Leslie Bussert (Library), Amanda Hornby (Library), & Gray Kochhar-Lindgren (CUSP.)
We accomplished the aforementioned goals and more. In January Amanda and Leslie co-facilitated a crowded and lively discussion group at the 2007 American Library Association Midwinter Conference on "Using New Media in Information Literacy Instruction". In June, Amanda presented on "Multiple Modalities of Learning" at the Center for University Studies & Programs faculty retreat, which addressed new media in higher education. We also formed and continue to contribute to our Pacific Northwest New Media Working Group blog (http://newmediawg.blogspot.com/), where we keep track of relevant resources, conferences, or other new media happenings in the industry or higher education. Gray co-presented a workshop on new media with Melanie Kill and Ron Krabill for the PIPS; co-taught a course with Ron on "The Public Humanities and the Digital University," and published "Gesamtdatenwerk: Peter Greenaway, New Media, and the Question of Archetypes," Quadrant: The Journal of the C.G. Jung Foundation for Analytical Psychology (Winter 2007) and "The Call of TelePhonics: Reading, Technology, and Literature@yes-yes.edu" Hypermedia Joyce Studies 8/1 (2007). <http://hjs.cuni.cz/>. Both of these essays have new media components to them.
Bruce Burgett (IAS), Martha Groom (IAS), & Becky Rosenberg (Teaching and Learning Center).
In 2006-07, we formed a teaching circle focused on our tasks as co-directors of the first year of the Project for Interdisciplinary Pedagogy (PIP). During the course of the year, we met to plan for the four PIP workshops, to interview and select our 2007-08 cohort of PIP fellows, and to coordinate various other activities, including Julie Thompson Klein's visit to campus in November 2006. All of these tasks involved our collaborative reading and reflection, both among the three of us and with the larger cohort of PIP mentors and fellows, on issues related to interdisciplinarity and interdisciplinary pedagogy. In September 2007, Burgett and Groom will follow up these activities by participating on a panel organized with two of the 2006-07 fellows (Sanchez and Starkweather) at the annual conference of the Association for Integrative Studies. The three of us will also continue to co-direct PIP in 2007-08.
This has been a very productive year for our New Media Teaching Circle, comprised of librarians and faculty with shared interests in new media and its effects on teaching and learning in higher education. Our goals were to use the teaching circle to discuss research and educational applications or effects of new media; to create a bibliography of new media resources; and to collaborate on facilitating some sort of new media presentation or conversation among the UW Bothell community (tentatively scheduled for Fall 2007 in concert with a Teaching and Learning Center professional development seminar).
Mary E. Abrums (Nursing), Kanta Kochhar-Lindgren (IAS), &
"Best Practices in Teaching Global Health"
Our work together this year focused on two major goals:
Best Practices--teaching about global health in the classroom.
Kari and Mary taught the course Global and Local Health Inequalities: Practices and Interventions, BIS 493/BHLTH 497, as an inter-departmental course, for the first time. We spent some of our efforts in the teaching circle focusing on "best practices" for this course. Co-teaching across departments was new for us, and Kanta helped us brainstorm and create assignments and course pedagogy. Our goal was to make this complex content come alive for the students, helping the students to better understand the lives and health-related issues of people around the world. Two specific accomplishments that arose from these conversations:
- Feb. 5, 2007: "Oppression and the Gendered Body"-performance-based learning in the classroom around women's health issues related to cultural oppression.
- March 5, 2007: "Global Health Lecture, Poster Session & Reception" (campus invited)
- Guest lecture: "The Point is to Intervene: The AIDS Epidemic and Prevention Efforts," Dr. Shari Dworkin, Dept. of Psychiatry, HIV Center for Clinical and Behavioral Studies, Columbia University.
- Student poster session on "Global health issues and interventions."
Best Practices--sharing global health conversations across the campus.
The purpose of this initiative was to offer the campus a forum to explore global health issues. Kanta, Kari and I planned and implemented the following forum:
Mapping Global Health Conversations at UWB, May 4 & 5, 2007.
- UWB Student and Faculty Poster Session on Global Health Issues
- UWB Faculty and Student Panel Discussion: "Teaching Issues and Approaches Around Health Disparities Locally and Globally.
