Archive for category Teaching
Changing Teaching one Fro Yo and Bánh Mì at a Time
I’m tremendously excited to announce Eat Talk Teach Run, a new project I’ve been working on at Emory for the last few months. Over the summer, my colleague, Howard Chiou, and I found ourselves thinking about grad student teaching. For many years, the Laney Graduate School has had a three-day event (TATTO) focusing on pedagogy that all of its students are required to complete, in addition to pedagogy courses in one’s own department. The advantage of this program is that it puts students from different disciplines into the same seminars to discuss teaching on a general level, being coached by faculty members from across the disciplines. But once you’ve done TATTO—typically at the beginning of your second year in grad school—the conversation stops.
Continuing the conversation about teaching across the Laney Graduate School is what we wanted to do. Furthermore, we wanted to recognize that some of the most innovating teaching is likely to come from those people who are experimenting in the classroom—experimenting per force because it is their first time. This is, of course, the graduate students.
Our solution is to put grad students front and center. Eat Talk Teach Run promises to be a monthly event, featuring lightning talks (4-minutes, tops!) by graduate students about an innovative assignment, classroom technique, or observation. We’re going to eschew the typical academic thing and not have any Q&A afterward. Instead we’re hoping to have conversation develop organically among the participants. How do you do that?
Well, we have a couple of theories, but the one we’re trying to begin is making people stand in line. For food. We all know that grad students love a free lunch, but we’ve upped the ante a bit by getting outside the normal university food vendors and have contracted to bring in frozen yogurt from a local store, Yogurt Tap, and bánh mì from our local ethnic food haven, Buford Highway. We hope that the food gets people excited enough to wait a bit and talk about teaching or the presentations with whoever they end up next to. The whole event takes less than an hour, and then people can run back to the lab or library. It’s an experiment. And we feel almost as if we’ve conned someone, but we’ve got the Laney Graduate School funding us.
Along with recognizing that grad students can teach very well, we’re also hoping to recognize the importance of learning across the disciplines. We’re working to get scientists, social science students, and humanities people involved. That’s one of the exciting things about working with Howard, who is not only a current grad student (I having lost street cred some three years ago), but is a current MD/PhD student. We’ve found that at least one humanist and one scientist have a lot to learn from one another.
As I said, it’s experimental in many ways. But perhaps the most is the fact that we’ve got a grad school that is willing to recognize the importance of graduate student teaching. We look forward to reporting on the outcomes.
Introduction to Digital Humanities
I was thrilled to learn this summer that I would be teaching again in the fall. Both the English department (where I’ve taught previously) and the Library (where I’m a CLIR Postdoctoral Fellow) had supported the idea during the previous year, but this is the first that we’ve been able to make it work out. I was even happier that the English department was willing to support my teaching “Introduction to Digital Humanities” as a junior-level course. Not only do I continue to work on digital scholarship in the classroom as well as during the rest of my fellowship duties, but I got a chance to design a new course.
It’s always struck me as dishonest that my syllabi don’t have “Acknowledgments” sections like books or some journal articles. These courses tend to have obvious lines of evolution. I had some clear inspirations as I was working, including courses by Meagan Timney, Jeff McClurken, John Theibault, Michelle Dalmau, and many more. Both Ryan Cordell and Paul Fyfe were designing similar syllabi at the same time as me, and I corresponded with each of them individually about his ideas and mine. Others wanting to go about designing a digital humanities class need to be aware of the two tremendous resources that are Lisa Spiro‘s “Digital Humanities Education” Zotero group and the CUNY Digital Humanities Initiative’s collection of syllabi. Lisa’s presentation at Digital Humanities 2011 was especially useful for me to hear as a preliminary to most of this work. In beginning to design one of the assignments, I realized that I needed to know more about textual studies than I already did, and I asked for assistance in a previous post and at DH Answers, where several friends weighed in. Finally, Erin Sells shared with me her assignment for mapping novels.
There appear to be as many ways to teach DH as there are definitions of the subject. Along with reading some of those definitions—print and blogged—I’ve decided to organize the class around a few different projects. We’ll begin with geospatial work, building an interactive map of Mrs. Dalloway. The next big project is a cross-campus collaboration between my class and four others that are reading House of Leaves this semester: Paul Benzon (Temple U), Mark Sample (George Mason U), Erin Templeton (Converse College), and Zach Whalestoe Whalen (U of Mary Washington). Our students will be reading the book at the same time; we will have some joint Skype sessions between the classrooms; and we’ll be attempting to build something as convoluted as the House itself, which Mark has already blogged about. My initial inspiration for asking for people to participate in this project was just to see if it could be done. And then Mark’s post on sharing in the digital humanities solidified the idea. What this project will investigate is the degree to which digital networks can change our experience of reading a print text, albeit one that resists being comprehensible by a single reader.
