Learning Communities
New Faculty Learning Community | AI Think Tank | Mellon Funded Racial Justice Learning Communities
New Faculty Learning Community Fall activities:
- UDL Consultancies — ongoing opportunity to receive targeted support for course design and teaching
- 3:30-5:15 p.m., Wednesday, March 20 — drop by for an informal mid-semester check-in
- Synergizing Teaching and Research Discussion — These conversations will be facilitated
by Eliza Kent (Religious Studies Department) and Juan Navea (Chemistry Department).
Lunch tickets will be provided. There are two opportunities to participate in this
discussion:
- 11:15 a.m.-12:15 p.m., Tuesday, April 9, in the Test Kitchen
- 1-2 p.m., Wednesday, April 10, in the Test Kitchen
- 4-5:30 p.m., Thursday, May 2, End-of-Year Celebration in the Tang Teaching Museum: Come celebrate your accomplishments with each other!
AI Think Tank
The Center for Leadership, Teaching, and Learning (CLTL) and Learning Experience Design & Digital Scholarship Support (LEDS) are teaming up to facilitate another semester-long AI Think Tank devoted to exploring more about generative AI within their respective disciplines/fields/services. Interested parties will parlay those findings into campus programming in fall 2024 focused on educating other faculty and staff about best practices for working with AI relative to their scope of practice.
Specs
- You must commit to attend five meetings throughout the spring semester scheduled for
Fridays from 2:30 to 4 p.m. (unless otherwise specified) on the following days:
- Feb. 9
- Feb. 23
- March 22
- April 19
- May 3 (meet from 2:30 to 5 p.m.)
- An additional meeting (held over Zoom) will be scheduled for late August to finalize programming plans for the fall.
- The think tank meetings will create a community of practice that develops our mutual understanding of AI and creates opportunities for spring programming collaborations. In the spring, you will work with CLTL and LEDS to deliver programming that will activate and apply your knowledge and educate those around you. All programming will be supported and publicized by CLTL, as needed. Compensation will be $600, distributed during the last pay period of the academic calendar.
Who is eligible?
All faculty and staff are eligible! This is a valuable incubation period to develop
programming and instruction for other faculty and staff. Think expansively, creatively, and ethically about how such an opportunity might serve your intellectual and professional
interests and infuse our campus with a variety of opportunities to think critically
and capaciously about how AI might enhance student experiences, learning, and digital literacy.
How do I indicate interest?
Please email Beck Krefting (rkreftin@skidmore.edu), Aaron Kendall (akendall@skidmore.edu), and Ben Harwood (bharwood@skidmore.edu) a statement of interest by Friday, Jan. 26, that includes:
- A brief statement that answers the following questions: Who are you, campus role, and why are you interested?
- The constituencies you believe would benefit from your research into generative AI (i.e., Residential Life, faculty in the sciences, instructors teaching writing skills, etc.)
- Some questions you would like to explore around AI in higher education
- Any nascent ideas you have for a workshop, initiative, or program you would like to create for faculty and staff with similar questions
What kinds of instructional moments might you consider designing?
- Writing and AI — academic writing support, automated student tutoring, content generation, early intervention and support, accessibility
- Leveraging AI in the sciences — data visualization, 3D models, diagrams, interactive simulations, virtual lab environments, theorem proving, bug detection, code review, adaptive and gamified assessments
- Pedagogical approaches for generative AI in the humanities — historical scenario reconstructions, style imitation and cultural critique exercises, philosophy dialogues, interactive art exhibits, collaborative storytelling, cultural heritage preservation
- Student support
- Career — career path recommendations, resume and interview assistance
- Academic — automated tutoring, language learning, creating study aids
- Creative — art/music generation, storytelling, creative writing
- Wellness — emotional support, stress management
- Creative Projects — experiment generating images, art, music, video, or literature
- Research Assistance — data analysis, literature review, generating hypotheses
- Evaluating privacy and academic integrity considerations for students/faculty/staff using generative AI at Skidmore
- Improving efficiency — chatbots and virtual assistants, automating email and scheduling, predictive analytics and reporting, financial aid and scholarship management, allocating resources, document summarization, student recruitment and admissions, human resources management, recruitment and talent acquisition, performance coaching, etc.
- Language learning and translation
- Navigating the ethical dilemmas that using generative AI can pose; bias, environmental/human impact, potential copyright infringement, etc.
