A message from the Center for Leadership, Teaching, and Learning

Fall Spotlight:

David Howson and Evan Mack

In the coming academic year, the newsletter will highlight the accomplishments of Periclean Faculty Leaders across campus. Interviews with faculty include conversations about teaching successes and challenges. We will provide additional teaching-related content from these interviews on the CLTL Faculty Voices webpage. Go check it out!

Project Pericles is a nonprofit organization that supports civic engagement within higher education. Skidmore faculty have found myriad ways of conjoining their pedagogical missions with that of Project Pericles. Here’s one example: Evan Mack, senior teaching professor in the Music Department, and David Howson, senior teaching professor and Arthur Zankel Executive Director of the Arts Administration Program, designed and developed a course using their musical and arts administration expertise to challenge students to generate solutions to real-world problems. Mack and Howson both value learning from their students and enjoy finding creative and efficient ways of adapting to students’ needs. As Mack said, “Every year it’s different, so you’re constantly reinventing yourself, your class pedagogy, and your syllabus to meet the demands of today’s evolving students. I like the constant discovery, rediscovery, and reinvention.”

Both Mack and Howson live in the Adirondacks and have witnessed first-hand the financial disparities in the region — there is a great deal of wealth and even more poverty. In the spring of 2022, professors Mack and Howson offered a Periclean-funded course titled The Arts and Rural Poverty, which provided students with the foundational tools necessary to help them address specific community needs in the area pertaining to the arts. Students first studied underlying issues of wealth disparities in the Adirondack region, learned to distinguish between federal standards for “poverty” and “rural poverty,” and explored how financial and geographical barriers affect the arts. To augment the lack of musical instruments available in the K-12 educational system in the region, students organized a musical instrument collection drive to provide upcycled musical instruments to public school students in the area. When referring to the impact the course made on students and the broader community, Professor Howson said, “I think one of the things about this particular class is it’s not just ripply, we’re creating waves out there.” Professors Mack and Howson look forward to exploring additional ways to use the classroom as laboratory for addressing real-world problems.

— By Lila Norton ’24

Announcements

National Center for Faculty Development and Diversity (NCFDD)

Don’t forget that Skidmore is an institutional member of the NCFDD, through which you have free access to a number of excellent professional development tools. These include:

• The weekly Monday Motivator
• Monthly core curriculum webinars
• Guest expert webinars and multi-week skill-building courses
• 14-day writing challenges
• Full library of previous webinar and multi-week course recordings

You may utilize this and more with a free individual membership account by visiting https://www.facultydiversity.org/join, selecting our institution, and creating and activating a new membership.

Funding for new Black Studies courses

We are pleased to announce that due to the generous support of the Mellon Foundation—for a three-year grant: Africana Studies and the Humanities at Skidmore: Transnational Explorations in Social Justice—we are able to offer stipends of $1,000 to faculty who successfully create courses cross-listed with the Black Studies Program (BST). To learn more, visit the CLTL announcements page.

The Weller Room (Lib 212)

This space devoted to CLTL events is also available as a (quiet) workspace each weekday morning from 9 a.m. to noon. Folks participating in the Scholarly/Creative Endeavors work groups are especially encouraged to use this space before meeting for lunch. Added bonus: It is now fully stocked with coffee, tea, condiments, cleaning supplies, and paper products. Feel free to use supplies, but do clean up after yourselves. If you wish to reserve the space for events that advance the CLTL mission, you may submit an online request here.

CLTL Lending Library

The CLTL is updating its lending library! Starting in January 2023, folks are welcome to check out an assortment of books focused on critical pedagogy and teaching in higher education. The January newsletter will include a link to available books, which can be borrowed for up to a semester.

Upcoming Programming

New Faculty Learning Community Book Club: Inclusive Teaching: Strategies for Promoting Equity in the Classroom

Wednesday, Nov. 9, from 3:30 to 4:30 p.m. in the Weller Room (Lib 212)

Come join the new faculty learning community book discussion! This recently published book by Biology Professor Kelly Hogan and Mathematics Professor Viji Sathy offers cross-disciplinary, practical strategies for enhancing student learning for students of all abilities. If there are faculty and staff who were unable to participate in the book club in October and are interested in joining the new faculty, please email Beck Krefting who will send you a copy of the book prior to the event. There is space for a few folks to participate — first come, first served.

