The Bacca Fellowship for Undergraduate Course Enhancement in Language, Arts and Media is a program for faculty of any rank, department or program who are teaching undergraduates.
Faculty members work with the Language, Arts & Media Program (LAMP) to incorporate a new classroom activity, assignment or course goal in line with LAMP strategic priorities. Bacca Fellows participate in a year-long workshop aimed at facilitating undergraduate course and pedagogical development. Many of our Bacca Fellows have written reflections on their LAMP experiences. For details about past Bacca Fellows and reflections on their pedagogical projects, see Past Bacca Fellows' Projects & Reflections.
A Spanish language writing instructor encourages her students to rethink the formal essay. In Spring 2024, in lieu of a traditional final essay in Spanish 301: Advanced Spanish Writing, I experimented with a different form: a visual (also known as graphic or multimodal) essay. First-year students, sophomores, juniors and seniors were enrolled in the class. Three planned to major in Spanish, while others were finishing their language requirement. All of them entered at an intermediate-mid or intermediate-high level of… read more about On Making Knowledge Visible: The Multimodal Essay in a Writing Class »
Most of my students will not become scholars of Italian language, linguistics, literature or related fields. While I naturally wish to instill in them a love of the language and culture, my larger objectives are the honing of skills and mindsets which connect them to a broader world and improve their ability to communicate in any language and to pursue study of any subject. I want them to understand the incremental nature of learning, and to increase their agency in the process, identifying their individual strengths and… read more about Pedagogical Tensions in the Student-Centered Language Classroom: Fostering Choice and Creativity in an Elementary Language Course. »
Imagine a spacetime bubble of collaborative creativity you enter regularly, where everyday constraints are suspended.You have the luxury to converse with other faculty about some aspect of your pedagogical practice that’s been nagging at you for a while, which you have yet to figure out. I had taught Modernism across the Arts for several years when I applied for the Bacca fellowship, and my idea was to come up with a comprehensive final assignment that would require group work, a project (perhaps) involving technology that… read more about Modernism Across the Arts »
Reconceptualizing my syllabus, discarding the contractual document outlining assignments, policies, and penalties, in favor of a liquid syllabus designed in Story Maps transformed student learning.“Black Girlhood in French Cinema” is a seminar course that examines the entanglement of race, gender, and age through the representation of Black girl protagonists in French films. Two core questions underlie our class discussions for the semester: 1) What place have Black girls historically occupied in the construction of the… read more about The Liquid Syllabus: Cultivating Student Agency »
Language portfolios invite students to extend their learning beyond the classroom through a variety of multimedia adventures. What do students actually take away from their time in a language classroom, and how do they grow as people in the process? This year’s BACCA fellowship gave me the opportunity to explore avenues for passing this question along to the students themselves by inviting them to identify meaningful content and document their own growth. The primary tool for drawing students into this journey was the… read more about Exploratory Journeys: The Versatility of Language Portfolios »
Eustace, a 3-year-old Coquerel’s sifaka lemur, was literally bouncing off the walls, or trees, to be accurate, on a clammy October 2020 morning at the Duke Lemur Center in Durham, North Carolina. As his long-suffering father, Marcus Aurelius, and ever-tolerant mother, Rodelinda, tried to rest after their mid-morning snack, their rambunctious son assailed them with head bops and tugs on their tails amidst his own backflips. Young primates are playful! This is both why monkey bars are called “monkey” bars and why our own… read more about Learning is winning: Bringing a neglected form of primate learning, play, into the classroom with board games! »
Making Space for Student Voices in Multilingual Public Policy Modules. Part of my work as a professor of French Studies is to help students think more clearly about Public Policy in other countries. Public Policy is what a governing body creates on behalf of its public, in response to a problem or issue that comes before it. Governments make policy about schools, schools make policy about education, and so on. France’s policies not only perplex students, but they downright confound them, whether we are talking about… read more about Developing Public Policy Courses in Five Different Languages, or How Do You Manage a Pedagogical Experiment? »
Improv games and long-form listening in a digital writing class. As LAMP Intern in Innovative Pedagogy, I’ve had the privilege of observing and participating in the Bacca Fellows’ learning community for the last two years. Here’s one takeaway I can share from Bacca experimentation in my teaching this semester: it’s ok, in fact, it can be great, to move away from a content-competency model and to focus instead on creative activities and relational bonding in the classroom. I’m teaching a digital literacy and… read more about Opening up to “Now” in a Multimedia Composition Class »
Getting closer to life in an existentialism lecture reworked as a double seminar. I applied for the Bacca Fellowship planning to teach a seminar on autofiction, focusing on recent writers such as Annie Ernaux, Karl Ove Knausgaard, Rachel Cusk, and Sheila Heti, who all, in different ways, try to get as close to life as possible. I had only taught this seminar once before, and I wanted to overhaul it. The Bacca Fellowship seemed the perfect opportunity to rethink the course. But the meaning of life appears to be back in… read more about The Meaning of Life Is Back in Fashion: Existentialist Oversubscription »