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. One LC will examine the ways U.S. jails and prisons control access to information and the information needs of the incarcerated. Another will use theories of Black and decolonial ecologies to examine environmental racism. Please review the options available and, if interested, contact the respective facilitator(s) directly by Friday, Jan. 26. Each LC begins the week of Feb. 5 and runs through the week of April 29. Each LC will have commitments of approximately two hours weekly during the semester (except for the week of spring break). Once again, faculty/staff who participate in a learning community will be compensated $750. Upon completion of an LC, Folks interested in applying knowledge learned in an LC will be invited to be compensated for participating in the Racial Justice Teaching Challenge initiative in a subsequent semester. You are welcome to apply to join a learning community as many times as you wish throughout the duration of the grant. Important note: staff members, whether exempt or non-exempt, should contact their supervisor prior to applying to join an LC.
Libraries, Incarceration, and the Humanizing Power of Information
Meeting time: Wednesdays 3 to 5 p.m. (Weller Room, LIB 212)
Max enrollment: 12
Facilitators: Marta Brunner, College Librarian
Community description
Is information access a human right or is it a privilege you can lose if you do something
wrong? To put it another way, can one be fully human without access to information?
In this racial justice learning community, we will rely on primary source material
to grapple with these questions in the context of modern U.S. incarceration. To this
end, we will examine the ways U.S. jails and prisons control access to information,
why they do so, and the impact these policies have on people inside. We will consider the ways in which unequal
access to information contributes to higher rates of incarceration in particular communities,
especially communities of color. We will learn about the information needs of incarcerated
people by answering real informationrequest (aka “reference”) letters from individuals currently inside prisons and jails. On
the other side of the coin, we will learn from the histories of prison information
production, exploring newspapers, zines, music, podcasts and radio shows, poetry, autobiographies,
and letters.
This learning community is discussion-based, and participants will be invited to do a small amount of self-directed exploration outside of our meetings in order to share insights during our discussions. Participants may engage with genres of their choosing, e.g., listening to music or podcasts rather than reading. We will decide as a group the degree to which we set aside regular time during our meetings in order to read or engage with primary sources together.
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 mbrunner@skidmore.eduby Friday, Jan. 26.
Black Ecologies: Environmental (In)justice and Radical Resistance
Meeting time: Thursdays 2:30 to 4:30 p.m. (Weller Room, LIB 212)
Max enrollment: 12
Facilitators: David Vivian, assistant professor of French, World Languages and Literatures
Community description
2023 was officially the hottest year on record. Catastrophic climate events are occurring
with ever greater force and frequency. The science is clear — we are in a climate crisis. But how do we break free from a status quo that is so
obviously unacceptable? This seminar proposes that we need a radical revision of our
conceptualization of the human-environment relation—radical in the etymological sense of getting down to the roots of the issue. When it comes to matters of climate and environmental justice, we are
all inextricably interconnected (the overarching principle of ecology). And for far
too long people of color have borne the brunt of environmental injustice. From toxic water in Flint and Cancer Alley in Louisiana,
to farm workers in California, fossil fuel pipelines on tribal reservations, and pesticide poisoning in the Caribbean, environmental injustice
often stems from environmental racism.
This learning community will explore these examples and others, while probing deep into the roots of environmental injustice. How, for example, is the predominant Western vision of other-than-human nature, as a result of the legacies of the colonial-capitalist system, responsible for promoting slavery and environmental racism? As Angela Davis reminds us in “Decolonial Ecology” (2021), racism is not simply a factor “determining the way environmental hazards are disparately experienced…but, rather, it creates the very conditions of possibility for sustained assaults on the environment, including on the human and non-human animals, whose lives are already devalued by racism, patriarchy, and speciesism.” This seminar will thus turn to theories of Black and decolonial ecologies from authors, directors, and activists (e.g., Sylvia Wynter, Malcom Ferdinand, Achille Mbembe, Kimberly Ruffin, Rob Nixon, Kyle Whyte, Camille Dungy, Cyril Dion, Dolores Huerta, Robert Bullard, Arundhati Roy, Amitav Ghosh, Tiya Miles, and Robin Wall Kimmerer), as a rich corpus for rethinking the human-environment relation, cultivating greater empathy, and actively combatting the often-mortal consequences of environmental injustice. In the spirit of Black pedagogies, the learning community will take a democratic approach and employ core tenets of collaboration, community, dialogue, and engagement.
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 dvivian@skidmore.edu by Friday, Jan. 26.