Lunch it up with James Lang on Friday, Nov. 11, in Murray-Aikins Dining Hall

Noon to 1 p.m.: Inclusive Teaching: The Role of Structure

• Colleges and universities have become rightly focused on making sure all students feel included on campus and in the classroom, but many faculty are not sure how to make their classrooms more inclusive spaces. Research has demonstrated that one of the most effective — and easiest — ways to engage and support all students is to build more structure into your assessments and daily teaching practices. This interactive presentation will introduce participants to research on inclusive teaching, offer a suite of small ways in which we can use structure to make our courses more inclusive, and provide time for discussion on how these ideas apply to Skidmore faculty and students.

1 to 2 p.m.: Luncheon with Lang

2 to 3 p.m.: Writing Like a Teacher: Expanding Your Readership

• Are you looking to grow the readership for your writing? Are you interested in drawing from your disciplinary research or your teaching experiences to write for a broader audience? This workshop focuses on how academic authors can reach more readers by drawing upon their pedagogical wisdom to create better learning experiences for readers. Lang will provide insights into how to identify or describe topics that will catch the eye of editors, mix research with story in your writing, and use attention tools that faculty writers can apply in their prose. The session will include a presentation and time for questions and discussion.

So we can plan adequately to accommodate dietary needs, please register here to attend the luncheon portion of the events by Monday, Nov. 7.

James M. Lang, Ph.D., is a former professor of English and the founding director of the D’Amour Center for Teaching Excellence at Assumption University in Worcester, Massachusetts. He is the author of six books, the most recent of which is “Distracted: Why Students Can’t Focus and What You Can Do About It” (Basic Books, 2020). Lang writes a monthly column on teaching and learning for the Chronicle of Higher Education; his work has been appearing in the Chronicle since 1999. His book reviews and public scholarship on higher education have appeared in a wide variety of newspapers and magazines, including The Conversation, Time, the Boston Globe, and Chicago Tribune. Two of his children currently attend Skidmore. His full bio is available on the CLTL programming page.

Research Salon with Assistant Professor Kris Covey (Environmental Studies and Sciences): “The Soil Inventory Project: Building a National-Scale Distributed Soil Carbon Data Collection and Modeling Platform”

Wednesday, Nov. 16, from 4 to 5 p.m. in the Weller Room (Lib 212)

Kris Covey studies terrestrial ecosystems and their role in climate and life. An applied ecologist and a biogeochemist, he works to integrate his research into solutions for managing human-dominated landscapes for multiple values. In 2020, Covey co-founded The Soil Inventory Project (TSIP) along with Bruno Basso (MSU). Serving as the NGO’s president, he works with private, industry, academic, and foundation partners to develop a distributed national-scale soil inventory system to inform soil management and markets.

Bridge Experience (BE) Brown Bag Lunch Series with BE and Civic Engagement Director Eric Morser

Friday, Nov. 18, from 12:15 to 1:15 p.m. in CIS 321

This final brown bag session in the fall series will focus on how to modify courses in the natural sciences to fit the BE requirements. Joining Morser are associate professors Lia Ball (chemistry) and Evan Halstead (physics), who have successfully taught BE courses and can offer guidance to other faculty wishing to do the same.

Helpful resources

Teaching Support Network

Folks joining the Teaching Support Network this fall will meet to debrief and share about the experience on Monday, Dec. 12, from 2 to 3 p.m. in the Weller Room (Lib 212). Be on the lookout for another call for participation early next year! 

Teaching Tips

• “How to Make Your Teaching More Inclusive”
• “Female Faculty: Beware the Non-Promotable Task”

Skidmore College

 815 North Broadway

 Saratoga Springs, NY 12866

 518-580-5000