search. My BOLD project allowed me to demonstrate in a tangible way my understanding of evidence-based teaching practices and course design.
Natalie Covington
Hearing and Speech Sciences
2019 BOLD Fellow
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| Graduate students from all disciplines are encouraged to identify a faculty mentor, discuss a potential project, and apply by May 15. Previous projects from STEM participants are described in the BOLD project gallery; the program includes all disciplines and encourages applications that take novel, discipline-appropriate approaches.
The Fellowship carries a $1000 stipend and the opportunity to apply for $500 to fund travel to present the project. For more information about the program, including application information, see the CFT’s BOLD program page.
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| Season 2 Coming Soon!
Thanks to the Vanderbilt students and faculty who contributed to the first season of VandyVox! We were thrilled to share student-produced audio from anthropology, game studies, health policy, human and organizational development, law, mathematics, and women’s and gender studies. Be sure to listen to our final episode of the season, which features the audio introduction to English major Anna Butrico’s senior thesis on podcasting.
You can listen to all eight episodes of Season 1 in your favorite podcast app or on VandyVox.com, where you can also find resources for engaging students in audio production work in curricular and co-curricular settings. We hope that VandyVox gives listeners a sense of the kind of creative and critical media students can produce, as well as tools instructors can use to support their student in this kind of work.
Season 2 is coming later in 2019! If you know of Vanderbilt students (undergraduate or otherwise) making great audio, let us know! We’re particularly interested in sharing audio produced as part of class assignments, but we’re open to any student-created audio work with an academic hook. To make a submission, contact VandyVox host and Center for Teaching director Derek Bruff .
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