Labs Across the Curriculum
Course Development Projects: 2011-2012
Ethnographic Field School in Jamaica
Lisa Anderson-Levy and Nancy Krusko
Although the Department of Anthropology has a long tradition of offering
archeological field opportunities in which students learn field techniques, there are
no comparable opportunities to learn the primary methodology of cultural
anthropology, ethnographic methods. Jamaica is an ideal field school location
because the Caribbean is notoriously overlooked as both a research area and a study
abroad destination for US based researchers and students. Lisa and Nancy will lead
a group of students in January 2012, and would like to offer this experience every
other year as an ethnographic field school. In coming years, they intend to
collaborate with faculty from across the disciplines interested in developing
innovative teaching models drawing on other disciplinary perspectives. In the
longer term, this program may find collaborative partners at other ACM schools.
The Francophone Culture Lab
Natašа Bašić
Students who study abroad in a Francophone country will have the opportunity to
develop a project (i.e. to experiment and observe) on a cultural aspect of their host
country. During their stay, students will collect materials or conduct research on
one or several specific cultural aspects. Upon their return, they will enroll in a ¼
credit to 1 credit special project course and produce materials to be used in French
215 (Advanced French Language and Composition). The French 215 students will
benefit from up-to-date and in-depth examples and analyses of Francophone
cultures. This project is part of departmental initiative to develop a capstone.
Civil War and Civil Rights in the Beloit College Archives
Fred Burwell and Ellen Joyce
By offering this course at this particular time and place with significant
anniversaries of both the Civil War and the Civil Rights movement coming up in the
next few years, the History Department hopes to lay the groundwork for more
active engagement with community-based history in Beloit and its surroundings.
This course is entirely archives based and is led by Ellen and Fred as equal partners.
It probes the archives and local history in relation to both the Civil War and the Civil
Rights movement. It focuses on student involvement in cataloguing, sorting, and
expanding access to archival materials for future researchers. Ellen and Fred plan to
use the College’s Alumni magazine (and other resources for contacting and
surveying alumni) to issue a call for diaries, letters, scrapbooks and other
memorabilia that would enhance these collections for future student projects and
for other researchers.
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Cultural Competence and Confidence outside the Spanish classroom
Gabriela Cerghedean
This project will provide students with the opportunity to be actively engaged with
the Beloit Latino community. The module will improve students’ language skills and
their understanding of the target culture within a specific context. During the fall
semester and continuing into the spring they will be part of various projects and will
acquire the tools needed to successfully understand, communicate, and interact in
Spanish with members of diverse cultures. The projects that the students will
undertake include tutoring at the Stateline Literacy Council, translating brochures
into Spanish and helping to develop a bilingual web site for Community Action of
Beloit, and translating and reading children’s literature in after-school programs.
Their active participation will establish and develop valuable partnerships between
Beloit College students and the Latino community. It will transform our classroom
into a place without cultural barriers that promotes cultural competence.
Beloit Fiction Journal
Chris Fink
This project aims to redesign, revitalize and expand one of the signature
publications of Beloit College, The Beloit Fiction Journal, and the course in which the
students produce the journal. This course affords students at Beloit an absolutely
unique liberal arts-in-practice experience which involves them in all phases of
compiling, editing and producing a national literary magazine. The grant
particularly involves the marketing and online presence of BFJ; it seeks to expand
both the reach of the journal and the hands-on, professional experience of the
students on its editorial board.
Cultures, Communication, and Communities: The Spanish-language
Laboratory
Sylvia López
Sylvia will use a laboratory-based pedagogy to foster communication between her
Spanish-language classes and the local Latino community. By bringing her language
learners together with native speakers of Spanish, Sylvia intends to create
meaningful, intercultural, and experiential opportunities for students who want to
practice their Spanish both within and beyond the traditional classroom setting. In
the end, she expects that these laboratory-based interactions with the local Latino
community will give language learners an excellent opportunity to see that language
is a social practice; that meanings are negotiated when communicating; and that
linguistic and cultural proficiency are gained when language instruction is
contextualized.
School as Lab: Experiment of Theories and Practices in Beloit Educational
Institutions
Jingjing Lou
School has long been a site providing tremendous opportunity for observation,
experimentation, and practice in many fields of studies. Jingjing proposes to use
school as an ideal lab in modifying one of her current courses: EDYS204
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“Constructing Differences”, an introductory course for students of education and
other disciplines to examine issues of culture, race, social class, gender and sexuality
and how differences are “constructed”, especially through schooling. Jingjing plans
to take the advantage of local educational institutions and use them as a "lab" for
students to test various social theories and also to apply in their own practices.
