The Scholarship of Teaching and Learning @ CSM
By Jean Mach, professor of English & SoTL Center coordinator

Good things come in threes at the SoTL Center this month: The selection of our first two CSM Scholars, a collaboration with our sister college, Cañada, and the second Talking about Teaching Forum.

The SoTL Center warmly congratulates the first two CSM Scholars: Michelle Brown and Lucia Olson.  Their projects will explore ways to improve and enrich students’ learning, focusing on this year’s topic:
• Preparing the Citizens of the Future: Classrooms that Develop a Sense of Civic Responsibility

While sharing that focus and collaborating on refining their methods, the two scholars will approach the idea of “Civic Responsibility” through very different disciplinary lenses.

    Michelle M. Brown
    Michelle M. Brown
Associate Professor,
Broadcast & Electronic Media

Michelle will create a “CSM Media Ethics Forum . . . an online web forum that features actual documented cases involving media ethics.”  She explains that “each case study will pose a thought-provoking real world situation” encountered by media professionals.  The students might confront a dilemma such as this: “You are News Director at an NBC TV affiliate station. You are told by your station owner to ‘bury’ a negative story about the safety of a recalled General Electric microwave. Keep in mind, General Electric owns NBC, so they are your employer, but this is also a matter of public safety.”  In the Forum, students will respond to questions like the following:

1. What do you do? Explain why.
2. Is this issue legal, regulatory or ethical?”

Michelle will assess the students’ work through both quantitative and
qualitative measures and hopes to publish her study in professional journals
such as Journal of Broadcasting & Electronic Media and Media Ethics. 

    Lucia Olson
    Lucia Olson
Adjunct Instructor of English

In her English 100 class, Lucia plans to “use protest literature and American
protest history to demonstrate for students the power of language and writing in civic responsibility.” She explains that “coupling John Lewis’s memoir of the civil rights movement [Walking with the Wind] with American Protest Literature helps students grasp the history of protest and protest literature in America in a real and personal way.”

The students will be immersed in a rich cultural and political dialogue throughout the semester, culminating in giving “group presentations on one of the protests in American history–women’s suffrage, civil rights, Vietnam War protests, Stonewall’s GLBT activism, Native American activism, or labor rights disputes” as well as
writing “their own version of one of the manifestoes in [the text] American Protest Literature.” 

Lucia may use student portfolios, perhaps electronic, to assess the cumulative effects of the students’ engagement in a range of activities related to the role of protest literature in America’s democracy.  She will seek various public forums for them to present their work.

We happily anticipate presentations of these timely and important classroom research experiences in the SoTL Center during the coming year.

To make a good thing even better, these two scholars with be joined by a third, in a collaboration with our sister college, Cañada. The Cañada Scholar Program, also getting underway this fall, will share the same theme of “Civic Responsibility,” with a scholar to be chosen by the end of October. As an important goal of the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning is to break down barriers to public sharing of our professional work, this collaboration will benefit not only the Scholars but all faculty members of both colleges.  We plan to find ways to spotlight the projects of the three scholars, in our district and beyond, as they evolve.

And finally, please join us for the second Talking about Teaching Forum:

• Friday, Oct. 26, 2-3:30 p.m. in the SoTL Center, Bldg. 12-170
                                                                “ePortfolios for Scholarship@ CSM”
                                                                presenters:  Cheryl Gregory, Mike Burke, Jean Mach

This forum will present our ePortfolio work, recently featured in the Carnegie Foundation’s Open Knowledge News:           http://gallery.carnegiefoundation.org.