The Center for Teaching and Learning will be offering FLCs during the 2017-18 Academic Year. Participating in an FLC requires a commitment to meet together 5-6 times (about every 2-3 weeks) over the course of a semester. In most cases, FLCs work over a two-semester period. In addition to the meetings, participants will read, collaborate, and make progress on individual projects between meetings. Each participant will actively contribute as responders, facilitators, peer reviewers and experts in selected areas of teaching and learning. Faculty should consider their other professional commitments before applying.
What We Talk About When We Talk About Academic Writing
Comparing academic writing to ball handling, David Russell, in his oft-cited sports analogy, has this to say: “There is no autonomous, generalizable skill called ball using or ball handling that can be learned and then applied to all ball games” (57). In the spirit of Russell’s ball handling analogy, join us as we look at Writing in the Disciplines–an offshoot of Writing across the Curriculum–and think about how we might discover more nuanced ways to talk about and teach all the things we mean when we ask students to write for academic audiences … [more]
Apply for this faculty learning community at http://tinyurl.com/mzghstt
Facilitator: Dr. Kelli Prejean, Associate Professor, COLA/English Department
Digital Humanities Across the Colleges
The mission statements of Marshall University’s Colleges emphasize an interdisciplinary, intercultural, and/or interactive curriculum. With digital technologies permeating the personal and academic lives of our students and ourselves, faculty members have been exploring how digital technologies can help us promote connectivity in our pedagogy. As more of us ask our students to create digital texts, study texts that were “born” digital, and use digital tools to analyze texts, let’s investigate what a digital humanities (DH) pedagogy looks like across the colleges at Marshall. How and why might we incorporate DH in our classes… [ more ]
Apply for this faculty learning community at http://tinyurl.com/mbzdh86
Facilitators: Dr. Allison Carey, COLA/English Department & Dr. Kristen Lillvis, COLA/English Department
Breaking Past Your Intuition With Evidence-Based Arguments
Intuition may serve as a convenient short cut to problem solving in our everyday lives, but it may also lead us astray. Our common sense may cause us to misjudge even the most mundane everyday phenomena and is woefully inadequate for solving problems outside of our everyday experience. Constructing rational quantitative arguments grounded in empirical-evidence allows us to transcend the limits of our intuition. Nowhere are these skills more relevant than in the sciences where so much of nature is inaccessible to our direct observation. The ability to construct rational, quantitative, data-driven arguments however is equally important in fields of study as diverse as journalism, history, philosophy, communications, and education … [ more ]
Apply for this faculty learning community at http://tinyurl.com/y7tplog5
Facilitator: Dr. Herman Mays, COS/Biological Sciences