Learning Communities
New Faculty Learning Community | Skill2Build AI Institute | Mellon Funded Racial Justice Learning Communities
New Faculty Learning Community Fall activities:
- New Faculty Mixer on Friday, October 4 from 2:30-4:00 PM (Weller Room)
- Teaching Challenges Discussion on Friday, October 25 from 4:00-5:00 PM (Weller Room)
- Making Sense of Student Ratings with Sara Lagalwar on Friday, November 22 from 4:00-5:00 PM (Weller Room)
- End-of-Semester Breakfast on Thursday, Dec. 12 from 8:30-10:00 AM (Test Kitchen, Dining Hall)
Skill2Build AI Institute
The Center for Leadership, Teaching, and Learning (CLTL) and Learning Experience Design & Digital Scholarship Support (LEDS) are excited to roll out a new pilot program: the Skill2Build AI Institute. This will be a year-long phasic initiative offering faculty and staff a deep immersion experience facilitating AI fluencies and exploring AI tools that might improve workflows and accelerate more efficient processes for student learning and the College at large.
In the fall, participants will join our AI Innovation Lab, featuring workshops aimed at building proficiency in ChatGPT and highlighting key issues everyone should consider when using GenAI (e.g., environmental, ethical, socially just). In the spring, participants will go on to participate in the AI Innovation Challenge to explore how ChatGPT can address a “wicked problem” they identify in their professional/administrative/teaching/research practices respective to their department or unit. The Institute will culminate with an event showcasing how participants used AI to solve these “wicked problems.”
To learn more about participating in this AI Institute, read the full call for proposals, which are due Friday, Sept. 6. Staff and faculty participants will be compensated $1,000 for the year. Please do not apply if you are unable to attend the scheduled meeting times in the fall.
Mellon Funded Racial Justice Learning Communities
Two learning communities (LC) will run this fall in conjunction with the Africana
Studies and the Humanities at Skidmore: Transnational Explorations in Social Justice
grant from the Mellon Foundation.
Each LC begins Sept. 16 and will have commitments of about two hours weekly during
the semester. Upon completion of an LC, folks interested in applying their learning
in an LC will be invited to be compensated for participating in the Racial Justice
Teaching Challenge initiative in a subsequent semester. Faculty and staff who participate in a learning community will be compensated $750.
Selections will prioritize faculty and staff with direct teaching responsibilities
or who are engaged in projects/initiatives that impact diversity, equity, justice,
and inclusion efforts on campus; however, you are welcome to apply to join a learning
community as many times as you wish throughout the duration of the grant.
Please review the options available and, if interested, contact the respective facilitator(s)
directly by Friday, Sept. 6. Staff members should contact their supervisor prior to applying to join an LC.
The Haudenosaunee Thanksgiving Address as Transformative Worldview and Pedagogy
Meeting Time: Mondays, 12:15-2:15 p.m. (Weller Room, LIB 212)
Max Enrollment: 12
Facilitators: Kahstoserakwathe Paulette Moore, visiting lecturer and Co-Creation Initiative
community partner, and Angela Beallor, documentarian in community co-creation, MDOCS
Community description
In this learning community, we center the Haudenosaunee Ohénton Karihwatéhkwen/Thanksgiving
Address as a challenge, inspiration, and guide for the way we may transform perceptions,
interactions, and outcomes in our classrooms, with the public, and with each other.
As the effects of recent years of social, economic, and climate upheaval and ongoing
stress around illness continue to take their toll, educators and students alike benefit
from a shift and expansion in the ways we listen, teach, understand, and learn.
The Ohénton Karihwatéhkwen (OK) is the foundational Haudenosaunee ceremony that reminds
us to create around us an environment of gratitude, reciprocity, abundance, and responsibility
which serves to shore up our collective intellect, spirit, and ways of moving through
the world. This is not an abstract, theoretical, or shamanistic exploration. The OK
reminds us that the natural world supports us by providing food, shelter, water, language,
guidance (through wind, landscape, and more), and examples of how we may live through
the rhythms and wisdom of the animal world and the understandings of how our seasons
unfold.
