Wednesday, October 30, 2013

October Faculty Highlights: Lucinda Bliss, M.F.A.

As we continue to talk about how to build learning communities and how to increase connectivity with our students at Union Institute & University, I am happy to highlight Lucinda Bliss, M.F.A. as an example of a faculty member who is committed to social responsibility. Lucinda takes her academic and artistic gifts and uses them both to benefit her surrounding communities in unique, dynamic ways, and I'm proud to recognize her this month.
 
Lucinda Bliss, M.F.A., has taught at Union Institute & University since 2005. She is an instructor within the BA program, specializing in the area of visual culture and art history. In addition to her work at Union, Lucinda has taught widely at other institutions, such as the University of Southern Maine, and within the MFA program at the Vermont College of Fine Arts. Along with her teaching, she also worked for four years as the Director of the Bowdoin Summer Art Camp at Bowdoin College, as well as published the short chapbook of poetic verse, The Anatomy of Desire: the Daughter / Mother Sessions (2000). Lucinda is likewise a prolific visual artist, who has exhibited widely, demonstrating her passion and talent for painting, drawing, and mixed media works.   
 
In her own art and within her classes, Lucinda seeks to demonstrate the productive balance between creative freedom and critical thinking and research skills. Her own research background includes the topics of feminism and women’s studies, semiotics, the culture of rock-and-roll, psychoanalysis and identity, as well as the relationship between pedagogy and technology.
Lucinda seeks to create engaging learning environments for her students and is always aware of her role in productively challenging and mentoring them to achieve their full potential. Lucinda said about her understanding of social responsibility: “In working with students, my first priority is to create a sense of group trust, which is essential to establishing a context for rigorous dialogue and critique in the classroom. The bottom line is that it takes time to draw students out and to address their concerns, including fears and insecurities about art, as well to share a bit about myself and my work with the group.  At Union, we serve a diverse student body and this makes for a rich sense of community, if students in a course are committed to the group dynamic and to offering rich feedback on one another’s work. I believe that the arts hold a unique position in society—that self-awareness and cultural understanding can be deepened though artistic process and that art objects can speak to the human experience uniquely. Educating students in the arts means contributing to each individual’s ability to see, analyze, problem solve, and essentially become more engaged citizens of the world. It sounds grandiose perhaps, but I know it to be true, and it is this belief that links my practice as a teacher with my understanding of social responsibility.”
In addition, Lucinda’s own artistic pursuits offer further avenues for practicing social engagement such as partnering with Maine Farmland Trust, an organization designed to support farmers and to protect farmland: “Over the summer, I began a collaboration with the Maine Farmland Trust in which I've combined my passions for running, drawing, and farming. The process involves literally running the boundaries of farmland and documenting each run with a GPS watch. I then write a blog entry about the experience (lucindasrunningblog.com, which has been featured on Freshly Pressed) and then translate the narrative into visual form in my studio. Work from this project is currently on view at the Maine Farmland Trust Gallery in Belfast, Maine, and will exhibit in 2014 at Aucocisco Galleries in Portland, Maine. In addition, there will be an exhibit of related work in the fall of 2014 at Landmark College in Vermont."
Several of Lucinda's 2012-13 works can be seen on the AucociscoWebsite, reflecting an exhibit there in May, 2013.

October Faculty Highlights: Dr. Woden Teachout

As we continue to talk about how to build learning communities and how to increase connectivity with our students at Union Institute & University, I am happy to highlight Dr. Woden Teachout as an example of a faculty member who is committed to social responsibility. Dr. Teachout takes her academic and artistic gifts and uses them both to benefit her surrounding communities in unique, dynamic ways, and I'm proud to recognize her this month.

Dr. Woden Teachout has been teaching at Union Institute & University since 2003 and was part of the inaugural task force for building Union’s Online MA program. She admitted that she was skeptical of online learning at first, but her work with the MA program convinced her of its great value: “By carefully crafting the curriculum, we have been able to provide students with the essential tools for scholarship in the foundational classes, and provide flexibility for student-designed curriculum in the advanced classes, while dedicating credits to internships and experiential learning.” She continues to mentor and serve in the History & Culture concentrations offered within the Online MA degree.
Dr. Teachout is a writer and historian primarily interested in the cultural history of American patriotism and American understandings of democracy. Her first book, Capture the Flag: A Political History of American Patriotism (2009) examines the changing, and controversial meanings of the American flag since the founding of the United States. The book received wide attention and praise for its narrative style and cultural insight, being reviewed by publications, such as The Washington Post and The Boston Globe, and by documentary filmmaker, Ken Burns. 
 
