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Transformative Learning in the Humanities

Waiting for the last of the semester’s assignments to come in before my real feedback marathon begins, I’ve finally completed my part of Cohort 4, Group 2’s public knowledge project for the Transformative Learning in the Humanities Fellowship I was lucky enough to hold this fall.  The fellowship was extremely cool- we got a big stack of inspiring books (that I’m still working through!), were invited to workshops and lectures from the authors of those inspiring books, who were somehow even more amazing in (virtual) person than on their pages, and participated in fellowship workshops that modelled different tools and practices we could then use in our own classes.  I am super excited to play with padlet for in-class collaboration, especially in online classes (I had used it previously in face-to-face classes, but moved away- now it may be time to explore it again).  The different tactics to achieve 100% participation were especially appealing- I expect I’ll be using the write-read-tag in all of my classes going forward.  The fellowship was a brightspot in a very challenging semester, and I’m extremely grateful to have been involved.

I’m extremely proud of my group’s public knowledge project, Writing the World.  We decided to create a Manifold project to share some of what we each do in our classes, along with student samples.  Although I have some experience working in Manifold and probably could’ve done the ingest alone, group members Kate Culkin (BCC) and Yan Yang (BMCC) were interested in learning the platform, so we did a collaborative ingest over zoom.  Kate was more successful than I have ever been at getting a YAML file to work beautifully the first time!  It was very meta to create a project using a process where we focused on building our skills since that was such a focus of discussions during the fellowship and in each of our chapters.  


While I’ve given workshops and talks about aspects of my slightly peculiar pedagogy before (at CUNY Teaching Matters and Open Ed 2022), this is the first time I’ve sat down and wrote it all out in once place.  I am happy to have it to refer students and colleagues to, and to be able to look back at it after a few years, so see how I evolve in the time to come.  Though I wish I had made more time to work on my chapter, and there are already many revisions I’d love to make to my own writing, I’m incredibly proud to be in a collection with my awesome group members, Kate, Yan, and Dino Sossi (SPS).  The project is worth checking out for their class projects alone, so do head over and have a look