The Center for Teaching & Learning

Message From the CTL Director

Faculty Focused:

• Filling Faculty Vacancies with Your Top Candidate
• Innovation Station: Oral Histories as a Learning Tool
  
• Should AI be permitted in college classrooms?

• Tending to Students' Mental Health
• Framing Test Questions

Equity Emphasized:

• Transgender Awareness and Inclusion
  
• Native American Student Achievement

Scheduled:

• CTL Workshop: The Mentoring Relationship

As the program director for social work, I attend our accrediting body’s annual program meeting to ensure that we are keeping on top of our accreditation requirements. I participated in the meeting last month in anticipation of our upcoming reaffirmation. Over and over, the accreditation specialists identified the process as “continuous improvement.” Rather than reaching some mythical ideal, it’s assessing what we have and identifying places we can do better. I see that approach as an important part of my job as an instructor, committee member, departmental colleague, and your CTL director, too. This month, as we wrap up the final full month of the fall semester, I encourage us all to adopt a continuous improvement. For instance, it’s not too late to revise an assignment to improve clarity or to ask a colleague to observe you in the classroom.

Last month, Inside Higher Ed’s Christopher A. Snyder wrote a compelling piece in which he outlines, among other things, the principles of a liberal arts education and the current threats to those principles. I encourage Hood faculty to read and reflect upon it. Hood’s faculty have a significant opportunity to uphold and support liberal arts principles through our revised core curriculum—Heart, Mind, and Hands. The Subcommittee on Core Curriculum Proposals (SCCP) excitedly awaits your new core course ideas! If you’ve got a great idea for linked courses but don’t have that second person lined up OR would love to partner with someone who has an idea already, please check out our “Linked Course Collaboration” spreadsheet.

Textbook orders are due November 9th. Please consider adopting open educational resources (OER) for one or more spring courses. These resources are free to access, and often provide opportunities for you to edit, re-organize in ways that make the most sense for the way you want students to learn the content. If you have questions about OER, please reach out to me, Dean of the Graduate School April Boulton, or Reference and Education Services Librarian Kathryn Ryberg. We also plan to reach out to departments to engage in future discussions about OER.

I invite you to check out the resources on the CTL Blackboard site. Perhaps most relevant at this time given the events in Israel and Gaza is a section on "Addressing difficult topics with students." (CTL Bbà Other Faculty Resourcesà 2023-2024 Event Content) Thank you to Community and Inclusivity Vice President Tammi Simpson for sharing some CIC Belong resources. If you've got tips for addressing tough stuff in the classroom, please share!

“What can a chair do to ensure that the [Dean/Provost] makes an appropriately generous offer to the department’s candidate — and woos our preferred candidate with the same ardor as we have?” Read the “Ask the Chair” column in the Chronicle for tips.

Last spring, Mr. Tim Jacobsen, Broadcast Studios Coordinator and Instructor of Visual Media, worked with students in CMA 302: Visual Media Production II: “They partnered with [the African American History, Heritage, and Culture Society] and the Frederick County Department of Historic Preservation to record oral history interviews with African American residents of Frederick County who lived during and through segregation. The interviews will become part of the permanent Archives of the Frederick County Government.

For more information on how to use oral histories as a teaching and learning tool, check out these resources:

NEH.gov’s teacher’s guide on oral histories

Hood’s Oral History Libguide

Connect with Mary Atwell, Hood College’s Archivist

One of the most intense discussions taking place among university faculty is whether to permit students to use artificial intelligence in the classroom. To gain perspective on the matter, The Conversation reached out to four scholars for their take on AI as a learning tool and the reasons why they will or won’t be making it a part of their classes. to read the discussion, click here.

The CTL has a dedicated bookshelf space in the Library Commons for CTL resources and materials! Feel free to check out these books and return them when you are finished. If you would like the CTL to order other materials to increase our repository, contact Kerri Eyler with your request.

“On many campuses, professors are stepping up to the role, introducing “mindfulness minutes” in their classes, doing away with midnight deadlines, and offering no-questions-asked mental-health days.

Yet many are uncomfortable serving as wellness coaches or trying to recognize what counts as a crisis. While three quarters of faculty members in a recent survey by the Healthy Minds Network said they’d had one-on-one phone, video, or email conversations with students in the past 12 months regarding student mental health and wellness, only half were confident that they could recognize a student in emotional distress. One in five respondents said that supporting students had taken a toll on their own mental health.” To continue reading the Chronicle article, click here. If you know of a Hood student in need of assistance, please contact Hood’s Director of Wellness Amanda Dymek to find the right resources.