Her most recent book, Slow Democracy: Rediscovering Community, Bringing Decision Making Back Home (2012), was co-written with Susan Clark. In this work, Dr. Teachout draws on her historical training to show how the values of town-hall, American democracy are still practiced in the twenty-first century. Taking recent examples of community activism, Dr. Teachout and Susan Clark offer an attractive, alternative vision of a democratic government, powered by local concerned citizens, working together to address a variety of social and legislative issues.
Dr. Teachout’s writing, research, and instruction are intimately bound up with the questions of social responsibility and how she can have an impact on her surrounding communities. “One of the things that I most value about Union is its long tradition of engaged scholarship: scholarship that speaks to a community of academic scholars, but that also moves out of the ivory towers and into the rough and tumble of public life,” Dr. Teachout said.  “I’m interested in the cultural history of democracy, both as a scholar and a citizen, so social responsibility is always a central question. How have citizens tried to foster democratic cultures throughout the American past?  How have they used our history as a source of inspiration and a way to articulate values that might guide the nation?  And what might we do now to reinvigorate American democracy?”
But Dr. Teachout is interested in more than the content of history. She is also concerned with how that information is presented: “Looking at these questions, I’ve been increasingly drawn to issues of how we learn as well as what we learn.  As so many thinkers have articulated, there is a clear and necessary link between education and democracy.  Critical thinking, in particular, can be one of the foundations of civil society: both a means to personal empowerment for the disempowered, and one of the best ways to strengthen democratic culture and civic engagement.
For someone with these convictions, our Master of Arts program is a really exciting place to be.  We are blessed with incredible students:  thoughtful individuals who come to us with a host of rich life experiences and ways of looking at the world.  Our faculty talks a lot about John Dewey and Paolo Freire and their insights into the personal and social relevance of education.   We see our role as helping our students develop their capacities to their fullest, giving them the scholarly tools and strategies to unlock difficult problems – not only in our program but in the world beyond.”
Watch a short interivew below with Dr. Teachout as she talks about her book, Slow Democracy!
 
 
 

2013 Virtual National Faculty Meeting: Remembering Dr. Bernard Bull’s 7 Tricks and Tips


The posts for the October Union Strasse newsletter come on the heels of a successfully executed virtual national faculty meeting. All recordings and resources from each presentation are available in the WINK group on CampusWeb, and I encourage everyone to stop by and revisit the informative workshops by led by our generous, expert faculty presenters.
Our keynote speaker, Dr. Bernard Bull, is the Assistant Vice President of Academics, Associate Professor of Education, and Director/Chair of the M.S. in Educational Design & Technology at Concordia University Wisconsin. His presentation addressed the topic, “Online Learning through Community, Connectivity, and Collaboration.”
Many of you who attended reported how encouraged and inspired you were by Dr. Bull’s vision of using virtual classroom tools to cultivate better learning communities among your students.
The goal, he emphasized, is never to use technology for the sake of technology. Rather, technology becomes a means of achieving our main purpose: keep relationship and connectivity at the center of our mission and calling as teachers.
The calling of the online learner in the twenty-first century, Dr. Bull said, is as much about building learning communities and learning networks as it is about accessing information. He offered seven dynamic tools to empower instructors to cultivate those learning and networking communities with their students. I wanted to remember those seven tips and tricks here.
1)      Google+: This platform is similar to Facebook, and it is great for inviting outsiders into a virtual space to have a conversation, share videos, type comments, and share photos. Find more information here.
2)      Twitter: Dr. Bull said that using Twitter might see odd at first, but Twitter is really like micro-blogging—you can type 140 characters or less in any online posting. He encouraged us to use Twitter as a great place to share links and resources. He even recommended Twitter as a way to build 30 minutes of professional development into your day by just subscribing to certain Twitter accounts. In this way, a faculty member or a student becomes exposed to more resources by being connected to other people than they would find by trying to research it all on their own. Find out more here.
3)      Google Hangouts: This interface is similar to Adobe Connect. You can host up to 10 people in a virtual room, and the interface contains video and audio features. You can share screens and interact with a chat portal. The “On Air” capability allows you and your students to automatically record a meeting and stream it to YouTube. Recording is useful in case you or your students want to save the meeting for future reference. Find out more here.
4)      Diigo (Digest of Internet Information, Groups, and Other Stuff): Diigo is a social bookmarking website that allows users to highlight any part of a page and to attach a “post-it-note” to the highlight or to an entire page. If you are looking to organize a series of websites for your students, or if you want students to bookmark, record, and add notations about the usefulness of certain websites, Diigo is an excellent tool for individual research and for shared, team research possibilities. Find out more here.
5)      Blogging: Never underestimate blogging as a formative assessment tool. You can use any number of blog sites for students to record journal entries or begin drafts of papers for you and other students to give feedback. Find out more here.
6)      Google Docs: This feature in Google is useful for writing collective essays. The program also allows users to view and track editorial changes. This tool is an excellent compliment to a letter-grade assignment, ensuring that students have the opportunity to practice and learn before turning in their final draft. Find out more here.
7)      Digital Learning Community: The last tip is to encourage students to think about and become a member of a digital learning community. Part of being a digital learning community is to communicate early and often, be really curious, and to look for and reach out to specific individuals. Another part is to encourage and affirm IN OUR WORDS and talk intentionally rather than to discourage and distract. A digital learning community is a space to challenge and question one another and build upon the ideas of others.
Dr. Bull said that putting some of these tools into place has three advantages. Using them: 1) increases learning through practice, 2) increases student engagement and a greater sense of community and responsibility, and 3) increases access and possibility to your learners.
If you are an instructor at Union, and you have not already done so, please send me an e-mail at VPAA@myunion.edu and let me know how you think you could use some of these tools to increase connectivity, relationship, and engagement in your courses!