Academic Development Day
Once every semester, the College devotes a day to faculty discussions about relevant curricular issues and other faculty development activities. If you have a suggestion for an Academic Development Day breakout session or keynote, please contact us.
Academic Development Day
Tuesday, October 11, 2011
8:30 – 3:30
8:30 Coffee & pastries
9:00 “Decoding the Disciplines” workshop
We’ll start the day with something a little different: a three-hour workshop led by David Pace and Arlene Díaz (both in history at Indiana University -- see bios below). Pace and Díaz are part of a research team called the History Learning Project that investigates the challenges of teaching disciplinary thinking.
Their research asserts that many of the most serious obstacles to student learning are often invisible to their instructors because for these experts many of the steps required in thinking within a discipline have become so automatic that they are invisible. The Decoding the Disciplines approach provides a systematic process for identifying such bottlenecks to learning and for devising strategies for helping students overcome them.
The workshop will give an overview of the “decoding” process – including videos of faculty working through the process – and give you an opportunity to apply this approach to elements within your own courses.
To help prepare for the workshop, Díaz and Pace are interested in hearing about the bottlenecks you encounter in teaching disciplinary thinking (i.e., places where significant numbers of students find it difficult to master something that is important for success in the class). They ask that you email them one of your own bottlenecks at dpace44@gmail.com. See here for a handout from them that further explains what they mean by a disciplinary “bottleneck” and gives some examples.
12:00 Lunch
1:00 Creating Inclusive Classrooms
Our afternoon session has been organized in response to recent concerns students have raised about the ways faculty deal with issues of diversity in the classroom. This past spring, nearly 500 students signed a petition calling attention to what students see as faculty’s lack of preparation to deal with diverse students, diverse classroom content, and charged classroom conversations.
It’s obviously troubling to hear this kind of feedback from our students, and so we’d like to use our afternoon session both to get a better handle on what the concerns of our students are and also to begin a conversation about what we, as faculty, can do to create more inclusive learning environments for our students.
We’ll begin with a panel of students who have offered to talk about their own experiences. We’ll then break into small groups to talk about what we as faculty can do to create more inclusive classroom environments. Following a brief talk about some of the research that can inform our thinking on this question, Katie Conboy and Liza Talusan will explain some of the institutional initiatives underway that are meant to help support faculty in better meeting this challenge from our students.
Before Tuesday, you might also skim through Untold Stories, a publication out of the Office of Intercultural Affairs that captures some of our students’ thoughts about diversity, collected from a survey distributed last spring. This might serve to inform our conversation on Tuesday.
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Arlene Díaz is Associate Professor of Latin American History at Indiana University. She has served as the Director of the Latino Studies Program, as the I.U. History Department’s Director of Undergraduate Studies in 2003-2007, and as a member of the College of Arts and Sciences Committee on Undergraduate Education. She was a Freshman Learning Project fellow in 2006, and one of the founding members and principal investigators of the History Learning Project. In addition to her publications in history, she has published articles in the scholarship of teaching and learning in The Journal of American History and The National Teaching and Learning Forum and has presented workshop on Decoding the Disciplines in the United States, the United Kingdom, and Australia.
David Pace is an emeritus professor of European History at Indiana University, co-founder of the Freshman Learning Project, and one of the directors of the History Learning Project. He is a fellow in the Carnegie Academy for the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning and the Mack Center for Inquiry on Teaching and Learning and has received the American Historical Association’s Eugene Asher Distinguished Teaching Award. He is the co-author of Decoding the Disciplines: Helping Students Learn Disciplinary Ways of Thinking and has published articles on the scholarship of teaching and learning in The American Historical Review, The Journal of American History, Arts and Humanities, National Teaching and Learning Forum, History Teacher, College Teaching, American Historical Association Perspectives, and To Improve the Academy. Over the past six years he has been one of the directors of the History Learning Project.