Session Proposal: “Real life” across the curriculum

(Beth McCoy, Distinguished Teaching Professor of English) While meeting last semester with faculty, students expressed that they wanted instructors throughout all the disciplines to make room in their courses for conversation about “real-life” issues, especially those related to justice and power.

Given training, course content demands, and just plain time, however, many instructors may feel that making such room is impossible.

But technology and cross-disciplinary collaboration can help not just to begin to honor students’ desires, but also to fulfill College values,  imagine possibilities for meeting GLOBEand deepen student and faculty engagement with important conversations.

We’ll center our brainstorming around a brief piece by Alondra Nelson on Black Panthers’ engagement with science, politics, and medicine. From there, let’s imagine how technology, public writing, and collaboration might open up possibilities within and across the disciplines, and in STEM not the least. (We can even “build” a certificate in public writing/communication!)