Scholarship of Teaching Faculty Learning Community 2008-2009 Mitch Watnik, Faculty-In-Residence

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Scholarship of Teaching Faculty Learning Community 2008-2009 Mitch Watnik, Faculty-In-Residence http://www.csueastbay.edu/faculty_dev/sotl/ FLC Overview Ken Kyle (Public Affairs and Administration) Peter Marsh (Music) • Purpose: • Bring together colleagues with an intellectual interest in pedagogy • Foster researching and publishing in the scholarship of teaching and learning • Activities: • Share teaching strategies and narratives • Design research projects and/or professional presentations about teaching • Share and provide feedback on research and writing in progress • Compose (and eventually publish) research about the scholarship of teaching and learning • Outcomes: • Develop a personal plan for research in the scholarship of teaching and learning • Promote and encourage conducting research and publishing in teaching and learning throughout the disciplines • Rethinking the Canon: Experiments in Teaching the Classics of Western Art Music • In the past decade music historians have debated the relevancy of the Western musicological canon as taught in most Western Art Music history survey courses in music programs in universities and colleges across North America and Western Europe. Music scholars and educators have sparred over what musical knowledge a student must have in order to be considered “musically trained” in academic battles that at times have resembled those of the 1980s and 1990s over the broader question of what it is to be “culturally literate.” I wrestle with the question of how to define the subject of my core, year-long, Western Art Music history survey course, which is required of all music majors in our department. I find that I am reassessing some of the assumptions about its purpose and goals given not only the question of how to define the canon, but also how to make it relevant to a population of students who increasingly come from communities with a non-European heritage. My research work this quarter as part of the Teaching & Learning Community aimed at exploring these concerns as well as considering some possible solutions that arise from my own experience and that of music faculty from other schools. While still at an early stage, my work suggests that addressing issues of context, broadly speaking, and conflict might be two useful ways to make the study of the musicological canon relevant to my students. This paper will expand on these ideas, drawing from my early experiments with them in my survey course this year. Bound for debate: Visual imagery, teachable moments, consciousness-raising & marginalization by gender and sexual difference Little attention has been given to inadvertent teachable moments that are spurred by visual images. These unexpected teachable moments highlighted with visual imagery can potentially reveal power asymmetries and social injustices, especially within the context of advertising campaigns that tend to reproduce cultural norms. In this paper, we explore a campus controversy that revolved around a campus-wide advertising campaign that used Bondage & Discipline, Sadism & Masochism (BDSM), stereotypical gender, and lesbian imagery. We analyzed qualitative interview data as well as data from a women’s studies final exam to discuss teachable moments involving discussions of gender stereotyping and resistance, women’s marginalization, pornography and sexual agency. Through a lens of standpoint epistemology we highlight successes and failures resulting from both seized and missed opportunities to use the visual campaign as a mechanism of libratory pedagogy. (draft paper with Holly Angelique Penn State, Harrisburg) Diana Wakimoto (Library) Information Literacy Instruction Assessment and Improvement through Evidence Based Practice: A Mixed Method Study This study explores the ways in which students learn and understand information literacy concepts and ideas outside of traditional content knowledge and competency modes of assessment. The study also explores the personal relevancy of the required information literacy course to the first-year students. One of the overarching results of this study is that information literacy is personally relevant to students both in their work at the university and in their lives outside of the university. The results of this study will be used to improve the course to foster greater student understanding and learning. The Scholarship of Teaching and Learning Faculty Learning Community members provided great feedback on the presentation of the results of this study. This research study will be presented on June 30th at the 5th International Evidence Based Library & Information Practice Conference in Stockholm, Sweden. Which Business Statistics Text is Best For Us? There are dozens of books written at the introductory statistics level for business (including management and economics) students. This makes instructors' or departments' decisions on which book to use for such a course complicated. This is my evaluation of four books- one from each of four publishing houses whose representatives provided sample copies- according to the criteria: covers material from our course description, uses Microsoft Excel, cost (given herein as “list price", according to Amazon.com), and last, but certainly not least, presentation of the material. I used the first two to select the four candidate books and will therefore concentrate on price and presentation in the following. I especially emphasize the first few chapters of each book and the chapter on hypothesis testing. Keith Inman (Criminal Justice Administration) • Constructivist Pedagogy • From a constructivist point of view, people actively construct new knowledge as they interact with their environments. Everything you read, see, hear, feel, and touch is tested against your prior knowledge and if it is viable within your mental world, may form new knowledge you carry with you. New information is compared to the model that exists. It must be integrated not simply by memorization, but by integration into the current “model” of the world. This is why we must start with what students know, and introduce new material based on their current knowledge. The challenge is that all students come with different maps of the world. This is why knowing our students is an essential aspect of our pedagogy. • (Are you viewing the • inside or outside of the • mask?) • Using Wikipedia in the Classroom • Student reliance on Wikipedia for research is a recurring problem at the university level. The usefulness of Wikipedia is being actively debated among scholars today, and many professors simply disallow any use of Wikipedia by their students when writing research papers. In an effort to confront the issue of Wikipedia reliance, I have been requiring students to engage in editing Wikipedia itself. In my assignments, freshmen students must conduct research which will then be used to edit Wikipedia articles themselves. My goals in this assignment are several: 1) I want to get to the freshmen students in order to prevent them from developing (or maintaining) poor research habits related to a reliance on Wikipedia; 2) I wish to allow students the opportunity to witness the inner workings of the Wiki-world and how information is legitimized therein; 3) By having students edit Wikipedia itself, I am forcing them to use more traditional academic sources found in the library; 4) The more students edit Wikipedia, adding references to academic sources for instance, there may be some long-term hope to actually seeing an increasing improvement of Wikipedia itself. Sharon Green (Management) • Do Managerial Economics Textbooks Cover Ethics and Corporate Social Responsibility? • The topic of ethics has increased in importance in the business school curriculum in recent years. Addressing topics related to ethics is required for accreditation from the Association to Advance Collegiate Schools of Business (AACSB, 2008: 11). Highly publicised ethical scandals at corporations such as Enron, Arthur Anderson, and Tyco International, along with public alarm in response to accounts of environmental degradation, child labour abuses, and financial inequities, have heightened awareness of ethics and corporate social responsibility (CSR) in all business contexts. Although many colleges and universities have stand-alone graduate and undergraduate level business ethics and CSR courses, business and economics faculty are increasingly encouraged to address topics of ethics and CSR in courses throughout the business curriculum (Baetz and Sharp, 2004; Bracken and Urbancic, 1999; Hoaas and Wilcox, 1995.) For professors faced with this challenge, it is helpful if course textbooks cover these topics. This review addresses whether current managerial economics textbooks include discussion of ethics and CSR. (published in International Review of Economics Education with Jane Lopus, CSU East Bay) • Integrating Research and Teaching • How do I find the time to conduct research while teaching three classes every quarter? Can I design a research project that will also serve as a teaching tool in my classes? My project seeks to uncover the social and affective meanings of unconventional spelling in brand names. I use this project to… • demonstrate a “real-world” application of linguistic anthropology; • show students how to conduct linguistic-anthropological research; • give students hands-on experience in data collection and analysis. • “Use unconventional spelling to create a potential brand name for a car.” • FLYTE ILLUMIN8 SLIQ • ZÜM TRANSZEND • 1. What kind of car is [brand name]? 2. What about the name [brand name] gives you that impression? 3. Who would most likely buy a car called [brand name]? 4. What about the name [brand name] gives you that impression? Christopher Moreman (Philosophy) Andrew Wong (Anthropology) Mitchell Watnik (Statistics and Biostatistics / FIR for SOTL)