- Resources on and off Campus (Library)
- Empty Space Theatre-- Body Maps
- John Sullivan workshop on the environment and global health
This forum was sponsored by UWB Center for University Studies and Programs, UWB Nursing, Initiative for Creativity, Performance and Research, and the Diversity Enhancement Project. Both efforts were well received by students and faculty. The course became a very dynamic course, greatly enhanced by the "best practices" that involved both the humanities/performance and the analysis and creativity required in other assignments, including the poster presentations.
In the "Mapping Global Health Conversations" 2-day forum, the posters and panel discussion provided students and faculty with opportunities for lively conversations around teaching global health. Several international students offered particularly strong voices to the conversation. The Body Maps performance enhanced the meaning-centered learning around global health challenges; and the John Sullivan workshop on the relationship of the environment to global health was well received.
Sundar Balakrishnan (Business), James M. Miller (Business), & Gowri Shankar (Business.)
Our teaching circle has concentrated on sharing our MBA teaching experiences. We have discussed teaching techniques that have worked and also not worked with our graduate students and we have learned from each other teaching methods that are successful across our three disciplines (Accounting, Finance, and Marketing). We also used the teaching circles to discuss how to incorporate our stock market research into our courses.
We would gladly participate in future research and teaching circles. For two years now, we found the circles to be valuable meetings that created an accountability and discipline crucial to efficiently completing our work.
Eric Stewart (IAS), Elizabeth Thomas (IAS) & Ron Krabill (IAS)
This teaching circle was first conceptualized in the spring of 2006 out of a desire for faculty teaching in the degree options of Community Psychology (CP) and Society, Ethics & Human Behavior (SEB) to communicate closely with each other as the CP option was instituted at UWB. Foremost among our goals was to ensure the interdisciplinarity of both options, rather than splitting psychology-oriented content and faculty out of SEB, leaving SEB without significant influence from the discipline of psychology and CP with nearly exclusive influence from that discipline.
Following the formation of the teaching circle in autumn of 2006, the circle met throughout the year to discuss both specific assignments and courses being taught by teaching circle members and the broader curricular directions of both options. We believe these conversations played a crucial role in integrating the new CP option into the wider structures of IAS while maintaining the interdisciplinarity of both options.
Martha Groom (IAS), Rebecca Price (IAS), Rob Turner(IAS), Warren Gold (IAS), Dave Stokes (IAS), Dan Jaffe(IAS), Christy Cherrier (IAS), Peter Littig(IAS), Cinnamon Hillyard(IAS), Mike Gillespie (IAS) & Nicole Hoover (Quantitative Skills Center.)
We had a productive year focused on envisioning new science programs that can develop within IAS, with crosslinks to other areas at UWB. Our group met at least monthly, and often every other week throughout the year to discuss potential directions in math and science in IAS, with subgroups meeting at irregular intervals. We tackled a number of issues small and large, including how to coordinate labs and pedagogical issues, but primarily addressed how to improve the BS in Environmental Science, how to redirect and strengthen the existing concentration in STE, and, following release of the ASTP report, how we in IAS might best deliver curricula that were revealed in that report as potential priority areas for our campus. Our discussions were wide ranging, but focused by the close of winter quarter on developing four degree programs that would focus largely on science to expand on IAS's existing efforts in integrating science across the curriculum.
The first area would involve re-engineering the BS in Environmental Science to make it effective by including new courses, rethinking the requirements for the major, and contemplating adding distinct options for the major. The second area involves splitting STE into two new programs-a BA in Environmental Studies, and an option (or perhaps separate BA) in Science, Math, and Technology Studies. Given our existing strengths, the BA in environmental studies is an area we expect to be able to develop rapidly with few new resources, while SMTS will require greater visioning of its curriculum, given the very new arrival of faculty with significant interests in this area (and SMTS is likely to require at least one additional hire to be launched successfully). We also discussed creating a new degree in Life Sciences. The first three programs are expected to initiate in the 2008-9 academic year, while the life sciences degree would be developed over a longer time scale, with the expectation that it would involve collaboration with other programs at UWB. All of our work over the coming year (2007-8) will focus on preparing an NOI, as well as full proposals for the Environmental Studies and SMTS areas, and extensive consultation both within IAS and across campus to harness the full potential for each of the four proposed areas for expansion.
Our efforts will continue over the coming year, but we were successful in making our case to the IAS faculty regarding the desirability of these areas for program growth. We feel the next steps require more cross campus consultation, and expect that our specific plans may alter through this process.