News

Our News Section includes a combination of stories written by LAMP leadership, collaborators and affiliated faculty; articles regarding LAMP that appeared in the media; and stories of general interest to LAMP site viewers. You can also use the drop down category filter below to see "What We're Reading" – which highlights books and articles we think you may find valuable ; "Faculty Reflections" – articles by Bacca Fellows; as well as "Testimonials" from several participants regarding their experiences in our program.


 

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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 »

What happens when you’re teaching a course on student protest narratives, and a protest emerges just a few yards from your classroom? In spring 2016, I taught “Student activism, storytelling and community change,” an undergraduate Education seminar at Duke University. The course goals included: understanding narrative conventions and their role in student activism; composing and sharing student stories across media; and developing a sense of the ethical dimensions of narrative. Students participated in team-based case… read more about Teach the Moment »

One of the best aspects of being a Bacca Fellow was to step outside my normal day in the office and classroom and share with faculty from other departments ideas for teaching strategies. In our small group and one-on-one conversations I was able to drill down and focus on very specific aspects of my syllabi, classroom exercises, and assignments with the cohort, yielding very practical improvements. I was also impressed with how the program encouraged me to re-examine and further improve teaching strategies that I thought… read more about Christopher Sims, Bacca Fellow »

The Bacca Fellowship afforded me the opportunity to meet on a regular basis with experienced mentors and an engaged cohort, to dedicate time and energy to one of the topics I am most passionate about: what can we learn from traditional scholarly writing? What elements can be readily discarded, and what rhetorical strategies still serve us well? Which media best support communication when we take into account the theme, the presentational mode, and our interlocutors? What works, and what doesn’t, when we try to communicate… read more about Melissa Simmermeyer, Bacca Fellow »

The LAMP program was essential for the civic engagement project I developed for a Spanish course with undergraduates. It provided the necessary funds to purchase the cameras and other equipment, as well as it paid for events associated with the overall project, such as photography printing. However, the LAMP program most importantly offered the academic support of group discussions and suggestions, and the mentoring from experienced leaders, which proved invaluable for me professionally and for this project. read more about Graciela Vidal, Bacca Fellow »

The discussions I've had with LAMP leaders and LAMP co-participants have enabled me to think more deeply about the goals and missions I wish to pursue in my class, and about what it means to be an educator in current times. I strongly recommend that Duke faculty, especially at an early stage in their teaching career, take part in LAMP programs. read more about Joseph Grieco, Bacca Fellow »

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,… read more about Putting Students Into the Driver’s Seat »

Background and Goals of Redeveloping PS321 International 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 »

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” »

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 »

It is not easy to teach students about injustice. This can be especially true when matters of inequality, domination, and violence are everyday and present tense—not mediated through fiction, nor distanced by history. In my Writing 101 course, “Land of the Free: Liberty, Justice, and Imprisonment in the United States,” students grapple with controversial issues like the contemporary legacies of slavery and convict leasing, racial inequality in the U.S. justice system, and the casual use of solitary confinement in… read more about When the Subject is Injustice »

When we set out to teach various kinds of academic writing – research essays, literature reviews, lab reports – we can use the concept of genre to ground our students. It enables them to start, to enter the work of, say, a research essay. They can then use drafting and revising as a way to hone both their skills (defining and presenting their argument, situating it in the context of existing scholarship, marshaling compelling evidence, and so forth) and, thus, their eventual written product. But if we want to help students… read more about Teaching Speaking: Starting at the Beginning »

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 »

“You mean, you want us to actually send our essays to Wikipedia,” my students asked. “Yes,” I told them. “That’s the only way they might publish your essay.” For the last three semesters, I’ve assigned students to write research essays on neglected topics of local history here in Durham—not only for me to read, but for anyone on Wikipedia. Each time I’ve assigned this project, students have a delayed realization half way through the six-week unit that they are actually trying to write an article that will become the… read more about The Wikipedia Assignment »

Rick Godden and Anne-Marie Womack reflect on accessibility in the learning process in their essay for the Digital Pedagogy Lab, “Making Disability Part of the Conversation: Combatting Inaccessible Spaces and Logics”: By making disability a part of the conversation — or perhaps, more pointedly, by acknowledging that it is always an integral part of any conversation about learning and pedagogy whether we explicitly acknowledge it or not — we encourage instructors to evaluate classroom spaces and pedagogical practices… read more about Making Disability Part of the Conversation: Combatting Inaccessible Spaces and Logics »

Adam Rosenblatt reflects on the beauty of student engagement and expression in his essay for the Digital Pedagogy Lab, “On Beauty and Classroom Teaching”: “Beauty is why we teach, and how we learn. […] As educators, we choose the discipline, topics, and texts we teach based not only on our interests, but also on the beauty we see in them. We teach at our best not when we conceive of ourselves as lecturers delivering content, but when we invite our students to explore with us the internal logic, complexity, and… read more about On Beauty and Classroom Teaching »

