Events

Friday, September 8
Welcome and Welcome Back: Sharing Joys and Worries
Please join us for the first Fall 2023 Conversation about Scholarship and Teaching. This session will provide an opportunity to gather with colleagues familiar and new, and to share your excitement and worries about the semester ahead. Come to discuss joys (“I’m teaching a new class on one of my favorite topics!” “An awesome new colleague has joined our department!” “I had a wonderful sabbatical and am feeling ready to return to teaching!”) and concerns (“What the heck am I going to do about ChatGPT?” “Will I be able to engage my students?” “I’m trying a totally new pedagogical strategy and am really not sure how it’s going to go….”)

On the topic of concerns about ChatGPT and other generative AI tools, I am pleased to share that the AI Working Group and the Serie Center are collaborating on a series of workshops this academic year. Please mark you calendars the following sessions already planned for Fall (specific topics will be based on concerns shared on September 8 and elsewhere): Monday, September 18 (noon to 1 p.m., with lunch) and Tuesday, October 17 (4 – 5:30 p.m., with snacks). Also, don’t forget to check out the excellent AI Literacy and Critical Thinking LibGuide.

Friday, September 15
Reflections on the Transforming Pedagogies Institute
The Transforming Pedagogies Institute is a partnership between the Jan Serie Center and the Cultural Wellness Center, and is centered on transforming what we teach and how we teach at Macalester. The program focuses on Cultural Self Study in order to develop practices that help us (re)member who we are, who we have been, and who we want to be as humans, as cultural and social beings, and as teachers and learners and scholars. Please join us for this conversation to learn more about the experiences of some of the participants from our inaugural summer institute that took place in June, 2023. 

Monday, September 18
Generative AI Tools: Session 1
Join us for the first in a series of open conversations dedicated to opportunities and challenges associated with generative AI tools. 

Friday, September 22
Moments in Mentoring
Amy Damon (Economics)
Professor Amy Damon, winner of the 2023 Jack and Marty Rossmann Award for Excellence in Teaching, will discuss successes and failures in mentoring as well as facilitate a discussion about what works to effectively mentor students throughout their time at Macalester and beyond.

Friday, September 29
Land Cover Change and Biodiversity Conservation in Coastal Ecuador: Research Insights, Challenges, and Potential Undergraduate Research Opportunities
Xavier Haro-Carrion (Geography)
Professor Xavier Haro-Carrión will discuss past and current research on land cover change processes and their impact on biodiversity in coastal Ecuador. Additionally, insights about student involvement in international research will be provided. 

Monday, October 2
Dilemma Monday
Join us today and every first Monday of the month during Fall 2023 for conversation about pedagogical dilemmas, challenges, and concerns. There is tremendous benefit to being in community and crowdsourcing wisdom and experience.

Friday, October 6
Pedagogy Study Session #1: Culturally Sustaining Pedagogies
Join us for the first of four Friday Conversations about Scholarship and Teaching during the 2023-2024 year dedicated to deepening our understanding of pedagogy. This week we will read and discuss Chapter 1 from Paris and Alim’s Culturally Sustaining Pedagogies. Advance reading of the chapter is desired, but not required, in order to participate. You can access the reading in this google drive.

Monday, October 16 12:00-1:30 PM
Supporting Mental Health and Wellbeing: An Invitation to Learn about Question, Persuade, and Refer (QPR)
As mental health and wellbeing continue to rise in importance and saliency, the Hamre Center for Health and Wellness and the Serie Center for Scholarship and Teaching are working together to offer colleagues opportunities to learn about ways to offer hope and save a life. Question, Persuade, Refer (QPR) is a nationally recognized, data-informed suicide-prevention workshop that gives attendees the information and skills necessary to assess and intervene in situations of potential suicidal ideation. Suicide is one of the leading causes of preventable death around the world. Join us on any of the dates below (the training will be the same each time) for this chance to learn in community with other colleagues about strategies and options when those you know are struggling.

Tuesday, October 17 4-5:30 PM
Generative AI Tools: Session 2
Colleagues (at and beyond Macalester) are designing assignments that are intended to help their students become critical, savvy, and/or skeptical users of generative AI tools (here’s a recent example from the Chronicle of Higher Ed’s Teaching Blog, and here’s Emma Salomon’s Mac Daily article featuring examples from several Mac colleagues; if you’re interested in more STEM-based examples, check out this post in the Hechinger Report). Please join us for the next open session about generative AI tools, where we will focus on the pedagogical opportunities for and implications of genAI, and discuss strategies for mitigating learning loss. And, as always, be sure to consult the excellent AI Literacy and Critical Thinking LibGuide for ideas about assignment prompts, ethics, sample syllabus statements, and much more.

