The CTLA sponsors Community Friday luncheon learning opportunities during the fall and spring semesters. These events are designed to give faculty and staff the chance to enjoy lunch with colleagues, learn from presenters, and engage in conversation and reflection. Topics for discussion will focus on pedagogy, teaching and learning, faculty development, and student success. Announcements are sent out on a weekly basis with a request for RSVPs and lunch options. Unless otherwise noted, Community Fridays take place from noon to 1 p.m. in Humanities and Social Studies Center, Room A1231, with lunch service beginning at 11:45 a.m.
Spring 2024 Community Friday Schedule
The writer Kiese Laymon describes revision as a practice that we need to bring to our work and lives in equal measure, reflecting a necessity to revisit and rethink in order to move forward. In the last calendar year, Kevin Gannon, Jarvis Givens, and Joseph Tucker Edmonds visited Grinnell to share their important insights on the intersections of race, education, and student experience. Next Friday, join Susan Ferguson and Caleb Elfenbein who will briefly revisit core points from our important guests, creating an opportunity to consider how the wisdom they shared might help us continue to revise our work as educators.
Holly Roepke will delve into the dynamic and multifaceted realm of the physical education (PE) classroom, shedding light on its pivotal role in fostering holistic student development. She will explore how the PE classroom goes beyond conventional education, contributing to physical, mental, and social well-being.
This presentation aims to inspire educators and administrators to recognize the significance of the PE classroom in shaping well-rounded, resilient individuals prepared for the challenges of the future. It is an exploration of how physical education is not just a class but a transformative experience that contributes to the broader goals of education.
The CTLA thanks Grinnell Athletics for their generous support of this event.
For the Community Friday on Feb. 9, we are delighted to host a presentation that will highlight how the Grinnell College Museum of Art serves as a catalyst for visual literacy and critical thinking skills.
GCMoA Director Susan Baley will give an overview of the teaching role of academic museums and discuss her course in museum studies. Collections Manager Jocelyn Krueger will cover the object-based learning that happens in GCMoA’s Print and Drawing Study Room, where she provided resources and instruction to 44 different courses in the 2022–23 academic year. Curator of Academic and Community Outreach Tilly Woodward will discuss how she builds educational opportunities in the museum gallery with faculty from a wide range of disciplines. She will highlight her current collaborations with Anthropology Professor Maria Tapias and GWSS Professor Tamara Beauboeuf.
The CTLA thanks the Grinnell College Museum of Art for their generous support of this event.
Irma McClaurin ’73, has lived in eight different states. She holds the MFA in English, the MA and Ph.D. in anthropology, and has a 2023 Honorary Doctorate of Social Studies from Grinnell. Some have called her an “academic entrepreneur” who has worked as the president of a university, given up tenure twice, managed a $10.8M dollar portfolio at the Ford Foundation, founded the Africana Women’s Studies Program at Fisk University, and received awards for her writings as an academic and free-lance columnist. As the founder of the Irma McClaurin Black Feminist Archive, located at her graduate alma mater, University of Massachusetts Amherst, Dr. Irma calls herself a “born-again” anthropologist and was the first to describe “Black Feminist Anthropology” as a real thing.
The recent suicide of Antoinette Candia-Bailey, Ph.D., as a result of what she described as leadership “bullying,” and the involuntary resignation of Claudine Gay. Ph. D., at Harvard, have alerted us to the reality that the environments in which we all work have profound impacts on our emotional and physical health and overall wellbeing.
What is Grinnell’s culture today? Every organization and institution has a culture, sometimes codified in lofty mission statements. But rarely do institutions do check-ins to see if the lived/ operational/ everyday culture actually reflects these high-level values.
What do you like about Grinnell’s lived culture and what would you like to see changed? This is an interactive workshop to map Grinnell’s lived culture, brainstorm on what institutional policies and practices would have do to change, and what you would need to do as an individual to achieve something different. Dr. McClaurin would love to hear your thoughts beforehand so that she can incorporate what she hears into the time we will have together. To help her in this process, you will be invited to concisely respond to this question in the RSVP form (see link above): “What are three characteristics of Grinnell culture today?”
The CTLA thanks the Mellon Humanities in Action grant for their generous support of this event.
Join Associate Chief Diversity Officer for Disability Resources, Autumn Wilke, and Neurodiversity Support Specialist, Emily Fenner, for a conversation on neurodivergence at Grinnell. We will explore neurodiversity as a culture, including best practices and communication tools for interacting in a culturally responsive manner. Conversation will focus on how to recognize and respond to communication patterns and needs of groups that include both neurodivergent and neurotypical people. Participants will leave with practical strategies to implement in their daily work life.
For the Community Friday on March 1, we look forward to a special faculty-student presentation by Karla Erickson, professor of sociology, and Sira Nassoko ’24, music and computer science. Both Sira and Karla have been dissatisfied with evaluative practices. With the support of the Mellon Humanities in Action grant, Sira and Karla (along with Julia Yoo ’23) spent the fall 2023 semester researching ungrading practices by interviewing faculty who have changed their grading format, by reading the existing literature on outcomes, and by studying alternative grading approaches. Please join us as they share what they learned from others and from their own experiments with changing how they respond to student work.