AI-responsive writing assignments transition from homework essays to writing by hand in the classroom. The 2022–2023 Bacca Fellowship Program has given the three of us space to plan, collaborate, stumble, and forge ahead, in community with peers as we worked to phase in new writing assignments to our Spanish teaching. In lieu of composing essays on the computer, students in elementary and intermediate level Spanish classes now write by hand in class every other week, without access to any outside resources, for an… read more about From Pixels to Pens: Revamping Writing in a Spanish Language Curriculum »
Fostering a sense of home in language through Spanish-learners’ daily memory work When I tell someone I teach Spanish, I am usually met with one of two reactions: "I used to know Spanish, but I've forgotten after all these years" or a bewildered "¿Por qué?" I often think about what unifies my response to those two reactions, and I've found that it's memory. There is a sudden case of amnesia that overcomes Spanish language learners once they stop using the language, bespeaking a lack of connection to the target language.… read more about Where Does Spanish Go? Developing a Homing Device for Forgotten Language »
Assigning Writing Studio Consultants readings about frustrated writers—by the authors Nam Le, Lucy Ives, Geoff Dyer, and Bernard Malamud—to complement trainings in peer learning methods. “In the process of turning from [fiction], we’ve accused it of appropriation, colonization, delusion, vanity, naiveté, political and moral irresponsibility,” writes Zadie Smith in a 2019 essay. Where the “conflicted, the liars, the self-deceiving, the willfully blind, the abject, the unresolved,… read more about The Character(s) of Pedagogical Training »
In responding to works of literature or film, what responsibilities arise for readers, critics, students and teachers? For a few years I’ve been teaching a class in the English Department called Shakespeare Now and Then: Versions of The Winter’s Tale. The class begins with a slow read through Shakespeare’s late romance, act by act, scene by scene. Since it is a tragicomedy, we also explore the comic and tragic paths which it mixes and transforms within Shakespeare’s own canon. The rest of the class is taken up… read more about Shakespeare Now and Then: Versions of The Winter’s Tale »
The process fostered a new engagement with antiquity: ancient texts were reanimated through the use of technological tools, and the students, working from their homes and in libraries, in North Carolina and beyond, often separated by hours as well as miles, shared texts across a digital diaspora. The work of the textual scholar has always been, in my experience, one of solitude. I assemble a pile of reference books, open browser tabs to various online tools, and sit with my material. Whether I am analyzing a… read more about Creating Community in a Digital Diaspora »
Before starting their own individual research on online communities and tribes, I asked my students to work together in groups of 3-4 and to research an online bobo community in order to pinpoint what characterizes community as such: What does community feel like? What keeps it working? What happens when it’s not working? When does being part of something online become a mere performance, a way, in other words, to monetize by using “community” as a platform. My objective in teaching the seminar “Hashtags… read more about THE REEMERGING COLLECTIVE »
I was able to develop a simple strategy that allowed me to create an engaging learning environment in which students were encouraged to ask questions, actively participate, and contribute to class content--a solution was a stress-free and very low-tech. In the first paragraph of my proposal for the Bacca Fellowship, I wrote: “I am very interested in the challenge of shifting from a seminar format to a larger lecture setting for one of my… read more about Scaling-up /Scaling-back »
“We do not learn from experience … we learn from reflecting on experience.” John Dewey We have co-taught Spanish 310 (Translating English-Spanish, Spanish-English) for several years. Over time we have continued to define and refine many aspects of the course. Some fundamental challenges remain, however, and that’s why we applied for the Bacca Fellowship. 1. How can we process the critical reflections efficiently and provide students meaningful feedback?… read more about Mise en abyme: a reflection on reflections »
In Spring 2022, during my fifth year as a Ph.D. Candidate in the Romance Studies Department, I had the opportunity to design and teach a course in my major field, Spanish Cultural Studies. As a language learner myself, I often felt that songs and music videos were reduced to occasional listening for leisure or fill-in-the-blank exercises, without considering their potential for critical thinking while practicing a second language. Influenced by my engagement in Sound Studies, I wanted to place music, performance, and sound… read more about From Podcasts to Music Interviews, and Other Sonic Assignments »
This year I decided to make a change in my pedagogy for Intermediate Hindi 203 and 204, in order to help my students become proficient in speaking through creating podcasts. In this blog, I will discuss why I chose the podcast format, the process of making a podcast, the challenges my students and I faced, the support I received from the LAMP group, and the areas I hope to improve. Why the podcast format The problem with oral presentations is that there’s little room for correcting students’… read more about Is anybody listening to my podcast? »
The Spring 2020 was marked by a big cataclysmic change in French 101. No, I am not referring to COVID-19, but to a changing of textbooks! Many teachers know how profound and sometimes scary changing textbooks may be, but I will say that doing so for my course opened an incredible opportunity to creatively redesign it. The switch in textbooks was motivated from a desire to update 1) the methodology of the course and 2) the content/layout of the materials. Our "old" textbook, Motifs, was heavily based on the… read more about Redesigning French 101 from the Core »
