Author: Laura Wenk

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Apply – 5 College Blended Learning Grants

The Five College Blended Learning Initiative is pleased to announce two new grant opportunities for 2017-18 (with work to begin this summer), one for experienced “blenders,” another for beginners seeking training:

  • “Stage 2” projects are for faculty members who have already completed at least one major blended teaching project, and who are ready to expand and/or revise based on lessons learned.  Read the call for applications and submit.  (Deadlines for application are March 1 and May 15, 2017)
  • Mini-grants for Training are for faculty members just beginning to explore ways a course (or part of a course) might be blended.  Grantees awarded from these grants will be supported to attend one or more “hands on” workshops offered this summer within the Five Colleges or further afield.  Read the call for applications and submit.  (Deadline for application is March 15.)

 

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Informal “Write On Site” Opportunity

One of our colleagues, Alexis Salas (Visiting Assistant Professor of Art History in HACU), is generously organizing a write on site group. Many of you have participated in Write on Site groups through the CTL. Here are the details Alexis sent:

Write-On-Site Hampshire College

The term “Write on Site” is attributed to Kerry Ann Rockquemore at the National Center for Faculty Development and Diversity. It describes scholars coming together to work on their individual writing projects. Writing side-by-side at a regularly scheduled time provides accountability around just showing up and starting the work. Write–On-Site Hampshire College also aims to cultivate a community of scholars.

Just bring your laptop and/or whatever you need for writing each week. Show up, check-in about what you are working on for the session and get to writing—Writing progress guaranteed! We hope you’ll join us. Faculty from all disciplines are welcome.

To limit the email overload, join us on Facebook to keep updated  https://www.facebook.com/groups/926401360839294/

Let’s set up Write on Site meet ups! Take the poll and let us know when you would like to meet. Take this Doodle poll to tell me when you are available this Fall 2016.

(The poll is specific to a given week—but really please treat it as your typical availability for each day of the week.  AKA, if you can’t meet this particular Monday Sept. 5 but normally can meet Mondays, then put in your normally available Monday times.)

Each session needs a sponsor (someone who can reserve a space for 5-10 people to write and open it) – please indicate when you can be that person and where the space would be. Write-On-Site can also take place outside of Hampshire College—please indicate what you are proposing and I will put it in the poll. If you can be the sponsor, email me with these details. Once we have established times (established by the Doodle poll) and sponsors for them (established by your emails to me), I will post the Write-On-Site Hampshire College days and times on Facebook.

Alexis Salas

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Hampshire Faculty Receive 5 College Blended Learning Grants

Congratulations to the faculty and staff who have received funding through the Five Colleges to develop new courses that use blended approaches – incorporating digital materials and tools into their courses. Michele Hardesty and Alana Kumbier, Lili Kim, Jennifer Bajorek and Karen Koehler, and Uditi Sen.

The funds come from two consortial grants – one from the Mellon Foundation and the other from the Teagle Foundation. You can read about the programs here.

But here are our colleague’s projects:

Beyond the Riot: Zines in Archives and Digital Space

Michele Hardesty (Humanities, Arts, and Cultural Studies, Hampshire College): Beyond the Riot: Zines in Archives and Digital Space will use online, classroom and site-specific learning to engage students with zines as primary sources for exploring feminist, queer, and POC cultural production in the 1990s. As the title suggests, these explorations will include, but go beyond, the well-known history of Riot Grrrl. With a blend of data visualization, digital annotation, DIY videogame creation, and physical zinemaking, students will create transformative means of researching zines and engaging with the contexts of their production. This course will be headquartered at Hampshire and taught by Dr. Michele Hardesty and Dr. Alana Kumbier, but will include multiple sessions and collaborators at other sites. This course will be offered to all Five College students in Fall 2016.

From Sugar Plantation Laborers to “Gangnam Style Consumers: Transnational History of Korean Americans

Lili Kim (Critical Social Inquiry, Hampshire College): The goal of this project is to utilize technology and digital resources to deeply engage students in conducting transnational historical research through identifying, investigating, and interpreting primary source materials that span across time, languages, and continents to produce histories of Koreans in the United States. The emphasis and incorporation of blended learning work will allow students to access a growing number of important digital archives on Korean American history and U.S. history, and to help overcome the logistical stumbling block of not being able to travel to the archives to conduct research. Using selected online tools, this blended learning course will enhance opportunities and access for students to work collaboratively and individually on organizing and analyzing primary sources as well as synthesizing scholarship in the field. Students will ultimately help fill in the gaps in and further our understanding of Korean American history through their collaborative research projects, which will be available and archived online.

