News Category
A Reflection on Facilitating Conversations on Difference and Power
Sep. 26, 2014—By Brielle Harbin, CFT Graduate Teaching Fellow Conversations about race are often fraught. The remains of past hurts or misunderstandings fill our words with emotion and implicit meanings. Peeling back these layers often reveals hurt, hurt caused by feeling misunderstood or invalidated. These hurts dwell in all of us, even when they go unengaged. We...
Upcoming Faculty Teaching Visit with Ifeoma Nwankwo, Associate Professor of English Thursday, September 25th
Sep. 18, 2014—ENGL 271: Caribbean Literature Ifeoma Nwankwo is an associate professor of English and founding director of Voices from our AmericaTM, an international public scholarship project linking academic research, K-12 curriculum development, and community engagement. In ENGL 271, Ifeoma brings together literature, film and music produced by Caribbean descended communities in the U.S., Canada, England and...
Upcoming Faculty Teaching Visit with William H. Robinson, Associate Professor of Electrical Engineering Wednesday, September 3rd
Aug. 27, 2014—EECE 277: FPGA Design William H. Robinson is an associate professor and associate department chair of Electrical Engineering as well as a recent recipient of an NSF award to examine the critical factors that leave African Americans as one of the most underrepresented racial groups in engineering faculty positions. In EECE 277, he helps students...
Upcoming Faculty Teaching Visit with Larry Isaac, Gertrude Conaway Vanderbilt Professor of Sociology Tuesday September 2nd
Aug. 26, 2014—SOC 216: Change and Social Movements in the Sixties Larry Isaac is the Gertrude Conaway Vanderbilt Professor of Sociology and editor of the American Sociological Review. In SOC 216, he guides upper level undergraduates toward a greater understanding of social movements in the 1960s. During the teaching visit, Larry’s students will be considering the Nashville...
Interested in the Digital Humanities? Apply to be a HASTAC Scholar – Deadline Sept. 1
Aug. 19, 2014—by Derek Bruff, CFT Director If you’re a graduate student in the humanities interested in exploring the intersections of teaching, scholarship, and technology, please consider applying to be a HASTAC Scholar for 2014-15. The deadline for applications is September 1st. HASTAC (pronounced “haystack”) is the Humanities, Arts, Science, and Technology Advanced Collaboratory, a global network...
An Introduction to Evidence-Based Undergraduate STEM Teaching – Starts October 6th
Aug. 18, 2014—by Derek Bruff, CFT Director I’m very pleased to announce that the free, seven-week, online course “An Introduction to Evidence-Based Undergraduate STEM Teaching” is now open for enrollment. The course is designed to provide graduate students and post-doctoral fellows in the STEM disciplines (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) who are planning college and university faculty...
Reflections from SoTL Scholar Abbey Mann
Aug. 15, 2014—“Scholarly teaching is what every one of us should be engaged in every day that we are in classroom, in our office with students, tutoring, lecturing, conducting discussions, all the roles we play pedagogically. Our work as teachers should meet the highest scholarly standards of groundedness, of openness, of clarity and complexity. But it is...
From the Director: Teaching, Difference, and Power
Aug. 14, 2014—by Derek Bruff, CFT Director Several years ago, I read about a line of research in mathematics education that immediately captured my attention. The research indicated that reminding female students of their gender before they took a math exam tended to decrease their exam performance in a statistically significant way. The reminder could be very...
Coordination and Coherence: Behind the Scenes of a Multi-Institution MOOC
Aug. 7, 2014—by Derek Bruff, CFT Director, cross-posted from Derek’s blog, Agile Learning Back in November, I announced that the Vanderbilt University Center for Teaching would be part of a $750,000, three-year, multi-institution National Science Foundation supporting the creation of two MOOCs (massive open online courses) on evidence-based teaching practices for future STEM (science, technology, engineering, and...
The Year in Review 2013-14
Jul. 15, 2014—by Derek Bruff, CFT Director Before we get too much closer to the start of the school year and all the orientations, workshops, and seminars the CFT has lined up for August, I wanted to take a moment and look back at the academic year we’ve just completed. My staff and I have prepared a...