A recent study in CBE-Life Sciences Education suggests that the way test questions are framed may have an effect on students’ attitudes about the question. Hsu, Clark, Hill, and Rowland-Goldsmith's abstract states, in part: “Nearly all undergraduate biology courses rely on quizzes and exams. Here, we conduct a quasi-random experimental study where students in different sections of the same course were given isomorphic questions that varied in their framing of experimental scenarios. One section was provided a description using the self-referential term “you”, placing the student in the experiment; another section received the same scenario that used classmate names; while a third section's scenario integrated counterstereotypical scientist names. Our results demonstrate that there was no difference in performance throughout the semester between the sections, nor were there differences in students’ self-reported stress and identity. However, students in all three sections indicated that they most preferred the self-referential framing, providing a variety of reasons that suggest that these variants may influence how well a student reads and processes the question.”

November 13-19 is Transgender Awareness Week. The purpose of this week is to raise visibility about transgender people. Historically, trans people have been misrepresented, and these misrepresentations have permeated public perceptions. Take deliberate steps to inform yourself about trans-inclusivity by checking out one or both of these Inside Higher Ed pieces.

An excerpt from Araya Baker’s piece “Confronting misconceptions about nonbinary, trans faculty, staff, and students: “...Non-heterosexual college and university students are not faring well collectively—almost a third reported suicidality during the 2021–22 academic year. The odds are even worse for transgender college students, who, unlike cisgender LGBQ students, are often an afterthought among the broader LGBTQ+ community as much as they are within higher education in general. Compared to their cisgender counterparts, transgender college students are more than four times as likely to experience mental health problems.” To keep reading, click here.

Jamie MaKinster reflects on the experience of being a trans educator and administrator in higher ed. MaKinster states, “There are few things more challenging in my life than explaining what it means to be transgender to those of you who are cisgender; however, a near-death experience last year led me to make a connection between the ways in which we ask ourselves questions about our existence and what it means to be transgender.“ For more, click here.

According to the Postsecondary National Policy Institute, only 17% of Native American students enter college and only 20% of traditional college-aged Native Americans were enrolled in college compared to 40% of all U.S. 18-24 year olds. Less than 1% of bachelor’s degrees went to Native American students in the 2019-2020 academic year. Many Native students do not believe college is an option for them.

Tribal Colleges and Universities (TCUs) are working to change that, by preparing students for a variety of professions and offering programs in cultural preservation and Native language studies. Read more about the challenges and successes of TCU’s from the Center for American Progress.

The Center for Teaching and Learning (CTL) condemns all forms of systemic racism, bias, and aggression against Black people, indigenous peoples, people of color, and those of marginalized genders, as well as discrimination based on socioeconomic status. We understand that excellence in teaching, by definition, must reflect our shared humanity and promote inclusive practices such as:

• being conscious of biases, racial abuse, micro-aggressions, and those who are minimized or left out;
• understanding and supporting those underrepresented in our Hood community; and
• promoting ways to actively foster equity, diversity and inclusion in our classrooms, research, and publications.

The CTL is determined to raise awareness of all those who have been systematically oppressed and call upon Hood faculty to join us in this commitment to create a more inclusive world. As members of the CTL Advisory Board, we stand united and affirm that Black Lives Matter

• Michelle Gricus, Associate Professor of Social Work, Director of the CTL
• April Boulton, Associate Professor of Biology & Dean of Graduate School
  
• Catherine Breneman, Assistant Professor of Social Work
• Paige Eager, Professor of Political Science, Dean of Faculty
• Shaun Hoppel, Director of Accessibility Services
• Elizabeth Mackessy-Lloyd, Assistant Professor of Nursing
  
• Jessica McManus, Assistant Professor of Psychology
• Heather Mitchell-Buck, Assistant Professor of English; Coordinator of Digital Learning
• Katherine Orloff, Associate Professor of Journalism
• Kathryn Ryberg, Reference & Education Services Librarian
• Atiya Smith, Assistant Professor of Psychology & Counseling
• Jill Tysse, Assistant Professor of Mathematics
  
• Jeff Welsh, Director of Instructional Technology in the IT division
• Adam Weintraub, Graduate Assistant for the CTL

Email: CTL@hood.edu
Website: www.hood.edu/CTL
Location: Hood College, Rosemont Avenue, Frederick, MD, USA
Phone: (301) 663-3131