Reading Photography

Jennifer Bajorek and Karen Koehler (Humanities, Arts and Cultural Studies, Hampshire College): Reading Photography will take an innovative approach to teaching the history of photography by integrating the design and creation of online course modules, organized around selected photographs, with a slow teaching approach. The digital modules will be designed to increase student engagement, enhance opportunities for collaboration, and deepen the knowledge­base and resources that students will draw on in their assessed work. By allowing students to cultivate knowledge of historical context outside of class, the modules will actively enlist students in advance preparation, thus freeing up class time and allowing us to focus, during in­-class interactions, on the development of mindfulness and critical concentration in looking at, and reading, photographs. Additional outcomes will include skills development in research methods, practice using digital tools to create and research image collections, and the sharing of the online modules to enhance public knowledge.

Refugee Narratives

Uditi Sen (Critical Social Inquiry, Hampshire College):  This project seeks to develop a blended learning curriculum that enables students to engage analytically and creatively with the memories of refugees in India and Pakistan. These are Hindu and Muslim refugees who often witnessed, and fled from, genocidal ethnic violence that accompanied the partition of British India into India and Pakistan. Their reminiscences, preserved as audio and video files in several online archives and blogs, offer a unique perspective, ‘from below’, of the partition of India, which is arguably the most formative event in South Asian History. They also encourage students to explore broad questions of universal relevance: how do refugees negotiate displacement? What impact does violence and trauma have upon identities? How does memory and identity interact in the telling of life stories? Oral history testimonies have often been describes as the ‘voices of the past’. However, since these testimonies are collected from refugees who not only inhabited a different time, but also a different place and culture, learning to ‘hear’ this voices is a challenge that requires not just careful study, but also creativity, analytical dexterity and empathy. It is here that traditional face to face learning in a classroom falls short of achieving the desired connection between the recorded, often disembodied voice, and the student who is set the task of hearing, analysing and understanding the narrative, in its full complexity. This project aims to develop a hybrid curriculum, entitled Refugees, Memory and History: Hearing and Interpreting Partition Voices, which blends together face to face or readings and lecture-based pedagogy with online resources and learning.

The chief goals achieves by this project will be to overcome student hesitation in creatively engaging with voices from a foreign context, to ensure collaborative learning while students work on their independent projects and to create a course website that maps the learning process and showcases the work of students. The key texts of this course, the interviews, are available in online archives. This project will also blend classroom teaching, that includes lecture, small group discussions and workshops, with online learning using wordcloud, voicethread and blogposts.

 

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Final Call for Additional Faculty Development Funds

Faculty Development grants are supported by several awards from foundations and individual donors and may be used to support the production of scholarship and art, and curriculum development during the academic year. There is a call for Hampshire faculty – look for the proposal application in your email from 4/18

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Pinterest Wins Fans in Academia

EllisForbes article on Alicia Ellis’ use of Pinterest

Ask people in academia what they think of social media, and you’re likely to hear laments about the rotting of students’ minds. An epidemic of hasty posting, sharing and up-voting creates the risk that no one wants to think anymore. But Hampshire College assistant professor Alicia E. Ellis has come up with an ingenious way of using Pinterest — yes, Pinterest! — to help her students analyze challenging novels, poems and essays.

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Congratulations 2016 Gruber Award Winners!!!

Grid_tinsonChris Tinson, Assistant Professor of African American Studies, is the 2016 winner of the David Gruber Award for Excellence in Teaching. Professor Tinson’s recommendations described his unique ability to facilitate challenging discussions and utilize student questions to guide learning. In doing so, he provides powerful opportunities for education, healing and student development. He is committed to the well-being of all his students, engaging them with relevant, real-world learning experiences in the fields of African American and Africana Studies. Professor Tinson is continuously innovating his field and teaching, posing the hard questions about race and racism in the United States and internationally to his students and peers. He has also served as a mentor and guide for student activists in the Black Lives Matter movement and the Decolonize Media Collective (DMC).

 

Grid_koehler_0

Karen Koehler, the Marilyn Levin Professor of Architectural and Art History, is the 2016 winner of the David Gruber Award for Excellence in Advising. Professor Koehler received high praise for motivating students to accomplish their best work and for creating a supportive and inspiring community of peers and mentors for her students. She sets high standards and supports her students to achieve their goals. Each of the nominations also mentioned Professor Koehler’s Institute for Curatorial Practice, an innovative program that she created to help both students at Hampshire and others outside of our institution to engage with the field of curatorial studies and get connected to internships and jobs. Her crucial support and mentoring of students extends well beyond their time at Hampshire, as many enthusiastic letters from alumni attest.