The last assignment for the semester will tackle Carol Ann Duffy’s poetry. We’re fortunate to have her papers in our Library. In these papers is a letter about her 1999 volume, The World’s Wife. She is writing to her publisher to explain why she taking the volume from one press to another. In explaining her reasons, she mentions her belief that the volume is very different from the previous ones that she’s written. We’ll spend the last month of the semester testing this assertion—first with close reading and then with text analysis. For a final project, the students and I will write a joint paper about our findings, an assignment inspired by Gideon Burton’s recent ebook project.
As the number of links here should make quite plain, the creation of the syllabus was very much a joint effort. That’s just setting the stage for what I anticipate will very much be a collaborative experience with my students. It’s going to be a semester-long experiment, which is the best thing I can imagine doing at the moment.
The syllabus itself is available after the jump, and you’re welcome to watch the course website for developments.
#Lazyweb: Textual Studies Primer
One of the things that I love about Twitter is the #lazyweb feature: the ability to ask the world to help you find the answer to questions. Unfortunately my query today needs a bit more space to explain. And it’s not that I’m lazy in this case, it’s just that I’m short on time and I know that many of my colleagues will be able to quickly point me in the right direction.
I’m super excited to be teaching again this fall, and even more excited to be teaching an “Introduction to Digital Humanities.” It’s the first time a course like this will be taught at Emory, and it’s going to give me a great chance to dive more deeply into aspects of the field that I’m less familiar with. As I’ve been turning over the course in my mind, I’ve known that I’ve wanted to do one or more projects with the students, probably using our special collections, which tend to be quite strong in particular swaths of literature. This week I sat down with Liz Chase, one of our special collections librarians, and brainstormed. We came up with a great project involving our holdings of Carol Ann Duffy’s notebooks. In short, we want to do some comparisons between how she writes in her 1999 volume, The World’s Wife, and her previous volumes. We’re interested in thematic material, vocabulary she uses, poetic styles, and so forth. But as I’ve been working to design the project, I’ve come to realize that the students’ work (to say nothing of my teaching) will be improved by the inclusion of some readings on textual scholarship along these lines. But I don’t know this field at all.
What’s more, I’ve been trying to think about what sort of software we might most profitably use to help push our analysis after creating a dataset of the texts. I’m guessing we’ll want to represent word counts, word clouds, line structures, and more. My first thought is SEASR, but I’m not familiar with the tool and I’m not sure if it’s overkill or underkill or totally off the mark. I can always use Wordle, but I would like to have more options. And perhaps if I really knew this field of scholarship then it would be easier for me to know which tools I should be using.
What I really need, then, is a suggestion of books or articles that I should read so that our class proceeds thoughtfully on the project with an understanding of what’s been done in the past. Any tool suggestions would be welcome as well.
THAT’s a Wrap: THATCamp Jr.
Posted by Brian in Teaching, Technology on July 27, 2011
Last month I attended THATCamp Prime and along with re-connecting with colleagues at The Well and making new friends throughout the three days, I left with a mission: THATCamp Jr. I was more than a little excited. David Morgen, Leeann Hunter, Raf Alvarado, and I had a plan. David and I had kids, and we’d drafted Pete Rorabaugh to bring his kids along too. We were going to make a movie and—following the THATCamp and unconference model—let the kids be in charge. What could possibly go wrong?
Of course, it’s possible that plenty could have gone wrong, with the main thing simply being the difficulty of getting three dads (two of them single fathers) to find a time when vacations, work, and other responsibilities made it possible to try something new and novel. While some last minute dissertation edits tried to interfere, we found a weekend, invited as many people as we could, and just did it.
We got our eight kids (ages ranging from 5-13) together on a Friday afternoon to hash out themes and characters. David’s and Pete’s kids had already had a chance to discuss what they wanted the movie to be about and they’d reached a conclusion that appealed to mine as well: zombies. Much excitement ensued at this point.
We distributed the eight kids around the Emory Writing Center, where David is Assistant Director, and got them to start thinking about possible plot points. Some kids drew pictures of their characters; others created possible scenarios; all of them started talking about props. David, Pete, and I were joined by Leeann and Katy Crowther, allowing us to give individual attention to most of the kids and ask them questions about the ideas that they were rattling off. After everyone had some time to brainstorm (pun completely intended), we circled the wagons and gave everyone a chance to share their ideas. Continuing to talk with the kids, we coalesced several suggestions into some workable set pieces, getting a storyline together using something from each child. At the end of about two hours, we had a good sense of the props we needed and the costumes that everyone would bring to the next day’s filming. Our family was in charge of ninja swords, police badges, limes, and plastic food (trust me on those last two).
