Center for Teaching, Learning and Research

Join us for this lunch and panel discussion with Dean of Curriculum Grace Spatafora (Biology), Elizabeth Morrison (Religion), Jonathan Miller-Lane (Education Studies), Priscilla Bremser (Math), and Tanya Byker (Economics). What can we do to create a curriculum that fits our students’ needs? Discussion will begin with impressions of the new half-credit course option and midd.data’s summer bootcamp pilot.

To see the full schedule and register see - go.middlebury.edu/cts

Join us for this lunch and a panel discussion with Derek Doucet (Dean of Students), Jennifer Bates (CTLR), Maddie Hope-Lyng (Health and Wellness Education), and Jodi Litchfield, Peter Ploegman, and Dierdre Kelly (Disability Resource Center). Panelists will provide their perspective on the impact of the last few years on student learning and what challenges and opportunities our students are navigating at Middlebury now. For discussion: How can we all embrace our current students and support them in their learning, wherever they are?

Sometimes growth involves reassessing our own foundational practices and assumptions. Join us for this lunch and discussion about academic reading, facilitated by Hector Vila (Writing and Rhetoric Program). Knowing how to read is fundamental, but do we prepare our students to meet the objectives we set for reading assignments in our courses? How can we understand and communicate the value of this fundamental skill and the various reading processes our students need to use?

Join us for this lunch, panel discussion, and workshop with Julia Berazneva (Economics), Ellery Foutch (American Studies), Alex Lyford (Math), Alexis Mychajliw (Biology), and Greg Pask (Biology). Following a brief panel discussion about faculty’s experiences with teaching through play, project-based learning, research-based learning, and community-connected public humanities labs, participants will be able to meet with the panelists to discuss ideas for experimenting with their own instructional approaches.

To see the full schedule and register see - go.middlebury.edu/cts.

Students from Tara Affolter’s class will perform Act II of their “Freedom Dreaming” theatre production, which points out barriers the students have faced or witnessed in the work towards an anti-racist Middlebury. The performance (about 10 minutes) will be followed by an informal discussion with attendees over cocoa and cookies. Audience members will be asked to reflect on what they heard and how it might affect their own curricular and pedagogical choices.

To see the full schedule and register see - go.middlebury.edu/cts.

Join us for lunch and this final session of the “Freedom Dreaming” series, where participants will explore the ideas offered in the play as well as the live audience responses regarding how to make progress towards an anti-racist Middlebury. Participants will then set anti-racist goals within their own disciplines. This session is also a chance to ask for specific support or offer ideas for more programming around equity, justice, and inclusion.

To see the full schedule and register see - go.middlebury.edu/cts.

Join us for lunch and a panel discussion with Tara Affolter (Education Studies), Mikaela Taylor (Special Collections), and Renee Wells (Institutional Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion). From the plethora of DEI workshops Renee has created for faculty and staff, to the support Mikaela brings to the archival work of the Twilight Project, and then the new “Freedom Dreaming” theatre project created by Tara and her students, this panel will help fill in the picture on current efforts to create an anti-racist Middlebury.

Join midd.data for a Lightning Talk with Michelle Leftheris (Studio Art). NOWSPACE is an online, live-streaming observatory which collects video from cameras pointed at the sky across North America. In this immersive, web-based artwork, multiple streams are collaged into singular compositions of a synthesized view of the nation’s skies.

Join midd.data for a Lightning Talk with Chris Herdman (Physics). The familiar phases of matter we encounter every day—solids, liquids and gases—are well described by the laws of classical physics. Yet when matter is cooled down to very low temperatures, quantum mechanical effects can become important and transform ordinary matter into a quantum phase of matter. To discover a new phase of matter, you need to “know what it looks like”—that is, you need to identify a physical signature of the phase matter in experimental or simulation data.

Join midd.data for a Lightning Talk with Christopher Star (Classics). This talk will include a report on Star’s ongoing diachronic study of the use of the word “apocalypse” and related ideas in the press. For centuries apocalypse typically referred to the book of Revelation, the final book of the Christian Bible.