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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...
College Teaching: A Panel for Future STEM Faculty – October 14th
Sep. 22, 2014—As part of their PhD Career Connections series, Vanderbilt’s Biomedical Research Education & Training (BRET) Office is hosting a panel on college teaching for PhD students in the sciences. The panel is scheduled for 9-10am on Tuesday, October 14th, and features Mark Forsyth, Associate Professor of Biology at the College of William and Mary, and...
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...
First Person Singular
Sep. 17, 2014—by Derek Bruff, CFT Director, cross-posted from Derek’s blog, Agile Learning Your first paper assignment asks you to make an argument drawing largely on your personal experiences and perspectives. Did you have writing assignments in high school that asked you to do this? I asked this question of the students in my first-year writing seminar...
Teaching, Difference, and Power—with Our Language
Sep. 12, 2014—by Nancy Chick, CFT Assistant Director I’ve been thinking about the role of language in the CFT’s theme of “Teaching, Difference, and Power.” During the first semester of my first faculty position, fresh out of graduate school, I spoke the language of my dissertation. Beautiful (to me) multisyllabic terms, an elegant (to me) theoretical framework...
Teaching Ferguson
Aug. 30, 2014—by Nancy Chick, CFT Assistant Director This year at the CFT, through our theme of “Teaching, Difference, and Power,” we turn to the complexities of the roles of difference and power in both what many of us teach and how we all teach. In an earlier post, I explored the notion of “educationally purposeful” ways...
Vanderbilt Undergraduate Research Fair – September 1st, 4-5:30pm
Aug. 29, 2014—by Derek Bruff, CFT Director As part of our “Students as Producers” theme last year, the Center for Teaching brought attention to teaching strategies that engage students not only as consumers of information, but also as producers of knowledge. We focused largely on the context of credit-bearing courses because we knew Vanderbilt already had a...