May 30, 2014

Those of us who teach literature that’s not contemporary face very specific challenges in engaging our students: for example, in teaching18^th-century British literature, I need to help my students read language that seems unfamiliar to them, and introduce them to a historical period that they rarely know anything about.

Recently, I tried a new approach: I asked my students to collaborate on editing an actual 18^th-century novella: the goal was to take the difficult and unfamiliar typography and language, and challenge my students to make it accessible for readers just like themselves. This new level of engagement with the text itself brought them into a more interactive understanding of the story, and pushed them to collaborate with each other and with me.

This workshop outlines the methodology I used to prepare my students for the work of editing and annotating an 18^th-century text. We will discuss problems that arose, and the ways that students themselves resolved the problems.

Finally, we will discuss the ultimate goal of such a collaborative project: publishing the edited text as a digital edition, on a website.

We will review some current technologies and tools for producing durable websites for presentation of edited texts.

Workshop participants are invited to share their own experiences with textual editing and collaborative digital humanities projects.

After briefly discussing the limitations of PowerPoint presentations, presenters will introduce PechaKucha and Prezi presentations as engaging alternatives. They will model a PechaKucha, sharing an example tied to civic engagement, and show a sample Prezi that underscores its dynamic and collaborative powers. The second half of the session will be dedicated to a hands-on co-creation of a Prezi presentation that explores the positive potentials of both these presentation styles.

The Service Learning Associates (SLA) program engages 8 to 10 undergraduates each semester as student leaders to their peers in service-learning courses. Each SLA works intensively with one professor to support a service-learning course that aligns with the SLA’s academic background and interests. The SLAs meet regularly with both faculty and fellow SLAs throughout the semester and attend professional development trainings facilitated by the Office of Service Learning. SLAs provide much-needed logistical support to faculty, promote service learning on campus, and lead their peers in critical reflection multiple times throughout the semester. SLAs serve as liaisons to students and the community and work in partnership with faculty on facilitating high quality service learning. This session will highlight and discuss these student-faculty partnerships, a teaching-learning model that situates students as co-educators, the challenges and successes of peer educators in service learning, and how the SLA program complements other student leadership programs on campus.

“Value: Valid Assessment of Learning in Undergraduate Education”—a report from the American Association of Colleges and Universities—rationalizes the recent fervor for “accountability” in higher education. This interactive session profiles and accounts for Quinnipiac University’s innovative Seminar sequence on the empowerment of teaching and learning as communicated across three interdependent spheres: The Individual in Local, National, and Global Communities. Session participants engage with challenging curricular content, proven pedagogical practices, and students’ VALUE added practices across discourse communities.

As the study of liberal arts, and college education, come under attack in the twenty-first century, we scramble to add new aspects to our curriculum to remain relevant to contemporary demands. In the liberal arts, and college teaching in general, professors carefully craft the class session to weave the invisible background workings of a course to provide the best possible learning experience for students.

In the face of this crisis of relevance, the classroom space itself is an ideal place to empower students by making visible the behind the scenes work that we do in the classroom. By making this work visible we are empowering liberal arts students with the language necessary to understand their active role in the classroom. In this session I will discuss the classroom as a space to empower students to better understand what it is they do in the liberal arts classroom, while also sharing with students the language that they will need to talk about their relevant and transferable college experiences.

Our University has renewed its vision for better integration of the digital environment to meet curricular and program goals, and to improve student learning. Since the inception of the Office of Digital Learning (ODL) in fall 2013, there has been a revitalized collaborative effort between ODL and I.T. to enhance digital fluencies among faculty. When faculty members take on the role of “teacher as learner,” we observe 5 main challenges:

1. How to create a paradigm shift in the application of pedagogy principles for the synchronous and asynchronous online environments?
2. How to take account of anxiety as a factor when building courses for the online environment - the role of affect when the teacher becomes learner?
3. How to strike the right balance in managing student expectations when switching between face-to-face and online contexts?
4. How to maintain realistic expectations about the workload involved in creating, delivering, and sustaining an online presence?
5. How to create better infrastructural support for faculty, regardless of whether they are experts or new to the online environment?

We will use a recent case study to facilitate discussion of these challenges, and learn from the roundtable attendees’ experience in their respective institutions. The case study will focus on the process of building interactive learning using Lecture Capture tools to achieve the course goals and teaching objectives in two different disciplines. Observations from this study will be used to articulate the complexities involved in course redesign, and to develop effective, solution-oriented strategies for faculty development.