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.
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 »
When I was five, Dad ran down the driveway holding onto my wobbling bike. He let go, shouting words of encouragement even as I crashed onto the pavement. My elbow and knee were bleeding, but what hurt worse was my pride. “I can’t ride a bike without training wheels,” I cried through tears. After only two unsuccessful attempts, I concluded that I did not have biking skills. I stormed inside to do something else I already could do well.Forty years later, I still have that stubborn desire to excel at everything and that… read more about Getting Back on the Bike »
As a writer, I approached my first syllabus many years ago as more “to-do” list than work of imagination or meaning. My goal was to divide up the fourteen weeks of the semester into rational, discrete chunks. Once I did that, I soothed myself, it was only a matter of managing weeks, not wrestling an entire hairy, unruly, terrifying school term.Why did I choose this approach? I thought there is enough unpredictability to go around in any given semester. There are the known unknowns, as one US Defense Secretary once said, and… read more about Putting Students Into the Driver’s Seat »
I had a lofty goal: to get a group of our undergraduate students to set long-term civic engagement objectives for themselves. My proposal was a new Spanish course, named Engaging with the Latino Community Through Photography, with the purpose of adding applied social context to our curricula and helping our students in their own and personal path towards civic engagement. This course had as its final goal the creation of a Digital Archive of the local Latino Community, which is to remain as an online resource… read more about Images to Inspire Undergraduates Civic Engagement »
As a Bacca Fellow, I offered an undergraduate course “Web Design and Narrative” in 2016–2017. The course was based at the Center for Documentary Studies (CDS) at Duke University and drew a fairly broad cross-section of students, the majority of whom were either majoring in Computer Science or Visual Media Studies. Some students came into the course with a clear idea of what the content focus would be of their semester-long website projects, where others did not yet have a project focus in mind.As I saw the course ahead of… read more about Balancing Technology and Content in Teaching “Web Design and Narrative” »
Background and Goals of Redeveloping PS321International Law and Institutions (PS321) introduces Duke undergraduates to the domain of international law. In this course, I focus on the political conditions that affect the formation, content, and efficacy of international law, the latter defined as the capacity of international law to shape and constrain the behavior of states. Since I began teaching this class in 2009, I’ve also emphasized research and writing as a core element—the class receives both an R and a W.LAMP… read more about Redevelopment Effort for PS321: Experiences and Lessons »
For several years now I’ve meant to start a blog, and I’ve even come up with a title: Teaching Language. I first began teaching Spanish as a graduate student in Georgetown University in 1990. To say I was wet behind the ears is too kind; as a first-generation college student who stumbled into graduate school, everything was new and foreign. I had to learn everything from scratch, for myself, and on the fly. I guess everybody does, when you get right down to it. (And now that I look back, my friends from that time of my life… read more about Slowing It Down »