The next day, we met bright and early (9am) with our props and good attitudes. Since it’s summer in Atlanta, we decided to start with filming the outside portion. David had scouted a great spot for one portion of the film and when we arrived, we found everything we needed within 100 feet. The only problem was that we were near some massive part of Emory’s physical plant that created so much noise it would be impossible to capture any spoken audio. In true THATCamp fashion, however, we decided to roll with that sucker punch and make a silent film. Doing so would eliminate the need for the kids to remember lines.
As we started filming the scenes we asked the kids how they thought things should play out, who should enter scenes from where, and what their characters would do. We started with a series of shots of the ninja grocery store (stick with me here) and the beginning of some battles. The kids were having so much fun being ninjas, and the dads were having so much fun thinking of different angles we’d like to have in our dailies that we spent a lot of time on the first group of scenes. We eventually moved on to the zombies—although the convincing it took for some kids to shed their ninja gear for zombie lurches was not insignificant. As the morning wore on, it got progressively harder for the kids to reshoot scenes and for people some (read, my kids [and me]) to stay on task and focused.
Of course, keeping focused is perhaps not in the purview of a THATCamp. After all, shouldn’t we be free to un-organize ourselves? Still, we all had a goal, and I like to think that we fathers were there to play the role that caffeine and fructose perform at most other THATCamps. Eventually, though, we needed some real fructose. We were all glad to get a break for lunch somewhere not too far after noon. At that point we’d finished all the outdoors scenes, and the two indor scenes proved quick to do. The filming was finished at 2pm…
Celebrations included brownies, laughter, large draughts of water, and some bonus kids courtesy of Katy and her family.
One of the oaths that I took outside the CHNM’s Research 1 Building was that when it came time to edit the film that I would put in as many terrible iMovie special effects as the kids saw necessary. I’d had in my mind that we would finish filming, import the clips into iMovie, and all sit around the computer editing collaboratively. The absurdity of that vision was much more apparent (even to me!) when we had eleven people in a room, all of them wanting to type on the computers that were already there. We decided not to attempt the editing that day. At a remove, this decision makes a lot of sense when I remember that our vision of THATCamp Jr evolved when I realized my kids aren’t ready to learn programming, even in Alice or Scratch. David, Pete, and I decided that we would try to get everyone a copy of the raw footage and then work on editing in our own homes.
For a number of reasons, that hasn’t happened. (#1: As big as storage media is these days, video files are still larger than is convenient. #2: We were already quite charmed to have pulled off 8 hours of collaboration. Asking for more is like asking for a unicorn hood ornament on the Lamborghini Countach your cousin gave you for your birthday.)
Once again, we hit a potential snag. We’d done the hard part of our project (see my incredibly clever “herding cats” comment above), but we didn’t have anything to show for it. Fortunately a champion emerged out of the mist at this point, and David began editing the files. He had the advantage, of course, of everyone discussing the vision of the film as we were making it. But that doesn’t do the editing for you, and David worked on several versions of the film before reaching what is for now the final cut. (I’d still like to get a raw copy of the footage and see what sort of a remix I can achieve.)
It’s with a slight quaver in my voice and a tear in my eye that I’m pleased to present…
Fish & Chips: Zombies vs Ninjas
A THATCamp Jr Project
All of this was done at the cost of approximately $15 for supplies and about $8 for parking. Our gear included one Canon camcorder that is two or three generations old, two Flip cameras, a DSLR, and iMovie.
What did I learn? I learned that working with young adults in college has got nothing on working with kids…especially your own kids. These kids were so creative and willing to try new things. They were also ridiculously high energy and wore us out.
I also learned that it’s really possible to convert something from a Twitter “Wouldn’t it be great if we did this?” to a completed project. I think it’s safe to say that we’re all tremendously proud of our kids, and I had a great time working with David, Pete, Leeann (who edited her behind-the-scenes footage into a great montage), and Katy.
What did our kids learn? I can’t speak for David’s and Pete’s kids, but I think mine would say that they learned how to fight vampires, how to film fights, and how to break a katana. Well worth a Friday afternoon and a Saturday morning.
What’s next for THATCamp Jr? At the risk of doing the predictable thing, I’m going to say that it depends on you. What will you try with your kids, your nieces and nephews, or the children you volunteer with? Pete, David, and I haven’t figured out what the next THATCamp Jr Atlanta will look like, but you can be sure that you and yours will be welcome. This is the South, after all, y’all.
Announcing the THATCamp Junior Dates
I’m pleased to announce that our THATCamp Junior project—making a film with our kids—will take place on Friday and Saturday, 8-9 July, in Atlanta. We know it’s not much advanced notice, but we invite others to come and play along with us. Get in touch with me via Twitter if you’re interested!
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