Stefano Recchia (Cambridge) and Jennifer Welsh’s (Oxford) volume, Just and Unjust Military Intervention: European Thinkers from Vitoria to Mill (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 2013), examines the question of when it’s politically, morally, and legally correct for one country to intervene in the civil war of another, and highlights how it has been a long-standing subject in history and political philosophy. Only have time for a chapter? Check out Chapter 11, Stefano Recchia’s essay entitled “The… read more about Just and Unjust Military Intervention: European Thinkers from Vitoria to Mill »

Guest blogger, Janine Utell, a Professor of English at Widener University in Pennyslvania, shares her latest pedagogical experiment on the ProfHacker blog: teaching with video essays. This is not exactly a post about how to teach the video essay (or the audiovisual essay, or the essay video, or the scholarly video).  At the end I share some resources for those interested in teaching the form: the different ways we might define the form, some of the theoretical/conceptual ideas undergirding the form, how it allows us… read more about Teaching While Learning: What I Learned When I Asked My Students to Make Video Essays »

“Based on fieldwork and archival research on epics, folktales, lyrics, laments, charms, and other oral traditions, How to Read an Oral Poemanswers the questions, What is oral poetry? How does it work? What is reading, literally and figuratively?” See John Miles Foley’s How to Read an Oral Poem for more on the oral tradition. read more about How to Read an Oral Poem »

“As scholars, we face increasing expectations to publicize our work online and make our research available to people outside of academe. The result: We are all of us dipping our toes into the role of the public intellectual.” – Read "We Are All Public Intellectuals Now" from Megan Condis, Assistant Professor at Stephen F. Austin State University. read more about We Are All Public Intellectuals Now »

On February 16th, Jeff Polish of The Monti led the first workshop in the 2016 What’s Your Story Series, “Find Your Story.” Storytelling is a fundamental part of how we interact with people, whether it takes place in a class presentation, a job interview, or even a date. What makes for a good story? What makes us as audience members respond positively to storytellers? See Jeff Polish’s presentation for a breakdown of the storytelling process. Join us on March 23rd for Tell Your Story, the final event in our series… read more about Storytelling Tips from Jeff Polish »

I recently inherited a bin containing the historical documentation of the library instruction program at Duke University. Included in this treasure trove of manila folders, cassette tapes (!), and 8×11 documents is a legendary “script” that, at one point in the 1990s, instruction librarians were required to read verbatim to students during their library instruction sessions: [excerpt] Section I. Introduction – Why this session?: Understanding the Academic Library I would like to welcome you all to Lilly… read more about Ditching the Script: An Embedded Librarian in the LAMP@TWP Faculty Learning Community »

The work of academics can matter and be influential on a public level, but the path to becoming a public intellectual, influential policy advisor, valued community resource or go-to person on an issue is not one that most scholars are trained for. The Public Professor offers scholars ways to use their ideas, research and knowledge to change the world. The book gives practical strategies for scholars to become more engaged with the public on a variety of fronts: online, in print, at council hearings, even with… read more about The Public Professor: How to Use Your Research to Change Your World »

The Chronicle of Higher Education This is how we can begin to practice a ‘pedagogy of presence’ in our classrooms By James M. Lang JANUARY 19, 2015 Over the holiday season, my youngest daughter and I had the opportunity to help prepare and serve a meal at a local soup kitchen. We worked with other volunteers in assembly- line fashion to fill plates of food for hungry folks waiting in a queue that stretched around a large room and out the door. As each plate came down the line with ham and potatoes, I plopped… read more about Waiting for Us to Notice Them »

I teach open because I believe that I have a responsibility to model in the classroom the kind of hospitality-based, collectivist, transparent society in which I want to live. In my pedagogical approach, open means rejecting a gatekeeping educational environment in favor of one characterized by participant pedagogy, a community-based, collaborative method in which all members take active responsibility for the learning process. For me, teaching open also means making course materials available to the public, codesigning… read more about Teaching Open and the Beauty of Remix »

Fairy stories such as Beauty and the Beast and Rumpelstiltskin can be traced back thousands of years to prehistoric times, with one tale originating from the bronze age, academics have revealed. Using techniques normally employed by biologists, they studied common links between 275 Indo-European fairy tales from around the world and found some have roots that are far older than previously known, and “long before the emergence of the literary record”. Read more: http://www.theguardian.com/books/2016/jan/20/fairytales-… read more about Fairytales much older than previously thought, say researchers »

During the fall 2014 semester, Aria (Thompson Writing Program, Duke University) and Hannah (Duke University Libraries) piloted an embedded librarian model of library instruction in a section of Writing 101 entitled Hacking Knowledge. C:\ _ to hack: to creatively tweak an established computer system to circumvent the limitations, or extend the capabilities, of the existing system. [1] When we began collaborating on a new Writing 101 course, Hacking Knowledge, we realized we would need to work together in new ways to… read more about Embedded Collaboration: Hacking the System of One-Off Library Instruction »