Friday, October 20
Panorama Accessibility Tool: Accessible Content for Everyone
Brad Belbas (ITS) and Shammah Bermudez (Disability Services)
Please join Brad Belbas and Shammah Bermudez for an overview of accessible text accommodations and introduction to Panorama, a powerful new document accessibility tool in Moodle. Panorama helps faculty identify and fix documents on Moodle sites which have accessibility issues. Learn about common issues which Macalester students experience with digital course documents (e.g., scanned PDFs, exported PDFs, eTexts from publishers) and how Panorama not only supports document remediation, but also converts the source file into a variety of alternative formats for students (i.e., epub, pdf, text, gradient reader, audio, braille, more).  Use what you learn in this session to improve access to course content for all your students.  […or your money back…as seen on TV].

Friday November 3
Our AAUP, What Is It and What Can We Do Together?
Ruthann Godollei (Art & Art History)
Please join Ruthann Godollei and other Macalester AAUP chapter leaders for an information session and conversation about our AAUP chapter and what we can do together.

Monday, November 6
Dilemma Monday
Join us today and every first Monday of the month during Fall 2023 for conversation about pedagogical dilemmas, challenges, and concerns. There is tremendous benefit to being in community and crowdsourcing wisdom and experience.

Friday November 10
Pedagogy Study Session #2: Teaching to Transgress
Join us for the second of four Friday Conversations about Scholarship and Teaching during the 2023-2024 year dedicated to deepening our understanding of pedagogy. This week we will read and discuss Chapter 3 from bell hooks’ Teaching to Transgress. You do not have to have attended the first session to come to this one. Advance reading of the chapter is desired, but not required, in order to participate. You can access the reading in this google drive.

Friday November 17
Why study predators? Because they are scary!
Stotra Chakrabarti (Biology)
Apex predators like lions, wolves, and leopards don’t mix well with humans. We compete for space, and food, and they threaten our lives and our livelihoods . While perpetually in conflict, we have remained fascinated by predators – from cave paintings in Chauvet and Bhimbetka, to mascots and emblems, we have chosen them to represent us and our societies. As a kid growing up in a rural society at the foothills of the Himalayas, Professor Chakrabarti understood quite early on that predators were dangerous yet awe-inspiring. Such a conundrum led him to ask questions about whether we can learn to better coexist with such dangerous animals in the Anthropocene. How do we reconcile predator conservation with human development in an age when the odds between predators and humans have intensified? In this conversation, Professor Chakrabarti will walk us through a journey: i) starting with his positionality in ecological research, ii) then will give a brief overview of where, how, and why his new (Conservation and Behavior) lab at Mac studies predators, iii) how carnivore-science can create opportunities to diversify outlooks in research and education, and iv) will finally end with some future ideas where he envisages multi-departmental collaborations at Mac.

Friday December 1
Healthy Minds Survey:  What Faculty and other Educators Need to Know and Can Help us Learn
Jen Jacobsen, Tiger Simpson, and Audrey Seligman (Hamre Center for Health and Wellness)
In October 2022, 601 (~30%) Macalester students participated in the Healthy Minds Survey, a national survey that encompasses a variety of topics, including attitudes and behaviors related to mental health on campus, substance use, and subjects such as community and academics.  With the close collaboration of Institutional Research & Assessment, Jen Jacobsen (Executive Director of Health & Wellness), Tiger Simpson (Director of Health Promotion & Sexual Respect) and Audrey Seligman ’17 (Health Promotion Specialist) investigated relationships between these areas, including through the lens of demographics.  As with any good quantitative survey, the data provides a launching point for further questions and vibrant discussion.  We invite you to participate in making meaning of what we’ve learned and in developing strategies for how to use this information to further support our students’ well-being. 

Monday, December 4
Dilemma Monday
Join us today and every first Monday of the month during Fall 2023 for conversation about pedagogical dilemmas, challenges, and concerns. There is tremendous benefit to being in community and crowdsourcing wisdom and experience.

Friday December 8 8:00-9:30 AM
Supporting Mental Health and Wellbeing: An Invitation to Learn about Question, Persuade, and Refer (QPR)
As mental health and wellbeing continue to rise in importance and saliency, the Hamre Center for Health and Wellness and the Serie Center for Scholarship and Teaching are working together to offer colleagues opportunities to learn about ways to offer hope and save a life. Question, Persuade, Refer (QPR) is a nationally recognized, data-informed suicide-prevention workshop that gives attendees the information and skills necessary to assess and intervene in situations of potential suicidal ideation. Suicide is one of the leading causes of preventable death around the world. Join us on any of the dates below (the training will be the same each time) for this chance to learn in community with other colleagues about strategies and options when those you know are struggling.

Friday December 8
Wartime Measures: A Poetry Reading
Michael Prior (English)
Professor Michael Prior will help us close out the semester with a poetry reading from his forthcoming new book, tentatively titled Wartime Measures.

2022-2023 Conversation about Scholarship and Teaching