Past Events

CARPE hosts and sponsors various events at W&L throughout the year. See below for past workshops and events.

Tuesday, Feb 11, 2020

Teaching Writing in the Sciences: Exploring Alternative Methods for Teaching Lab Report Writing 

Teaching students to write effective lab reports can be challenging and often tedious work: we explain our expectations over and over again, dutifully respond to drafts, and still improvement seems to arrive at a glacial pace. This presentation, by Col. Stacia K. Vargas Professor, of Physics and Astronomy at VMI, explores an alternative approach that shifts the responsibility for revision onto the students, engaging them in a series of metacognitive reflections that deepen their thinking, their learning, and their sense of agency–and improves the quality of their work! Though by no means a panacea, Vargas’s discussion provides a useful starting place for an important discussion.

Wednesday, Feb 26, 2020

POGIL Training Seminar: Strengthening Student Learning through a Proven Classroom Approach

POGIL is an acronym for Process Oriented Guided Inquiry Learning. Because POGIL is a student-centered instructional approach, in a typical POGIL classroom or laboratory students work in small teams with the instructor acting as a facilitator. The student teams use specially designed activities that generally follow a learning cycle paradigm. Developed in Chemistry before expanding to fields throughout the disciplines, the POGIL approach has two broad aims: to develop content mastery through student construction of their own understanding, and to develop and improve important learning skills such as information processing, communication, critical thinking, problem solving and metacognition and assessment.

Faculty from all disciplines are invited to attend this comprehensive, full-day workshop over winter break led by experienced POGIL facilitator and Professor of Chemistry Gail Webster of Guilford College.

 March 16-24, 2020

Virtual Instruction Academy

Pedagogy and Purell: Alternatives for Assignments, Activities, and Assessments
In this session, professors, librarians, and academic technologists will team up to answer your questions about your course and virtual instruction. Do you need alternatives for a face-to-face activity? Is there an assignment or end-of-term project that has you stumped? Arrive with questions, leave with options!

Liberal Arts Values in the Virtual Classroom
In a campus-based, liberal arts setting faculty and students alike value community and small group interaction. As courses and interactions move online, we need to find new ways to represent core values of personal connection and inclusive engagement despite the challenges of inter-personal distance and mid-term disruptions. Guest presenter, Jeanine Stewart will share specific suggestions and open a discussion related to techniques professors can use to maintain a sense of community and foster robust engagement in the virtual classroom. 

Putting the Personal in the Virtual
Workplaces are communities that play a larger role in our lives than filling the time from 9-5 and offering a paycheck. This session will focus on providing a common language and framework for identifying and meeting our own social needs as well as supporting community members who are temporarily working remotely. The focus will be on how we might embed small but significant connection points into our daily work. Guest presenter, Jeanine Stewart will share specific suggestions and open a discussion related to how each person can contribute to a sense of community and foster robust engagement while working virtually. 

Thursday, Apr 23, 2020

Spring Term Course Workshop

Developing Course Goals for Spring 2020 Courses
Teaching a Spring Term course in the age of COVID presents some unique challenges: how do we teach the “experiential” in a virtual way? That in mind, setting course goals that are manageable but also meet our best expectations for our students is no easy task. This one hour workshop is designed to give faculty a chance to consider these challenges and to draft and receive feedback on goals that will drive the entire course, helping us make thoughtful decisions as we prepare for Spring Term.

Structuring Our Spring Term Courses to Maximize Productivity and Decrease Stress
This session looks at ways to manage an “experiential” course in a virtual setting: how do we structure the days/weeks to ensure that students learn what they need to learn? This session will offer several initial framing ideas, then ask participants to apply these approaches to the particular challenges of their own courses.

Managing Community and Student Interaction Workshop
How do we build a virtual class from scratch? How do we ensure that the relationships that are so valuable on campus exist in a virtual realm. This workshop will explore topics ranging from managing online discussions to ensuring that group work is occurring productively. Attendees will have the opportunity to explore a range of possibilities determined by the particular goals of their course. 

Making Sure We Survive: Managing the Workload Workshop
How do we shift agency in learning over to students to ensure that: a) they learn course material more deeply; and b) we don’t die trying to facilitate our courses? Further, how do we do this in a Credit/No Credit context to ensure that students actually engage the material? This session explores these questions, seeking best-practices answers that might eventually even inform our approaches once we return to a face-to-face format.

Wednesday, September 9, 2020

Pedagogy and (perhaps you have) Pizza #1:

Creating Classroom Joy in the Time of COVID

After an unusual and chaotic spring and summer, it’s good to return to teaching! Now that we’re back, whether it’s in an outdoor space, a virtual space, or a concert hall, how do we create a sense of community and add a spark of joy to our teaching? To start, three professors will talk about activities they’ve done to engage students, virtually and in-person. After that, we’ll transition to sharing ideas. What steps have you taken to help students feel the joy of learning, even if it’s not in a conventional classroom?

Presenters: Lynny Chin, Sociology; Mikki Brock, History; and Diego Millan, English

Tuesday, October 13, 2020

Pedagogy and (perhaps you have) Pizza #2:

“There is work to be done”: Deconstructing Colonization and Racism in the Classroom

Join Dr. Chanelle Wilson as she facilitates a journey toward deconstructing colonization and racism in the classroom. The session series will provide background information about the intersections of colonization and race, specifically in the context of classrooms and social interactions, at small liberal arts institutions. We will further our exploration with the opportunity to engage in subsequent interactive small group sessions to deepen engagement, skill exploration, and strategy building. The follow-up sessions will focus on locating ourselves in oppressive structures with the analysis of current syllabi and classroom practices and working collaboratively to implement principles and practices of decolonization and anti-racism to disrupt and dismantle institutionalized systems. Participants will leave this series with products ready to implement, immediately, or at minimum, in Spring 2020. There is work to be done, and you are invited into the movement.

Dr. Chanelle Wilson is an Assistant Professor of Education and Director of Africana Studies, at Bryn Mawr College. With over ten years of experience, and a lifelong commitment to revolutionizing education for justice, Dr. Wilson supports self-introspection for outer transformation and guides with the steady underlying premise of love, joy, and hope.

This event is co-sponsored by Academic Technologies, Africana Studies, CARPE, and the Office of Inclusion and Engagement.

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