Thinking Outside the Classroom, Creative Approaches to Online Teaching Part Two
Sep 10, 2020 3:30 P.M. EST
Spring semester 2020 saw a swift transition to remote arts instruction for many teachers. Amidst feelings of isolation and anxiety about the future, teachers and students had to adjust to a new way of learning and teaching. As humans so often do in times of crisis, our communities rose to the challenge. Teachers and students worked together to learn new technology; resources for remote teaching were shared throughout the art community; and genuine efforts were made to maintain a sense of community despite the imposed social distance. As our community looked towards Fall 2020, and continued remote instruction for many schools, arts instructors still needed a space to hear others’ experiences, share, and gather resources on navigating online arts instruction. With this webinar series, a2ru hoped to provide that space.
The second part of this two-part series featured three instructors who have truly embraced creativity in their teaching and research. Stuart Candy (Associate Professor, Carnegie Mellon School of Design) is an award-winning foresight practitioner, designer, artist and educator, and his work aims to augment our capacity for navigating alternative futures by any means necessary. He discussd designing experiential scenarios and bringing possible futures to life in online encounters.
Keli DiRisio (Assistant Professor, School of Design, Rochester Institute of Technology), brings empathy to her graphic design work, and was working on two mobile applications, one dealing with back pain and the other a screening tool for medical professionals to identify victims of domestic abuse. She teaches both deaf and hearing students, and discussed the difficulties of managing inclusivity while teaching remotely. She also shared her tips for keeping students engaged, reminding them why they are designers, and encouraging them to embrace their creativity.
Our third panelist, Trent Hergenrader, is an Associate Professor of English and Creative Writing at the Rochester Institute of Technology. His research resides at the intersection of creative writing studies, digital pedagogy, and games and game-based learning, largely focusing on using collaborative writing projects and role-playing games in college classrooms to teach the craft of fiction writing. Realizing that fall classes would likely be taught online, he created an upper-level creative writing workshop as an asynchronous online role-playing game. He shared his experience designing this course, and discussed how the class used Slack, the Google suite of products, online maps, Zoom, and a worldbuilding wiki to create a tight-knit learning community that can thrive in an entirely online environment.
Moderator
Nicholas Allen is the director of the Willson Center for Humanities and Arts and a Professor in Humanities. He has published several books on Ireland and its literature, has been the Burns Visiting Scholar at Boston College, and has received many grants and awards, including from the Mellon Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Irish Research Council. His new book, Ireland, Literature and the Coast: Seatangled, will be published shortly.
Speakers
Stuart Candy is an Associate Professor in the Carnegie Mellon School of Design. An award-winning foresight practitioner, designer, artist and educator, his work aims to augment our capacity for navigating alternative futures by any means necessary. At CMU, he is responsible for integrating foresight / futures practice throughout the design curriculum. Professor Candy has been involved in and identified with hybrid design / futures currents such as “design fiction” and “speculative design” dating back to their early appearances in the 2000s, and has been instrumental in bringing these idioms to wider attention and application through presenting, teaching and writing, as well as expanding their boundaries through collaborative projects using transmedia storytelling, participatory design events, games, installations, and guerrilla interventions. Prior to entering academia full-time, he was an in-house futurist at global engineering firm Arup, leading the Foresight and Innovation function across the company’s Australasia region. He is currently director of CMU Situation Lab, and Affiliated Faculty in the School of Architecture and the Entertainment Technology Center. He is Chair of the Academic Task Force of the Association of Professional Futurists, a founding member of the Foresight Advisory Board at the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies (Switzerland), and is the first Fellow of both The Long Now Foundation (USA) and the Museum of Tomorrow (Brazil).
Keli DiRisio has been an Assistant Professor of Graphic Design at Rochester Institute of Technology since 2018. Before that she was an Assistant Professor at SUNY Oswego in the graphic design department. Keli has her BFA in Graphic Design, an MS in Print Media and an MFA in Visual Communication Design all from RIT. In addition, Keli still stays active in her design practice and is currently working on two mobile applications, one dealing with back pain and the other a screening tool for medical professionals to identify victims of domestic abuse. She shares her love of UX/UI with her students and stresses the importance of empathy in their design. She is always excited to show new technology to her classroom and is currently diving into projection mapping as a way to showcase her students’ work.
Trent Hergenrader, Ph.D., is an Associate Professor of English and Creative Writing at the Rochester Institute of Technology, where he teaches fiction writing, literature, and media studies. His short fiction has appeared in Best Horror of the Year, The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, Weird Tales, The Mammoth Book of Dieselpunk, and elsewhere. He is the author of Collaborative Worldbuilding for Writers and Gamers (Bloomsbury 2018) and co-editor of Creative Writing in the Digital Age (Bloomsbury 2015) and Creative Writing Innovations (Bloomsbury 2018). He is a co-founder of the Creative Writing Studies Organization and co-founder and editor-in-chief of the peer-reviewed, open-access Journal of Creative Writing Studies. His research resides at the intersection of creative writing studies, digital pedagogy, and games and game-based learning, largely focusing on using collaborative writing projects and role-playing games in college classrooms to teach the craft of fiction writing. His current book project, tentatively titled The Worldbuilding Workshop: Teaching Critical Thinking through World Modeling, Simulation, and Play is under contract with MIT Press.