[Event canceled due to illness] Increasing Your Impact: Making a difference in ways that matter

Joan Gallos, award-winning educator, author, academic leader, and researcher in the fields of leadership, education, and personal development.

Location: Weitz 230

Leadership in higher education takes a variety of forms, many of which do not involve designated administrative positions, such as chairing a department or committee, leading a research group, organizing a symposium, proposing a new initiative, or even teaching a class. At its most basic, academic leadership is all about the quality of everyday actions and decisions that enable institutions, like Carleton, to live up to their mission, values, and aspirations. Bottom-line: wherever you sit and whatever you do, what you do matters. How can you enhance your everyday leadership and make a difference in ways that really matter?  This session explores that basic question and probes essentials for success in today’s complex, multicultural academic world.  We will dig into four “frames” or coherent mindsets for seeing and understanding leadership and organizations, and examine how each frame enables us to better tackle a unique set of institutional dynamics and social challenges that impact our ability to move what we care about forward. In a world where uncertainty is the norm and complexity reigns, a solid foundation in the basics of how organizations work and how everyone can help them work better is essential. This session will inform, inspire, and set you on a path to enhance your leadership effectiveness for the good of Carleton and beyond.

Refreshments available outside Weitz 236

An Indigenous Perspective on Culturally Responsive and Trauma-Informed Instruction

Facilitators: Broderick Dressen ’09 and Paul Dressen, Prairie Island Indian Community

Location: Weitz 236

The half-day session will briefly (1 hour) cover the history of Indigenous peoples in the United States, with a more direct look at the Mdewakanton Dakota peoples of Minnesota. This history will cover topics such as: educational systems, historical systems, legal systems, economic systems, and cultural and societal systems. The session will then proceed into goal setting and methodology to working with Indigenous people (1.5 hours). This will include benchmarks set by members of the community, objectives, and navigating delivering cultural curriculum. The last part of the session (1 hour) will explore how all of this is done in-practice, looking at how the presenters have implemented this in their own work.

Koru Mindfulness

Speaker: Facilitators: Patrick Gordon, Director of Health Promotion & Betsy Lane-Getaz, Nurse Practitioner

Location: Weitz 231

Koru Mindfulness is an evidence-based curriculum specifically designed for teaching mindfulness, meditation, and stress management. This session will offer experiential practice, reflection and provide space to explore how mindfulness can enhance teaching and learning.

Participants will be able to experience mindfulness practices then explore how mindfulness/meditation could be a tool for either (1) their own well-being, (2) the well-being of their students, and/or (3) as a tool to enhance learning/teaching/connections in the classroom.

Instructor Identity and Inclusive Pedagogy: Challenges and Impacts

Facilitators: Amy Csizmar Dalal, Professor of Computer Science and Marty Baylor, Professor of Physics

Location: Weitz 236

When we talk about inclusive pedagogy — practices such as grading for equity and flexible deadlines — we typically talk about the benefits for students. We rarely discuss its impacts on faculty who employ, or wish to employ, inclusive teaching practices, and how these impacts vary depending on a faculty member’s intersecting identities, as a recent Chronicle article highlights. In this session we will discuss the challenges that inclusive pedagogy places on faculty. We will examine how these challenges might show up differently based on an instructor’s rank, gender / gender expression, sexual orientation, race/ethnicity, etc., and consider what might be done to mitigate those challenges at the instructor and/or departmental level. The goal is to produce a list of suggestions and practices that faculty and department chairs can use to better support their colleagues as they implement inclusive pedagogy.

Advance preparation:  Please read this article that motivated the session.

What to Teach Students Whose Phones Can Do (almost) All Their Work?

Facilitators: Members of CELT

Location: Weitz 235

Recent articles have sounded an alarm about tools that can create art and music, write papers, and produce code that can easily pass as a student’s “own” work. As these tools become more common, how will our idea change of what it means to produce work? Can we invent assignments that take advantage of these tools? Can they benefit our students by helping them develop critical liberal arts skills and understandings?  Join us for an experimental session to begin thinking about these questions in which you will design an assignment that works with one of the tools.

Advance preparation:  Please try out one of the following tools (or another in your field) and read two or three of the following (short) articles.  

Tools:  DALL-E 2, MidJourney, Jasper AI, WolframAlpha, GPT-3, Github CoPilot, Rytr, Soundraw, Wordtune, StableDiffusion, Night Cafe, Google Translate App transcribe and conversation feature, DeepL

Suggestions in 18 Best AI Writing Tools

Readings:

• Susan D’Agostino, “Machines Can Craft Essays. How Should Writing Be Taught Now?” Inside Higher Education (Oct. 26, 2022) 
• Ray Schroeder, Higher Ed, Meet GPT-3: We Will Never Be the Same! Inside Higher Education (Aug. 24, 2022)
• Elizabeth Steere, “Text Spinners and the Problems of Paraphrase Plaigiarism” Inside Higher Education (Nov. 2, 2022)
• Podcast: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/intentional-teaching/id1651034975?i=1000586232091

Assessing the Intercultural Domestic Study Graduation Requirement

Facilitators: Ross Elfline and Members of the ECC

Location: Weitz 236

Over the next two years, Institutional Research and Assessment, in consultation with the Education and Curriculum Committee will be assessing the Intercultural Domestic Study graduation requirement. As this requirement has not previously been assessed, the workshop serves as an opportunity to gather faculty who contribute courses that fulfill the IDS requirement to offer their perspectives on it. Some questions we might address include: What do we hope Carleton students take away from IDS courses? How do we design our courses currently to satisfy the goals of the requirement? Do we think that we are meeting these goals? In addition to helping IRA and ECC in their work in assessing the IDS graduation requirement, the workshop also serves as a way to share best practices with other faculty, across various disciplines, who share important curricular goals.

How Do I Teach Students to Write with Numbers Effectively?

Facilitator: Lin Winton

Location: Weitz 230

Students will often throw a statistic into their paper for “significance”. The source of the statistic is often unknown or dubious, as is the relevance. How can we co-opt this bad habit into something productive? How might this vague notion of “significance” relate to an unconscious valuing of numbers and STEM disciplines above all? This session is for faculty and staff who want to help students write with numbers more effectively, particularly in less-quantitative courses where numbers can support a student’s argument, but are not central to the course. We will discuss problems with execution and the beliefs that underlie them, strengthen your abilities to identify those problems, and cover essential skills that students need for finding and using numbers rhetorically, but are not the domain of any particular discipline (and thus fall through the cracks). The goal is that instructors of all “quantitative comfort” levels leave more confident and equipped to help students write with common numbers in a way that is accurate and nuanced.