Davis Family Library Center for Teaching, Learning and Research

Working with students in research contexts presents great opportunities for learning as well as new challenges in teaching. How do we prepare students for the unknown? How can they contribute effectively to faculty projects? How do we prepare them to be effective researchers themselves? Join Will Amidon (Geology), Svea Closser (Anthropology), and Amy Morsman (History) in a discussion of the challenges they experience bringing students into their research, helping students develop their own research projects, and integrating research into a course.

Dear Colleagues, Please join us on Tuesday, March 8, 2016, in Center for Teaching, Learning & Research at 12:15 p.m. for an Academic Roundtable on Academic Advising. A few years ago, Richard Light, a leading scholar on American higher education, stated that “good advising may be the single most underestimated characteristic of a successful college experience.” And yet, there is evidence that academic advising at Middlebury and many other liberal arts colleges is not as robust as it could be.

Yes, it’s a college-wide learning goal, an FYS learning goal, and we know it’s a critically important skill, but honestly who can afford the precious class-time it takes to teach oral expression? Colleagues Shawna Shapiro (Writing and Linguistics Programs) and Sarah Stroup (Political Science) will join Oratory Now Director Dana Yeaton (Theater) in a demonstration and discussion of the many ways, large and small, we can use speaking to deepen, broaden, and in some cases even expedite, what we already do.

Background Materials available at go/roundtable

Most digital humanities approaches pursue traditional forms of scholarship by extracting a single variable from cultural texts that is already legible to scholars. Instead, this talk advocates a mostly-ignored “digital-surrealism” that uses computer-based methods to transform film texts in radical ways not previously possible. The return to a surrealist and avant-garde tradition requires a unique kind of research, which is newly possible now that humanists have made the digital turn. Lunch provided, so please RSVP at go/dla.

A conversation/workshop with Seth Denbo ‘90, American Historical Association Director of Scholarly Communication & Digital Initiatives, that uses the 2015 AHA “Guidelines for the Professional Evaluation of Digital Scholarship by Historians” as a case study for thinking about the digital liberal arts in relation to issues of professional evaluation, hiring, and promotion.

Open to faculty and administrators. Lunch served. Please RSVP at the URL below, but feel free to attend even if you forget to sign up.

Quoctrung Bui is a graphics editor at the New York Times‘s The Upshot. He has written stories on insurance, inequality, zoning, taxes, and other topics. He started his career in journalism at NPR’s Planet Money after a stint at the Federal Reserve Board.

Presenter: Dr. Bryan Alexander, Futurist and President of Bryan Alexander Consulting
Tuesday, January 23rd, 11:00-1:00, CTLR, lunch included
Register online at http://sites.middlebury.edu/ctlrjan2018/portfolio/bryan-alexander/

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.