Celebration of Teaching Spotlight: Junior Faculty Teaching Fellows

Posted by Rhett Mcdaniel on Monday, April 16, 2012 in Events.

The CFT, in conjunction with the Graduate School, invite you to join us on Wednesday, May 2nd in celebrating teaching on the Vanderbilt campus, including the 2011-12 Junior Faculty Teaching Fellows:

Jon Edd, Mechanical Engineering
Humberto Garcia, English
Amanda Goodwin, Political Science
Emily Nacol, Political Science
Evelyn Patterson, Sociology
David Petrain, Classics
Paul, Stob, Communication Studies
Ioana Suvaina, Mathematics

Emily Nacol, Assistant Professor in the department of Political Science will be a featured speaker at the Celebration. She’ll speak about her experiences as a Fellow:

“Being a Junior Faculty Teaching Fellow this academic year has been extremely helpful and enjoyable for me. Most of all, the fellowship has helped me regularly set aside time to sit with other junior faculty, CFT staff, and senior faculty to reflect on my teaching philosophy and practices. These conversations across academic disciplines are fun and useful, and I’m struck by how much we have in common as teachers, even though our research diverges quite dramatically. Classroom visits, consultations with the great CFT staff, and syllabus workshops with staff and peers have improved my teaching in the short-term, most certainly. I always walk out of these gatherings with new approaches or strategies that I can try right away in my classroom, and these small changes have yielded serious improvements for my students and me. But, I’ve also been able to think long-term about how I might transform my current repertoire of classes by incorporating experiential or service-learning components, group work, and new kinds of source materials. Finally, the support from my peers and Joe Bandy in our syllabus workshop helped me design a new graduate seminar and develop more confidence as a teacher of a core course in political theory, my discipline. My experiences as a JFTF have improved my teaching in tangible ways this year, and I am walking out with a store of new ideas to try in years to come.”