Events

No RSVP needed.

Want to feel safer about the security of your information? Smith is now offering two factor authentication to ensure that you're the only one who can access your accounts. ITS will be offering short sessions to introduce faculty to two factor authentication, including why it's important and how it works.

Please join us for this informative session about a new way of securing your email and other college information. If you choose, we'll get you enrolled on the spot, and as an added bonus, we'll give you a key fob to help get you started!

Workshop Leader

Ben Marsden, Information Security Director

Limited to 25 participants. Please RSVP to Patty Tran (ptran@smith.edu) by May 5.

Participants will explore a range of options for integrating online and multimedia writing into classrooms. The workshop will demonstrate student projects and sample assignments along a continuum that ranges from design elements in print projects to online postings to visuals to audio to video. Emphasizing easy-to-implement activities and manageable learning curves, the facilitator will address points of resistance to the adoption of digital and media-oriented writing assignments. Strategies for assessing digital writing and for addressing concerns of intellectual property will be woven into the discussion and demonstrations. Breakout sessions will provide participants with opportunities to develop assignments and adapt the workshop approaches to their own classrooms. The workshop will also consider the benefits of integrating digital writing into curricula, including the possibilities for not only developing emerging media literacies but also extending familiar habits and rhetorical strategies. The workshop will also focus on ways that digital writing can be used to foster creativity, engagement, and internal motivation. Starting with approaches that lower the threshold for implementing assignments, the workshop will demonstrate a range of projects and guide participants toward possibilities for using digital writing to transform class activities.

Workshop Leader

Daniel Anderson

Professor of English & Comparative Literature, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. Anderson is an expert in digital humanities and digital rhetoric.

Limited to 20 participants. Please RSVP to Kayla Cheneba (kcheneba@smith.edu) by May 11.

Do students improve as writers between the first and senior years? Join the writing committee, friends, and allies for a reading of papers written by the same students in their first and senior years. We'll read and discuss first-year papers from WI courses and senior papers from across the curriculum for a day and a half. This is not grading – it's expeditious, holistic assessment followed by discussion. Readers read at their own pace. All disciplines welcome.

Workshop Leaders

Julio Alves

Director, Jacobson Center

Cate Rowen

Executive Director, Institutional Research

Minh Ly

Associate Director, Educational Assessment

NB: Reviewers will receive a $400 stipend.

Limited to 25 participants. Open to all, not just those interested in teaching a FYS. Please RSVP to Patty Tran (ptran@smith.edu) by May 12.

Perhaps it goes without saying that our work as academics shows up principally as discursive activity. We are able to differentiate various disciplinary communities by way of their preference for, traditions involving, and attitudes toward writing. Regularly, we expose our students to these preferences and (implicitly or explicitly) invite them to produce discourses that we recognize as discipline-specific. Here, writing is an instrument in service of an understanding of theories, methods, issues, and information associated with a tradition of scholarly inquiry.

But it can be argued that writing in the first year seminar, especially when such a course functions as a writing course, redistributes the writing/content dialectic. In such courses, a content (a constituent public or academic issue, question, or problem) is often explored so as to foreground the work of writing in its capacities to shape and change knowledge, with drafting and revising prose the primary focus for the course. Appropriately, such a focus energizes the overall goal of the course: to introduce students to intellectual life, constituted largely by transdisciplinary discursive practices (analysis, argument, and deliberation) where disagreement is an expected feature of public-intellectual exchange. For those of us who teach first-year seminars, we may pose a prudent question: Can we differentiate between the ways we make use of writing in the first-year seminar from the reasons and ways we turn to written work in more advanced disciplinary courses? How do our expectations for "good writing" in the first year differ from our valuation of robust disciplinary writing later on? How can a first-year seminar's intellectual agenda "stand its own ground?"

In the workshop, we'll think together about the purposes and goals of Smith's seminars and consider strategies for bringing and enhancing attention to writing in the first year.

Workshop Leader

Van E. Hillard

Professor of Rhetoric and Writing Studies, Director of the Writing Program, Davidson College

Please RSVP to Ailey Picasso-Hobin (apicassohobin@smith.edu) by May 12.

