Working with a wonderful colleague this past year, I helped get a digital humanities (#dh) minor approved at Pepperdine. She did the lion’s share of the work, but I was excited by the prospect of creating the new minor to provide students with a foundation in #dh. Plus, it seemed an exciting way to encourage myself to think more about… Read more →
Games/Activities for Review
I am always on the search for new, interesting ways to engage students and break up my lectures into more manageable chunks. This past semester (fall 2016) I was faced with a couple of new challenges that forced me more than ever before to develop in-class activities. I was returning to work full time after a semester of maternity leave… Read more →
Goals for 2017
I keep telling myself that I will add a new post every 2 months, but then I always seem to forget (blame sleep deprivation). My goal for 2017 is to post more actively, for me more than anyone or anything else. I find that if I draft a post about what I’ve been doing in class, it helps me think… Read more →
Activities for the large lecture class
Now that the Fall semester has ended, I’ve started to reflect on what types of in-class activities worked well and which ones failed or simply need tweaking. In the end, I realize that activities that are successful might eventually work less well depending on the time of the semester. For this reason, I can’t stress enough how important it is… Read more →
Teaching the Large Lecture Course: Some Reflections
This fall semester I am teaching a large lecture course on the Western Humanities. I have around 240 students for a 90-minute class that covers caves through cathedrals (basically, 40,000 BCE–1350 CE). We cover history, philosophy, literature, art history, theater history, music history, and more. It is daunting to think of covering so much material in a relatively short period… Read more →
Creating Application Activities: Team Based Learning for Art Historians
Creating meaningful and interesting application activities in a team-based learning art history class can be challenging. Some activities will come to you in a single “Aha!” moment, others will take hours of drafting, thinking, and reworking. Then, when you are in the classroom, some activities will work well, while those you think are brilliant and insightful might fail. So… Read more →
Peer Evaluations: Team-Based Learning for Art Historians
[This post has been long in the making…] An important component of team-based learning, or TBL, is the peer evaluations. While TBL has many similarities to the “flipped classroom,” one of the main differences is that TBL factors peer evaluations into students’ final grades. There are plenty of good sources that discuss the process of peer evaluations, so I will… Read more →
Team-Based Learning in Art History: Pros and Cons
In the past year, I’ve become passionate about team-based learning, or TBL. TBL was an attractive pedagogical approach that seemed to go beyond simply flipping the classroom. My home institution decided more than a year ago to offer intensive training in TBL for faculty interested in new teaching methods. While I was writing my book manuscript, I decided I would… Read more →
Incorporating Digital Art History into the Curriculum
As the beginning of the semester rapidly approaches (and the summer sadly ends), I find myself trying to incorporate new digital tools into my three courses. After the GMU/Getty institute in Digital Art History ended, I began changing my syllabi to include more digital tools and projects. I have to remind myself not to overload students with all the wonderful… Read more →
Day 8: Dirty Laundry and the Potential for Public Art History
Is public art history possible? What does it look like? How can we convey the political nature of art better to people (anyone)? How do we overcome certain perceptions people have about art history? How do we translate our personal interests and disciplinary ideas and trends for a broader audience? Do we need to do this at all? These were… Read more →
Day 7: The Power of Visualization
I am indebted to Spencer for teaching us his formulas for some of our data. I am not the most skilled person with Excel. For my work on the Sacred Heart, I’ve always wanted to make a chart like the above of the percentages of Sacred Heart texts published in different countries in the eighteenth century. I probably should have… Read more →
Day 6: Mining Data
I had high hopes for the applicability of data mining to my current/future project and my long-term research on the Sacred Heart. I’ll largely discuss my research on the Sacred Heart because I’m familiar with the material, having worked with it/on it for the past decade. I thought it would be useful to have a “safety” to see how well… Read more →
