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PROJECT PROFILESVKP 2002 Summer InstituteThe Visible Knowledge Project convened a third Summer Institute at Georgetown University, August 1-3, 2002. Representatives from the fourteen core campuses, as well as several Independent Investigators and members of the research and design team, came together to examine what it means to undertake as a collaborative activity the scholarship of teaching and learning.
The Friday plenary centered on student learning and included presentations by Melinda de Jesús (I2U and Arizona State University)and Tracey Weis (Millersville University. De Jesús focused her presentation around the challenges of teaching Asian-American studies to a largely non-Asian-American student population. She designed her course as an attempt to use new media technologies to mediate students' first exposure to what is difficult subject matter for many of them. Having students encounter these materials first on the web emphasizes for them that the viewpoints they discuss in class are not de Jesús' alone, but represent a whole world outside of their experience. It is de Jesús' hope, too, that this allows that first encounter to be less threatening because it can occur in the students' space, rather than in the more political space of the classroom. As such, de Jesús' project highlights the important differences that emerge when we consider ideas such as "intermediate thinking processes" in the context of a discipline which concerns various identity constructions.
On Saturday, Gail-Green Anderson (LaGuardia Community College) described the process of redesigning her course in the wake of September 11th. Hoping to take advantage of a powerful pedagogical moment, Green-Anderson had students in her fall 2001 freshman composition course write personal testimonies. The results were what Green-Anderson described as these “amazing stories,” which were collected into the school’s archives. For the spring, Green-Anderson selected materials that focus on violence in the public arena and in domestic situations. She believed that if her students related to the readings in a personal way they again would use a sense of connection as a basis for their writing. In the computer lab, where students contributed to the course discussion board, Green-Anderson found that her students seemed to relish the ample opportunity to write about the readings. Students were writing from a first person perspective yet they were clearly articulating their ideas based on what they were reading, they were writing a lot, and much of it was grammatically correct. Furthermore, Green-Anderson’s students began writing more outside of class.
This year we introduced concurrent sessions. Concurrent session topics ranged from "Gathering Evidence/IRBS" to "Analyzing Evidence" and "Coding Qualitative Data." VKP participants Betsi Stephen (Georgetown University) and Mills Kelly (GMU) led the session on gathering evidence and IRBs; VKP Research and Design Team members Daniel Bernstein and Anita led the sessions focused on qualitative data and analyzing evidence. Sherry Linkon closed the Summer Institute with a reflective and motivating talk about her experiences with her SoTL project. She explained that as a result of her presentation at last year's Summer Institute, something is happening to her that has never before in her professional career: people are genuinely interested in her project/research and want to know how it is going and where it is now. But Linkon declined to give an update, instead referring the audience to her new electronic project poster. And beyond promising to stay in touch, she asked that her VKP colleagues visit her project poster and give her feedback. As Randy Bass pointed out in his opening remarks, the amount of work taking place in the project is impressive: classroom research projects, core campus group meetings, local dialogues, intercampus activities, and the Summer Institute gatherings. Linkon's request to her VKP colleagues is one specific way to help the project maintain the momentum of all this work. |
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Project
Director Randy Bass's opening plenary offered a "state of the VKP"
presentation, reiterating the goals of the project. "We're asking
questions about the impact of technology on learning by also asking about
the impact of teaching on learning," said Bass. Describing his own
scholarship of teaching efforts over the past six years, Bass says he
moved through three different types of questions: What's possible; What
works; and What is. Bass sees these questions as three components and
entry points to a process for systematically examining teaching and learning.
The "What's possible" kinds of questions relate to the design
of a course or learning component. Faculty often enter into this area
of the process by asking "What happens if I try this a whole new
way?" The "What works" kinds of questions measure the learning
that takes place in a course, asking "Do my students learn better
this way? And how would I know?" "What is" kinds of questions
aim to describe what actually happens when students are trying to learn.
Viet
Nguyen, of the University of Southern California, and Paula Berggren,
of CUNY's Baruch College, presented case studies of their classroom projects.
Nguyen focused his presentation around students' multimedia work in his
courses in Asian American literature. Nguyen's courses are focused around
the question "how do we tell stories about America," with an
"assumption . . .that the dominant culture's stories about the United
States have been partial and limited in many ways." Instead of writing
a traditional paper, students create projects in which they are asked
to show a grasp of the concepts of multimedia literacy as well as critical
thinking. Nguyen believes that the "fusion of multimedia excellence
with analytical excellence can produce brilliant academic work in the
conventional sense." However, Nguyen is concerned with the challenges
and pitfalls of assessing student work on measure of both creativity and
critical thinking. Nguyen's experiences using multimedia in his courses
raise questions such as "how do we grade creativity?"
Paula
Berggren presented her experiences examining student learning in a freshman
honors seminar on the Arts in New York City. Aiming to "cultivate
[in her students] an ability to evaluate what they encounter in theatres
and museums," Berggren asks students to "demonstrate an understanding
of the intertextuality of the arts, and of the arts with culture"
through research, writing and discussion. For her VKP project, Berggren
is focusing on her students' contributions to an electronic discussion
board. "I propose to measure the growth in their ability to judge
and appreciate the art object or performance by comparing their answers
to questions" posed after three levels of experience with the material.
Berggren describes Level A as the students' initial contact with the material;
Level B students situate the material in a richer intellectual context
and Level C students experience the material in its live form. As the
students move through these levels of exposure to each performance or
art object, Berggren posts 5-6 questions on the course discussion board
and requires each student to answer 2 and respond to one fellow student's
posting. Berggren reminds her students to keep their responses in mind
as they move through the levels of experiencing the arts.
Tracey
Weis (Millersville University) presented work emerging out of the Digital
Stories Affinity group (a group of faculty working primarily at Millersville
University, California State University Monterey Bay and Borough of Manhattan
Community College). Weis' talk introduced the concept of digital story
multimedia narratives which can be used to tell a personal story or to
narrate a histories and then proceeded to discuss how they can be used
in various kinds of classrooms. Weis showed examples of student-created
digital stories from John Ward (Education, Millersville), Rina Benmayor
(Oral History, Literature and Latina/o Studies, CSUMB) and Cecilia O'Leary
(Cultural History, CSUMB). She then led participants in an exercise using
several different 
As
in the past, attendees participated in peer working group sessions throughout
the Institute. These working groups enable organized peer critique and
feedback on individual SOTL projects. This year included an additional
feature: on two of the three days that working groups met, they were asked
to report on how the projects discussed in the working groups connected
to broader project themes. For more on the working groups and the project
themes, see this edition's