The Design Thinking Initiative is putting a twist on the process of crafting learning experiences for students. In this workshop we will jump-start syllabus design by incorporating insights and ideas from other workshop participants and by leveraging the concept of rapid prototyping – quick and early experiments or models that help answer tricky questions. We will use design thinking techniques and explore tools, methods, and course partnerships to build interdisciplinary collaboration and experiential learning into your courses. Faculty and staff are invited to bring ideas for courses or programs at various stages of development. Participants are welcome to come to one or both sessions and to continue to work in Capen Annex until 4 p.m. as schedules permit.

Workshop Leader

Zaza Kabayadondo

Co-director of the Design Thinking Initiative

Opportunities for Inclusive Teaching will be a hands-on session on how to review and select instructional technologies, and practice the steps needed to assure that text and media elements in courses are accessible to all learners.

Participants will have the chance to play with current tools for the creation and use of accessible materials. In addition to looking at course materials from both the instructor's role in creating and choosing course content and the students' role in accessing that content, we will have a discussion of accommodation vs universal design.

Workshop Leader

Laura Rauscher

Director of Disability Services

Limited to 20 participants. Please RSVP to Johanna Ravenhurst (sherrerdcenter@smith.edu) by May 5.

In her book, "Can We Talk About Race?," Beverly Tatum argues that only some students are reflected in college course curricula. Using her ABCs of inclusivity (Affirming identity, Building community, and Cultivating leadership), this workshop will (1) work to uncover what our unspoken assumptions may be in structuring our courses; (2) discuss the potential implications of those assumptions on who is included in the story that our course tells about our field; and (3) reshape our own classes so that they begin to reflect all Smith students. Each workshop participant will be asked to choose a specific course to evaluate, and bring in syllabi and course assignments, so that we can begin the concrete journey of making our own courses more inclusive. Based on the backgrounds and goals of participants (to be collected in advance), we will focus our time together by working on course "stories" and goals, choosing examples and readings, and rethinking the structure of specific assignments through the lens of inclusivity and intersectionality. Prior attendance at the book discussion and/or Dr. Tatum's talk is NOT required – all are welcome!

Workshop Leaders

Shannon Audley

Shannon Audley (Education and Child Study) is a former high school science teacher turned educational psychologist. Her research interests focus on understanding how children's social interactions with peers and teachers influence their experiences of and reactions to (in)justice in the school setting.

Borjana Mikic (EGR)

Borjana Mikic (Engineering) is currently the faculty co-director of the Design Thinking Initiative and is a former director of the Sherrerd Center.

Please RSVP to Kayla Cheneba (kcheneba@smith.edu) by May 15.

This workshop is aimed at new and newish Liberal Arts Advisers as well as those of us who advise students informally outside that framework. We will go over the basics of Liberal Arts Advising – what it is and how to do it, including time to discuss specific questions that came up this past year for first-time advisers. We will also discuss some case studies to help you anticipate the kinds of situations you might encounter as an adviser, and to start developing strategies for addressing them. This workshop is being offered in response to feedback from new advisers that they would like more preparation than was available through the fall Adviser Orientation meeting. Any faculty or staff interested in advising are welcome to attend this workshop, but we hope all new Liberal Arts Advisers will attend.

Workshop Leaders

Scott Bradbury

LAA director

Jane Stangl

First-Year Class Dean

Limited to 20 participants. Please RSVP to Patty Tran (ptran@smith.edu) by May 18.

This workshop will focus on identifying best practices for engaging in effective community partnerships with a special focus on the how scientists can ethically partner in community driven efforts to address climate and health-related issues.

Workshop Leader

Yanna Lambrinidou

Medical ethnographer, adjunct assistant professor, Science and Technology Studies (STS), Virginia Tech

Yanna Lambrinidou is the founder of the non-profit children's environmental health organization Parents for Nontoxic Alternatives. Since 2007, Lambrinidou and Dr. Marc Edwards have teamed on researching the historic 2001-04 Washington, D.C., lead-in-drinking-water contamination. This work exposed wrongdoing and unethical behavior on the part of local and federal government agencies and evolved into several successful, interdisciplinary research proposals, presentations, and peer reviewed publications. In 2010, Lambrinidou conceived and co-taught the new graduate level engineering ethics class "Ethics in Engineering, Science, and Public Policy." In 2011, Lambrinidou, Edwards, and their collaborators were awarded a 3-year grant from the Ethics Education in Science and Engineering (EESE) program of the National Science Foundation (NSF) for further development and national dissemination of this course. Lambrinidou is also teaching engineering ethics for continuing education of practicing engineers. Her previous research focused on hospice and pediatric cancer care.