How do you publicize and promote your professional and academic work and connect with audiences who might be interested in it? One effective strategy is to publish your content on the web. Here at the College, the Sites@Grinnell platform is a resource for digital publishing that is free, supported, and available to the entire campus—faculty, staff, and students.
In the Community Friday on March 8th, Mo Pelzel and Tierney Steelberg of the Digital Liberal Arts Collaborative (DLAC), co-administrators of the platform, welcome faculty and staff panelists to discuss why they find it valuable to share information about their projects on the web. Joining the discussion are Tamara Beauboeuf, Kristen Burson, Tetyana Dzyadevych, Bill Ferguson, Ross Haenfler, and Susan Sanning.
We’ll explore a number of distinct use cases for web publishing, including professional domains, long-form digital scholarship projects, sites for courses and digital assignments, research lab sites, blogs, departmental and programs sites, and sites for conference and workshop information. We hope that this showcase will inspire you to brainstorm how web publishing on Sites@Grinnell might make sense for your project.
This presentation will provide data on the larger landscape of first-generation and low-income college students in the US, in order to contextualize an overview of FGLI programming at Grinnell. Participants will leave with a better understanding of who FGLI students are, what challenges and unique strengths they possess, and how to better support these students in their work.
This Community Friday will feature a short panel discussion about creating and sustaining difficult conversations around challenging and polemic issues in our teaching and learning spaces. Presenters will include: Steve Andrews, Chinyere Ukabiala, Brigittine French, Vrinda Varia, and Rabbi Sarah Brammer-Shlay who will share insights from their experiences. The panel discussion will be followed by focused small group conversations around these topics meant to deepen questions, challenges, and successes around our pedagogical practices. Note that we are meeting in JRC 101, not in HSSC.
The CTLA thanks the Restorative Practices Innovation project for their generous support of this event.
For the Community Friday on April 12, we are happy to welcome special guest Lynn Ramey, PhD. Ramey is the professor of Medieval and Early Modern French and faculty director of the Center for Digital Humanities at Vanderbilt University. She is the PI for the National Endowment for the Humanities Advanced Topics Institute on the Immersive Global Middle Ages. See her Vanderbilt website.
In this presentation, Ramey will address the dynamic role of games in education, focusing on their application in classroom learning. She will start by highlighting key insights into how games foster engagement and facilitate learning across disciplines. Ramey will then showcase examples of games integrated into language, literature, and history classes. Finally, she will share her journey in developing a game aimed at teaching medieval French, underscoring the potential of games to transform academic teaching and learning by making complex subjects more accessible and engaging.
Ramey, David Neville, and Todd Hughes were organizers of a 2016 colloquium on Immersive Environments for teaching medieval languages and cultures. Their essay, “Revisioning the Global Middle Ages: Immersive Environments for Teaching Medieval Languages and Culture,” synthesizes the perspectives of eleven expert participants in medieval language and culture, second-language acquisition, and video game production to assess the use of three-dimensional (3D) immersive environments for learning about inaccessible or lost cultures.
The CTLA thanks David Neville and the Grinnell Immersive Experiences Laboratory (GCIEL) for their generous support of this event.
This year the Tutorial and Advising Committee has been working to draft foundational elements to reflect the meaning and purpose of Grinnell’s academic advising program. To date, we have written a program mission statement, with other pieces (e.g., goals, student learning outcomes, and advising competencies) to follow. These foundational statements help us collectively imagine and celebrate the purpose and objectives of this critical college program. In addition, this work supports the Quality Initiative on Academic Advising; having key foundational statements set the stage to guide the advising program forward.
In this session, Joyce Stern, Tim Arner, and members of the Tutorial and Advising Committee will share the new mission statement, discuss how the Committee created it, and brainstorm with interested community members about program goals, student learning outcomes, and a curriculum for developing advising competencies.
Encouraging deeper relationships between individuals and promoting social connections within the campus community strengthens equity, belonging, and collective efficacy. This leads to happier, healthier, and more productive campus communities. Leslie Bleichner ’07, ACDO: Community Training, Education, and Belonging, will introduce participants to four explicitly designed practices, backed by peer-reviewed research, to foster and facilitate engagement and build positive relationships, whatever your sphere of influence on campus. Through these practices, Grinnellians can learn to co-create solutions and ongoing accountability together in proactive, human-centered ways.
Two years ago, a group of staff and faculty (informally named the Reading Across the Curriculum team) embarked on a two-year Innovation Fund project to consider these questions: what can we learn from the current scholarship around college-level reading and what actions or changes would we recommend to our campus community? We’re excited to share some of our findings and ideas during this event with the intention of more in-depth professional development in the future.
According to Jodi Patrick Holschuh (2019), “research has estimated that over 80% of college-level tasks involve reading” (p. 600). Yet, the ability to read well in college moves far beyond decoding and comprehension and into levels of complexity that are multifaceted and not necessarily intuitive. We ask our students to engage in reading across the liberal arts curriculum, and scholars of the field argue that we are thus obligated to continue scaffolding the reading skills necessary to do so. This conversation will invite you to reconsider what we know about reading, to reimagine reading as the beginning stage of broader academic literacy, and to approach academic literacy instruction in discipline-specific ways that are more effective and engaging and for you and your students.