Teaching and Technology Apprenticeships in Philosophy & the Humanities

1. Teaching and Technology Apprenticeships in Philosophy & the Humanities By: Dr. Kay Picart FSU ENG & HUM

2. Aim • to form a collaboration with invited students in the attempt to integrate technology with teaching by developing opportunities for students to train as teaching apprentices and to acquire relevant skills in the use and development of technology resources, which are germane to teaching and learning Philosophy.

3. Requirements • Such students had at least one class of Philosophy taught by the professor, and as such, had acquired and displayed a proficiency in the general subject matter and skills of critical thinking, reading, writing and argumentation that the professor finds essential to function effectively as a peer instructor.

4. Tasks as a Teaching Apprentice • leadingweekly small group discussions that served as forums for clarifying possible confusions concerning the lectures; for preparing for exams; and simply for engaging in philosophical inquiry that contextualizes lectures taken up in class

5. Tasks as a Teaching Apprentice • monitoring, responding to, and grading weekly virtual threaded conversations and other web-based/interactive/virtual activities assigned outside the formal class time, based on guidelines given by the professor, who was monitoring the entire procedure;

6. Tasks as a Teaching Apprentice • receiving instruction and supervision for checking short quizzes, objective sections & short essay portions of the exam (or drafts and chapter summaries), with other student teaching and technology apprentices and the professor.

7. Tasks as a Teaching Apprentice • collaborating with the professor and other student apprentices in designing exams and checking drafts that lead to the production of the final paper

8. Tasks as a Teaching Apprentice • leading one or two sessions of the class, in which, after consultation with the professor, the student apprentice took over a selected topic (and used relevant technology in these presentations) and afterwards received detailed feedback regarding her/his performance

9. Honor’s Status • In addition to these tasks, student apprentices are required to hand in a short (10 pages, DS, minimum) paper related to the courses in which they have apprenticed, which will be used as raw material for conference presentation and possible undergraduate journal publication.

10. Duties as a Technology Apprentice • to update and post the syllabi of the courses the professor taught at St. Lawrence University, such as the Introduction to Philosophy; Feminist Legal Theory; and Philosophy and Film courses

11. Duties as a Technology Apprentice • to develop sections enhancing the presentation of the syllabi, which had frame grabs, powerpoint presentations, video clips, CD Rom clips, and brief audio and written excerpts that provided a succinct explanatory backbone or a series of guide questions that did not take the place of assigned texts to read in preparation for class, or the in-class lectures and discussions

12. Duties as a Technology Apprentice • design a venue (and maintain a site) for threaded conversations in which students, the teaching and technology apprentices, and the professor could extend discussions beyond classroom time

13. Duties as a Technology Apprentice • engage/assist the students in the stepwise development of their own course-related web projects, which present the results of their final projects. • Feminist Legal Theory • Basic Philosophical Issues • Philosophy and Dance

14. Duties as a Technology Apprentice • For example, for the Philosophy and Film course, this entails the production of video shorts, which move in between the creative and the critical/analytic. For the Feminist Legal Theory course, this involves the creation of a webpage designed like a poster presentation for a conference that entails a theoretical analysis of the legal dynamics of this case (e.g. Links to Student Webpages)

15. Additional Feature • when possible, the use of technology also enabled the integration of virtual guest speakers to various lectures, through the use of conference call formats (e.g., Judge Richard Posner for Feminist Legal Theory, and Professors Janice Rushing & Noel Carroll for Philosophy & Film)

16. Benefits/Results: • Students who wished to acquire training as teaching and technology apprentices had the benefit of rigorous feedback from the professor and extensive support from Information Technology staff

17. Benefits/Results • The use of peer teachers and technology assistants enhanced the atmosphere of learning and contributed to greater collegiality within and outside of class, while maintaining a professional sensibility

18. Benefits/Results • Students weighing whether or not to sign up for a class could simply print off a copy of the syllabus and have basic information on the class and its subject matter, methods and requirements available at any time

19. Benefits/Results • The development of an integrated website got rid of the need to set up multiple equipment, such as a slide projector, boombox, tv/vcr, powerpoint or net surfing presentations. The result was a formally neater and more coherent (not to mention convenient) arrangement. (e.g., ppt. lectures in WST 5934 or ENG 3014 or HUM 5253)

20. Benefits/Results • Students who (had to) miss a class could click on the site and start catching up on the basics of what they have missed so when they consulted with the professor or the apprentices, the time was better spent on questions, rather than a rote recapitulation of a lecture

21. Benefits/Results • Both the development of interactive activities and a forum for threaded conversations rendered the learning environment more dynamic and enabled discussions to extend beyond classroom time and physical confines (thus coordinating well with small group discussions, which were coordinated with virtual discussions in extending opportunities for conversation beyond formal classroom time)

22. Integration of Technology PHIL 100 (N=23): 1.41 PHIL 336 (N=13) 1.61 PHIL 366 (N=10) 1.6 Integration of Apprentices PHIL 100 (N=23) 1.35 PHIL 336 (N=13) 1.69 PHIL 366 (N=10) 2.25 Quantitative SurveysScale: 1-5, with “1” as highest

23. Latest Developments • I modified this model for an FSU mixed undergraduate-graduate course called “Gender, Authority and the Politics of Representation in Science and Art”

24. Applications in Graduate Pedagogical Training in Multicultural Film • I have also used this model to develop a training program for TAs in the multicultural film course of the Humanities Program here at FSU.