Limited to 30 participants per session. Please RSVP (one session only) to Sandra Blaney (sblaney@smith.edu) by May 19.

The Office of the Provost and Dean of the Faculty invites faculty and academic assistants to attend an Interfolio search-related tutorial. This workshop will review the ways committee managers and evaluators access applicant information and how best to utilize Interfolio during the search process. Departments anticipating national faculty searches for the 2018-19 academic year are especially encouraged to attend.

Workshop Leaders

David Schenirer

Client Success Manager, Interfolio

David works with institutional clients to conduct product on-boarding and implementation, provide day-to-day support, and be a strategic thought associate for partner institutions. David also works closely with institutional administrators to facilitate product feedback and better understanding outstanding institutional challenges.

Michael Raab

Director of Client Success, Interfolio

Michael has been with Interfolio for a little over one month, but has over 10 years of experience in the education technology space, and has worked for both Blackboard and Hobsons previously. He has a strong background in helping educational institutions adopt new technologies and improve workflows.

Please RSVP to Hayley Spizz (hspizz@smith.edu) with the start time of the session you'd like to attend by Monday, May 22.

Beginning in 2017-18, Smith will be expanding its use of Interfolio for reappointment, tenure, and promotion reviews. These one-hour sessions will prepare candidates and voting members for using the platform for 2017-18 or later reviews. The meetings for candidates (beginning at 8:30 a.m., 11:30 a.m., and 3 p.m.) will include an introduction to ByCommittee terms and user roles, managing your materials, and where to find support. The meetings for voting members in departments and the Committee on Tenure and Promotion (beginning at 10 a.m. and 1:30 p.m.) will include an introduction to ByCommittee terms and user roles, the candidate's perspective, viewing candidates' materials, uploading materials, and where to find support.

Workshop Leaders

David Schenirer

Client Success Manager, Interfolio

Michael Raeb

Director of Client Success, Interfolio

Limited to 10 participants. Please apply to Floyd Cheung (fcheung@smith.edu) by May 1.

Student-faculty pedagogical partnerships are increasingly a focus of attention in both scholarship and practice. For instance, Healey, Flint, and Harrington (2014) recently wrote that engaging students and faculty effectively as partners in learning and teaching "is arguably one of the most important issues facing higher education in the 21st century"(p. 7), and they provide a wide range of examples of the proliferation of such partnerships. Likewise, the most recent issue of the International Journal for Academic Development, entitled "Engaging students as partners in learning and teaching: Implications for academic development," offers both arguments for and examples of student-faculty partnership projects in Australia, Canada, Sweden, and the United Kingdom. The McMaster Institute for Innovation and Enhancement in Teaching and Learning has organized the first International Summer Institute on Students as Partners in Learning and Teaching in Higher Education, which took place in early May 2016. A grant from The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation includes funds to support Smith College in joining Lafayette, Oberlin, Reed, and Ursinus Colleges in developing a student-faculty partnership program based on the Bryn Mawr/Haverford SaLT program.

Workshop Leader

Floyd Cheung

Director, Sherrerd Center for Teaching and Learning

Application

To apply for the institute, send a letter of interest by May 1 to Floyd Cheung, Director of the Sherrerd Center for Teaching and Learning, at fcheung@smith.edu. In your application please describe possible courses in 2017-18 that could benefit from student-faculty partnership.

Please RSVP to Hayley Spizz (hspizz@smith.edu) no later than May 22.

The Office of the Provost & Dean of the Faculty invites faculty members to attend a workshop on the Tenure and Promotion process. This session will provide an opportunity for faculty members approaching tenure and/or promotion reviews to meet with former members of the Tenure and Promotion Committee, Bill Peterson, and Hayley Spizz. Information to help in the preparation and submission of materials will be provided, and sample dossiers will be available for viewing. There will be ample time for questions.

This workshop is offered each January and May and faculty members may attend as often as they wish.

Workshop Leaders

Bill Peterson

Associate Provost & Dean for Academic Development

Hayley Spizz

Faculty Policies Specialist