In an interview, author David McCullough stated, “Writing is thinking. To write well is to think clearly. That's why it’s so hard.” In other words, we frequently don’t know what we are trying to say until we start writing down our ideas, weighing the arguments as we draft them, organizing loose thoughts into a coherent whole. This is a useful concept for the students in my Writing 101 class, who often believe that they need to know exactly what they are going to say before they start writing. This expectation can, in turn,… read more about Teaching is Thinking »
A confession; I am a performer not a writer. I am a musician to be exact, or more exactly, a trombone player. And as such, I enjoy developing ideas and expressing with others. Not that I’m the most talkative person in the room, it’s just that interacting or performing for people seems to put me in a state of mind more conducive to idea development. However, like most of us, my job requires that I write a lot. This has been particularly true in the past six months. Normally, this would have been a huge chore,… read more about Improvisation as Process »
At the request of the Music, Dance, and Theater Studies departments, I designed the course “Writing about Performance,” which I taught this past semester for the third time. At each iteration, I’ve expected it to attract mostly students majoring in the arts, but in fact, they’ve come from a wide range of social sciences, humanities, and STEM disciplines. What the majority have in common, though, is a familiarity with the stage. Some are dancers; others are composers or choreographers; many have played a musical instrument… read more about Writing About Performance »
Somewhere around two-thirds of the way through the semester, I start falling behind. Even when I’ve taught courses many times, I finding it increasingly difficult to keep up with my teaching commitments than I did as a new faculty member. And since I see the same pattern across multiple classes, I have to cop to the possibility that the problem lies not with the students but rather with my own approach to teaching. My colleagues at LAMP helped me figure out why teaching seemed to be getting harder rather than easier. I… read more about Letting Go: Less Is More in Student Writing Assessment »
A feminist, a psychoanalyst, and a young conservative meet on a nineteenth-century Russian train. They carry steaming mugs of tea balanced between gloved hands, and chatter animatedly as the train lurches between stations in the remote countryside. The topic of conversation is a recent domestic homicide in the capital. The murderer unexpectedly boarded the train a few hours earlier and spoke at length about his case to another passenger. Having eavesdropped on the conversation, the three now debate the merits of the man’s… read more about The Tragedy of the Commons: Dramas of the In-Class Oral Presentation »
Each spring, I teach a course called Intensive Elementary French, which has become one of my favorite courses both for the students it allows me to interact with and the pedagogical puzzles it presents. The class attracts a group of students who are ready to devote a significant amount of time to learning French for personal, academic, or professional goals that are as lofty as they are varied. However, it also presents something of a perennial casse-tête. How do we best manage to fit a year’s worth of French… read more about Everyone's a Critic: Genre-based Writing for Beginning French Students »
How does technology change how we read and what stories we tell one another? And how does digital technology in particular influence narratives in contemporary culture? These two questions have guided my Writing 101 classes for three years to show how reading and writing have always been and continue to be mediated by technology (in the broadest sense of the word), in practice and theory. This year, I built on this notion to explore how narrative occurs in the most unlikely of places: in poetry and the archive. Digitally… read more about Building Rhetoric(s) of Narrative in the First-Year Writing Classroom »
My biggest take-away from participating this past year in the LAMP program is that, while I’ve taught at Duke 35 years, I’m still grappling with the basics of good course design! In my case, productive conversation with LAMP colleagues and leaders have led me to make two substantive changes to a new undergraduate capstone seminar in Political Science I’m developing for next year, PS430S, which will focus on how scholars in that discipline, and in History, study the origins of, and in one instance the avoidance… read more about Making Choices and Taking Risks in Designing a Seminar »
A few years ago, a Colombian professor of literature revealed the mystery of the signature of Manuel Quintín Lame. Leading an indigenous insurrection and advocating for an intercultural model of education, Quintín Lame was arguably the most influential indigenous leader of the twentieth century in Colombia. His signature had always been a bit of a puzzle for researchers and commentators. Next to his name, which could be easily identified, he signed with what many people considered to be a curious and shapeless doodle. It… read more about Language and Knowledge Go Together: Building an Experimental Website on Linguistic Rights »
In Fall 2017 and in collaboration with colleague Matthew Kenney, I offered a new course entitled Physical Computing, a critical media studies approach to the emerging ecosystem of internet-connected devices known as the Internet of Things, or IoT. When paired with Wi-Fi circuitry and augmented with sensors, virtually any object – a toothbrush, a lightbulb, a refrigerator, even a John Deere tractor – can become a “smart” thing that senses, collects data about, and responds to the world around it. The discourse… read more about From Paper to PCBs: Printed Circuit Boards as New Media Writing »