Center for Teaching, Learning and Research

We invite all members of the Middlebury College community, guests, and members of the public as we celebrate the academic and creative endeavors of Middlebury students. Friday will feature oral presentations, poster presentations and displays throughout the day in McCardell Bicentennial Hall. Student presenters include all four classes at Middlebury and all fields of academic scholarship.

A full schedule of activities can be found online at http://www.middlebury.edu/academics/resources/ctlr/students/uro/symposi…

Presenter: Jim Ralph, Rehnquist Prof of American History & Culture and Bill Koulopoulos, Director of Academic Technology
Friday, January 26th, 11:00-1:00, CTLR, lunch included
Register online at http://sites.middlebury.edu/ctlrjan2018/portfolio/slow-teaching-jim-ral…

How can digital history projects exist in the college classroom—and share knowledge to the broader public from that space? The Berkeley Revolution: A digital archive of one city’s transformation in the late-1960s & 1970s is a website and collective project that emerged from an honors undergraduate seminar in American Studies at UC-Berkeley, “The Bay Area in the Seventies,” taught by Scott Saul in the spring of 2017.

Scott Saul, professor of English at University of California-Berkeley, will discuss the development of Chapter & Verse, a books-and-arts podcast he hosts. The podcast is sponsored by UC-Berkeley’s Doreen B. Townsend Center for the Humanities. It probes the cultural imagination—what Joan Didion once called the stories we tell ourselves to live—by delving into novels, nonfiction, poems, music, film, and other touchstones of our culture, with an eye to the spells they cast and the questions they raise.

Join Christian Tanja from the Schwarzman Scholars Program to learn about this post-graduate fellowship to China. Open to international and US students, the language of instruction is English. The Schwarzman scholarship, inspired by the Rhodes scholarship, is a program designed to help future leaders meet the challenges of the 21st century and beyond by preparing them to better understand China’s culture, economy, governance, and motivations.

Workshop leader Gordon Uno, Professor of Biology at the University of Oklahoma, is a renowned educator and leader in promoting active learning. His training and research are in plant biology, but the workshop topics, examples, and methods span the STEM disciplines. The two sessions (am and pm on Friday) focus on evidence-based, active-learning methods and other high-impact practices appropriate for those just starting out as well as seasoned veterans.

Workshop leader Gordon Uno, Professor of Biology at the University of Oklahoma, is a renowned educator and leader in promoting active learning. His training and research are in plant biology, but the workshop topics, examples, and methods span the STEM disciplines. The two sessions (am and pm on Friday) focus on evidence-based, active-learning methods and other high-impact practices appropriate for those just starting out as well as seasoned veterans.

Presenters: Prof. Will Amidon (Geology), Sallie Sheldon (Biology), and Rob Moeller (Psychology)
Thursday, January 18th, 11:00-12:15, CTLR, followed by lunch
Register online at http://sites.middlebury.edu/ctlrjan2018/portfolio/will-amidon/

In the fall of 2014, Wellesley College launched a shadow grading pilot in which first-year, first-semester grades are not included on students’ official transcripts or in the calculation of their college GPAs. Professor Cuba, whose research on college students informed the decision to adopt this policy, will discuss the rationale for instituting shadow grading, the process for implementing shadow grading, and Wellesley’s assessment of how this new policy has affected students’ transition to college, course enrollments and grades.