To see the CFP for ISSOTL12 and instructions on how to contact HU IG members to organize a panel, poster, or roundtable, click here. 
--Nancy

Dear colleagues,

As you know, proposals for ISSOTL 2011 are now being accepted, and our own Nancy Chick is the program chair.  I have offered to help Nancy organize a humanities thread at the meeting.  The idea is to cluster SOTL work in the humanities into designated panels, and then to schedule them so as to minimize conflicts.  Of course, there is a value in mingling humanities presentations with those in other disciplines, so you may prefer not to be segregated into the thread. And the historians among you may already have plans for a history thread. 

But if you would like your presentation to be included in the humanities thread, please drop me a note when you submit your proposal to ISSOTL.

Looking forward to seeing you in Milwaukee,
Pat Michaelson
pmichael@utdallas.edu

The Spring 2011 issue of Academic Exchange Quarterly will feature articles about the scholarship of teaching and learning in the arts and/or humanities disciplines. Given the social science tendencies of SOTL, it is challenging for teacher-scholars in the arts and humanities to find project designs, methodologies, and genres that authentically reflect their disciplinary expertise, ways of knowing, and ways of demonstrating knowledge while still being taken seriously by the broader SOTL community. This issue of Academic Exchange Quarterly will provide a place to discuss these issues, as well as to document SOTL projects conducted from such arts and humanities perspectives.

Feature Editor Nancy Chick, Chair of the ISSOTL Humanities Interest Group, encourages arts and humanities teacher-scholars engaged in scholarship of teaching and learning, as well as those who’ve led SOTL programs that have successfully negotiated such challenges, to submit.

Hi all--

As part of my project on learning in literary studies, I'm investigating the conceptual frameworks that students use to organize their knowledge.  I'm especially interested in what happens as students move from one course to another, and how they make sense of the different critical practices their various professors engage.  Can someone point me towards a guide to interviewing that is not too social-sciencey?  For example, is it better to be completely open-ended ("what strikes you as you move through the lit major?"), a bit more directive ("what do you do when your professors have very different ideas about how to interpret texts?"), or even more specific?  Is there a "best" way to begin the interview?  And so on.  Needless to say, this is not what I was trained to do . . .

Thanks for any references--
Pat Michaelson
Univ. of Texas at Dallas 

Feature Editor Nancy Chick, Chair of the ISSOTL Humanities Interest Group, encourages arts and humanities teacher-scholars engaged in scholarship of teaching and learning, as well as those who’ve led SOTL programs that have successfully negotiated such challenges, to submit.

We are seeking proposals for chapters in follow-up to Exploring Signature Pedagogies: Approaches to Teaching Disciplinary Habits of Mind (Stylus, 2009), under contract with Stylus Publishing. Each chapter should briefly introduce a discipline, provide a brief literature review of the scholarship of teaching and learning (or the lack thereof) in the discipline, describe and evaluate the discipline’s traditional pedagogies and practices, and articulate elements of existing or potential signature pedagogies.  Each chapter will also be grounded in strong literature reviews and written in a lucid, engaging style. 

Exploring Signature Pedagogies included chapters on history, literary studies, creative writing, music, visual and performing arts, geography, human development, psychology, sociology, agriculture, biology, computer science, mathematics, and physics.  For this “sequel,” we are looking for considerations of other disciplines, inter-disciplines, and professions, such as the following:

Some of these fields have an existing literature on their signature pedagogy, so proposals should reflect a familiarity with these publications, as well as plans to summarize and extend this work.  Completed chapters should be approximately 4,100 words, including works cited. Co-authored chapters are welcome. 

Proposals are due on March 15 and should include a two-page (double-spaced) description of the chapter and a CV reflecting each author’s qualifications and experience with SoTL. 

Proposals should be sent to nancy.chick@uwc.edu.   Questions and queries can be addressed to the editors Nancy Chick (nancy.chick@uwc.edu), Aeron Haynie (hayniea@uwgb.edu), and Regan Gurung (gurungr@uwgb.edu).

Hi everyone--

At our meeting last week in Bloomington, I agreed to organize a workshop on humanities methods for ISSOTL2010.  Later that morning, I heard a presentation by two psychologists about a project they did "reading" students' postings in an online discussion and in a course blog.  They used a computer program to perform a content analysis, counting words of different kinds as well as word count and such, and then doing various statistical calculations.  I kept thinking about this as a perfect example of a social science project in which some humanities methodology might be helpful.  So then I wondered about doing a workshop with them, in which we might work through two ways of reading the text -- a humanities-based close reading and a social-science based content analysis.  In that way, we could show that both approaches yield useful information but provide different types of "proof."  The downside is that a room full of social scientists could watch all of this and simply repeat the claim that without "hard data" no analysis is conclusive.  Anyway, I wonder what others think. Does this seem like a useful model?

Sherry Linkon

Join us for a breakfast meeting on Saturday morning from 8:00 to 9:00 in the State Room West on the 1st floor of the Indiana Memorial Union.  For details, see this page.