Perceptions, values, and actions shift as we center the natural world in this way.
When COVID hit our Haudenosaunee communities and people were at a loss of what to
do, our Akwesasne Bear Clan Mother told us she had given the illness a Kanyen’kehà:ka
name so we can be in relationship with the illness, understand why it is here, and
ask it to leave. This provided a powerful, collective way forward for our communities.
It is notable that we are giving thanks to these entities, whether they are in shadow
or light, and not for them. Gratitude as our original instruction combines with the
passion and skill we all carry to help us understand what our responsibilities are
as they intersect with community needs.
Participants will engage in gift making and giving from the natural world with other
members of the group to inspire kinship, connection, and gratitude. We will explore
Rotinonhsyón:ni consensus-based decision-making process, embroidery and beading meditations,
round-robin text reflections, and other activities to illuminate the very real ways
that Indigenous world view is not only viable, but critical.
The teaching methods we will explore are text (see: selected texts) and arts-based, interactive, and embodied. Kahstoserakwathe shares her own films
and articles from years of exploring these themes and practices. Facilitators will
guide foundational exercises to support each participant in exploring the concept
of place knowing: where we are (where we work, where we live), on whose unceded lands
we are situated, what these lands provide, and where we’ve come from (looking at relocations,
migrations, and where our ancestors are from), in order to situate us within considerations
of movement, time, histories, kinship, and other relationships.
To Apply: In 250 words, please detail the course/project/research/creative work/personal goals that draw you to this learning community. Please send your responses directly to abeallorpres@skidmore.edu and paulettefilms@gmail.com by Friday, Sept. 6.
Teaching through Conflict: Emergent Strategies, Radical Futures, Making & Being
Meeting time: Wednesday 12:15 to 2:15 p.m. (Weller Room, LIB 212)
Max enrollment: 12
Facilitators: Lindsay Buchman, Visiting Artist-in-Residence & Ruben Castillo, Assistant
Professor
Community description
Conflict surrounds us, from global issues to our campus community; we bear witness to tension, despair, violence, transgression, and loss. We welcome all perspectives across staff and faculty in our collective contemplation of how we preserve our capacity to think beyond conflictual moments and respond with possibility, inviting action into our daily lives, classrooms, and minds. In this learning community, we will focus on administering to the needs of our students through conflict (in the classroom and beyond) to apply emergent strategies to pedagogical frameworks guided by the Black feminist tradition. We will examine canonical texts by bell hooks, Audre Lorde, adrienne marie brown, and Alta Starr, alongside Sarah Shulman, Sara Ahmed, and Paul Soulellis, to examine organizational approaches and embodiments designed to instill a sense of community while establishing methodologies for scholars and learners across campus. Participants in this learning community will distill narratives, experiences, reflections, and testimonies within a small DIY publication using methods from radical zine dissemination. This publication will serve as an archive of our collective world-making and an invitation to current and future Skidmore members seeking support to engage with our campus community through local and global conflicts.
Participants should anticipate weekly readings spanning theoretical texts, somatic exercises, and praxis-based learning, balanced by reading prompts and reflections to activate discussion. There will be a site visit to the Tang Museum to examine objects engaging in social justice-informed ephemera. Participants will conclude with a workshop on zine production and collaboratively produce book spreads connected to the themes of the learning community. In bell hooks’ Teaching to Transgress, she writes that “our work is not merely to share information but to share in the intellectual and spiritual growth of our students” (13). With this ethos in mind, we will examine the relationship between personal and political forms of hope and collective futures, tasking us with locating nuance within divisive and bad faith narratives. Together, we will reimagine our associations with conflict and its role in our collective learning environments, social contracts, and innermost lives, aimed at fostering a sense of connection and engagement among all participants.
To Apply: In 250 words, please detail the course/project/research/creative work/personal goals that draw you to this learning community. Please send your responses directly to lbuchman@skidmore.edu and rcastillo@skidmore.edu by Friday, September 6th.