Institutions that the class will work with include Merrill Elementary School, Merrill
Community Center, and the Hendricks Education Center.
Writing and Community Development
Megan Muthupandiyan
This lab investigates the best methods of integrating community engagement in the
writing classroom for both introductory courses, and professional writing courses.
It will significantly inform a student guide to community engagement that Carol
Wickersham and Megan have begun outlining. The project aims to continue training
in specific areas of grant writing, namely, in the health sciences and museum
studies, so that the Writing Program can offer more specialized grant writing
courses.
Reaching Adolescents through the Arts
Bill New
This course is devoted to the preparation of Beloit College students for responsible
and effective teaching and mentoring of at-risk youth through the arts. Field
experiences will take place at the charter secondary schools at the Hendricks
Education Center in Beloit, and will involve designing and teaching elective classes
and/or organizing other activities with an arts focus. In the past, students have run
courses in visual arts, video, theater, dance, and writing. The course will feature
study of adolescent development, the concomitant conditions of danger to that
development, and the ways in which teachers, counselors and mentors, generally,
can best interact with youth at risk. It will include regular supervision of individual
students and/or small groups, on a clinical model. Students will be required to
spend at least four hours weekly at the charter school, and to help sustain the
college partnership with staff, students and parents at the charter schools.
Virtual Lab Components for Elementary Russian
Donna Oliver
This project will produce rich resources for students to extend their learning of
Russian beyond the classroom through the “virtual lab” experience, which will, in
turn, contribute more generally to their knowledge of Russian culture and better
prepare them for their further study of the language and study abroad in Russia.
With the assistance of an advanced Russian student, Donna will develop two or
three virtual labs for each lesson in her textbook.
Constructing Archives
Linda Sturtz
In this new course, students will analyze how archives are constructed by examining
the ways in which collections contribute to narratives of collective memory for
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groups, how access to materials is facilitated or prohibited, and how collections’
policies influence the ways groups perceive themselves. Archives, Repositories and
Special Collections themselves will provide the laboratory for students’
investigations. These include the Newberry Library, the Wisconsin Historical
Society, the Beloit College Archives & Museums, the Beloit Historical Society, and the
US National Archives – Presidential Archives: Herbert Hoover Library, West Branch,
Iowa.
Repertory Dance Company
Gina T’ai
The purpose of Repertory Dance Company is to provide students the tools and
opportunity to build a dance company. There are artistic and pedagogical
components, as well entrepreneurial and business management components.
Students in the course will have the opportunity to perform, teach, and
choreograph, while simultaneously practicing writing grants, writing a mission
statement, and budgeting. The Company’s outreach objective is to facilitate dance
exposure and education in the public schools and the greater Beloit community by
creating and performing shows and teaching workshops. Through immersion in a
guided, experiential learning environment, students will gain practice in creating
and maintaining many elements of a non-profit arts organization.
Language Partners: Beloit and Kaifeng
Daniel Youd
Lab modules will pair all Beloit students in first- and second-year Chinese courses
with counterparts in English language courses at Henan University, our exchange
partner, in Kaifeng, China. Students will connect twice weekly for 30-minute
sessions via a technology such as Skype to work on various activities designed to
strengthen speaking and listening skills in the respective target languages (Chinese
for the Beloit students; English for the Henan University students). The project will
necessitate the creation of a lab manual and ongoing collaboration between Daniel
and faculty at Henan University.
Philosophy and Children
Robin Zebrowski
This project builds off of the movement begun in the 1970s by Matthew Lipman that
aims to bring philosophical perspectives into the lives of young children in a
rigorous way. To this end, Robin’s project, in collaboration with Heath Massey in
Philosophy and Carol Wickersham in LAPC, will bring Beloit College’s introductory
philosophy students into local classrooms, armed with children’s books such as Dr.
Seuss classics and others. Merely through reading the texts to the children and
guiding them with well-crafted questions, the Beloit College philosophy students are
able to introduce philosophical thought, a precursor of critical thinking, into the
lives of young elementary school children, at a time that they can greatly benefit
from it developmentally and academically. And as we all know, teaching is one of
the best methods for learning, which gives our philosophy students an advantage
toward understanding these very same questions.
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