Programs. Projects. Workshops. Seminars. Proposals.

Faculty Crafting the Teaching and Learning Commons:  Workshops, Seminars and Other Collaborations

“I was so happy to read Beloved.  I teach Quince Duncan and magic realism, and I had been meaning to read Toni Morrison’s work for a long time.  [Reading Beloved] made me think about magic realism and African American novels.” (Georges Nana, professor, World Literature and Languages, Workshop Participant:   Beloved:  Documenting Moments in Crisis and Change Workshop, Summer 2012). 

Since its founding in 2008, TRRC and faculty from across the campus have come together to design and participate in interdisciplinary summer workshops and seminars.  These workshops have produced such “tangibles” as the beginnings of a multidisciplinary food studies minor as well as department-based interdisciplinary courses and seminars.

But more to the commons-building point, faculty from the education studies, comparative women’s studies and political science departments imagined the inaugural year of the Ida B. Wells-Barnett Speakers Series experience. The faculty of the sociology, English, and biology departments gathered one summer to ponder:  How do we tell the stories of our disciplines using digital media?  Are some of us telling the same story?

Faculty of the computer science, political science, and philosophy departments spent summer days talking, eating, reading, and listening to each other sort through Beloved, finding their own intellectual homes in the text.  Postmodern examinations of discourses of illness and body met the natural science researchers of illness in a racial disparities seminar.

The projects/initiatives listed below are the invitations faculty extended to other faculty to help build a vibrant and exciting intellectual space for faculty and students. These links remain “active” as faculty add material and continue conversations beyond the initial workshop.

So please stay tuned!

Past Departmental Workshops

2013 -- Disability, Identity and Teaching," an interactive workshop with Stephanie L. Kerschbaum, Ph.D
2012 -- Beloved, Food Studies
2011 -- Food Literacy, Storytelling: A Tool for Interdisciplinary Collaboration
2010 - 2011 -- Text, Technology, and Pedagogy Faculty Development, Seminars

Funded Interdisciplinary Seminars, Modules and Departmental Workshops (Mellon, Title III)