Events
Contact
Jan Serie Center for Scholarship and TeachingDewitt Wallace Library, Suite 338 651-696-6605
Conversations about Scholarship & Teaching
Fall 2024
Conversations about Scholarship and Teaching (including “Dilemma Mondays”) are held in the Barbara Davis S.P.A.C.E. (Library 309). All faculty and staff are welcome.
Monday, September 9
Dilemma Monday: Difficult Conversations
Facilitated by Hui Wilcox, Brian Lozenski, Myrl Beam, Bethany Miller, Nancy Bostrom
In today’s climate, we are continually faced with complex and challenging situations that deeply affect our classroom dynamics. Whether it’s personal stress, national issues like upcoming elections, or global crises such as conflicts in Palestine, DRC, and Sudan, these events inevitably impact our teaching and the spaces we create for our students.
We invite you to join us for a conversation where faculty and staff will share their experiences and current practices in fostering meaningful dialogue and a sense of belonging within our Macalester community. This discussion will focus on:
Current Practices and Programming: Learn about the methods and initiatives being used to facilitate difficult conversations and support students through challenging times.
Critical Dialogue and Community Building: Hear how our colleagues are bringing people together through thoughtful and inclusive dialogue.
Embodied Practices in the Classroom: Discover techniques for integrating embodied practices into your teaching to help students build the emotional bandwidth needed to engage with and process difficult topics.
Friday, September 13
Student Engagement
Wendy Weber (Political Science)
Professor Wendy Weber, winner of the 2024 Jack and Marty Rossmann Award for Excellence in Teaching, will facilitate a discussion on the challenges we’re seeing around student engagement today and how we might address these challenges in our classrooms.
Friday, September 20
Publishing Your Research: Climate Impact and Inequities in Scholarly Publishing
Christie Manning (Environmental Studies); Katherine Fish(Serials and Electronic Resources Librarian); Louann Terveer (Digital Initiatives and Scholarly Communication Librarian)
How does the publishing industry interplay with pressing issues such as socioeconomic inequality and climate change? Why does this matter to Macalester and to your academic work? In this session, we will delve into some of the complexities surrounding the current publishing ecosystem, moving beyond the common focus on open access to explore broader, global impacts and potential solutions. Join us for a critical examination of the publishing landscape and learn how you can make more informed publishing choices.
Friday, September 27
Short-Term Faculty-Led Courses Abroad: Learn from What Has Been Done
Shanti Freitas (Center for Study Away)
Currently, Macalester offers a few short-term faculty-led courses that include an international travel component. As the Strategic Plan specifically names a goal of amplifying opportunities for experiential learning, there is increased interest in and conversations about these types of courses. This talk will highlight three existing courses: January in Rome (Beth Severy-Hoven), Blacks in Paris (Duchess Harris & Julie Rogers), and Climate Talks (Louisa Bradtmiller & Roopali Phadke). In a conversation facilitated by Shanti Freitas in the Center for Study Away, faculty will share their experience leading students abroad including course structure, learning goals, and take-aways, and reflect on how others might learn from these examples.
Friday, October 4
Pedagogy Study Session #1
Ebony Aya (Serie Center)
Monday, October 7
Dilemma Monday
Friday, October 25
Making an impact: appraising public scholarship
Kevin Ward (University of Manchester)
Join us for an engaging Q&A session with Dr. Kevin Ward, from Manchester University, that aims to demystify the dynamic world of public scholarship. Delve into the opportunities it presents for broadening impact, career growth, and fostering community engagement, while also anticipating various challenges and considering how to address them. This session offers a platform for academics to share insights, strategies, and experiences in navigating the evolving landscape of public scholarship
Friday, November 1
Literature Reviews For The Win
Erik Davis (Religious Studies) and Ginny Moran (Research & Instruction Librarian)
Our students are comfortable discussing sources as individual pieces of information, but have less facility with identifying the current state of knowledge on a topic and synthesizing an ongoing scholarly conversation. Erik and Ginny suggest that teaching the formative literature review can improve students’ empowerment, engagement, and evaluation of class work, and facilitate the independent integration and analysis that we strive to teach. We will discuss our evolving approaches and exercises; we look forward to hearing from you about your ideas and hope to stimulate a productive discussion about these topics.
Monday, November 4
Dilemma Monday: Election Edition
Friday November 8
Pedagogy Study Session #2
Ebony Aya (Serie Center)
Friday, November 15
Playing the media game & The Conversation info session
Joe Linstroth (Director of Media Relations and Public Affairs)
Have a new book, piece of art, or research paper coming out? Looking for ways to advance your career? Want to help the public understand and care about the issues, concepts, and perspectives you’ve devoted your professional lives to mastering? For these reasons, and many others, “playing the media game” can bring worthwhile rewards. This session is designed to inform faculty about the options and resources that exist to help you successfully engage with the media.
One of those options is the college’s membership with The Conversation, an international news outlet designed to help academics reach a general audience. In our first year, Mac professors published 21 pieces that were republished by outlets around the globe and totaled nearly 550,000 reads worldwide. It has been a game-changer and a fantastic success story!
Friday, November 22
Survey Says: How Macalester’s Spring 20214 National College Health Assessment (NCHA) Data Can Inform Your Work
Jen Jacobsen (Executive Director of Health & Wellness)
Nearly 30% of Macalester students participated in the National College Health Assessment (NCHA) in Spring 2024, but what does that mean for your work with students? Come co-create meaning with us and explore the relationships among students’ self-reported health behaviors, perceptions, attitudes, and their academic experience. What does self-reported cannabis use have to do with negative academic performance due to depression? Do students self-report more challenges with procrastination or with faculty? Which class year of students is the least likely to report that all-nighters are *never* academically necessary? Come find out the answers to these questions and more, discuss with colleagues how you interpret these relationships, identify how you might use this information to inform your teaching, advising, and mentoring.
Monday, December 2
Dilemma Monday
Friday, December 6
Getting it Right: Designing General Education Curriculum for the Liberal Arts
Duchess Harris (American Studies)/Dan Trudeau (Geography)
This session is hosted by the newly formed Curriculum Implementation Committee to reflect on the emerging curriculum revision process that is a part of the college’s Strategic Planning Initiative. This session explores different approaches to a general education curriculum in the liberal arts, focusing on alignment with institutional mission. Participants will engage in discussions on curriculum design, integration of interdisciplinary perspectives, and the promotion of critical thinking and high-impact learning practices. The session aims to foster collaborative dialogue to enhance the educational experience at the college and uphold the core values of liberal arts education.
2023-2024 Conversations about Scholarship and Teaching
2022-2023 Conversation about Scholarship and Teaching