Teaching

There’s an art to helping students become citizens of the world

Anonymous — Wed, 28 Nov 2018 18:16:57 +0000

There’s an art to helping students become citizens of the world Anonymous (not verified) Wed, 11/28/2018 - 11:16

Jeff Thomas

First-Year Seminar taught by art professors aims to help students broaden their horizons even beyond the realm of art

Art has always taken our imaginations to unexplored places, and now two �鶹��Ƶ art professors are finding it can also encourage freshmen, through a first-year seminar, to actively explore the campus, community and, hopefully, the wide world of academia.

“You get them out of their shell, get them to feel a part of the fabric of the campus, and beyond the campus as part of the community,” said Brianne Cohen, assistant professor of art history. “How do they become citizens of the world? Art is a great way to think through that.”

Paul Ramirez Jonas, a visiting art professor from Hunter College and an internationally renowned public-space artist, speaks to a First Year Seminar on the CU Boulder campus this fall. At the top of the page is an image from Jonas' "Key to the City" project in Manhattan. Image courtesy of Paul Ramirez Jonas.

Many departments on the Boulder campus are involved with the First-Year Seminar series, which are courses designed to help freshman acclimate to the university. Almost none of the freshmen registered in the course are actually art majors.

Neither Cohen nor Yumi Janairo Roth, an associate professor in art practices, had taught the seminar before. However, both are involved in post-studio, public-space art at CU Boulder, Cohen as an art historian and Roth as an artist.

“I just said, ‘Hey, we should teach one together,’” Roth said. Both think it is the first time any CU Boulder studio art and art history professors have taught an entire course together.

The seminar, “Art, Public, Site: Imagining Place and Making Worlds,” is very much geared toward getting freshman to go to different places, engage with people in those places and learn from those experiences. The initial phase, mapping, was sometimes as simple as throwing darts at a campus map and then figuring out routes to get there.

The students were also excited in October when visiting Hunter College Art Professor Paul Ramirez Jonas, an internationally renowned public-space artist, dropped in for a week.

Jonas gave the freshmen students an assignment to investigate how people interacted with art in public spaces, such as sculpture parks, campus buildings and hospitals. He has been a groundbreaking artist in socially engaged art, including the “Key to the City” program that engaged more than 25,000 participants in New York to explore new spaces.

Everyone already knows public art and has experienced it. Their experience has probably been dismal, but there is familiarity and a basis to start from. Also, for non-art majors, it is so much easier to connect public art to other disciplines and concerns.”

“The assignment was basically to imagine yourself as an anthropologist doing fieldwork. What do they take for granted as a space? How does art operate? It was a good exercise at looking at spaces and how people interacted with those spaces,” Roth said.

“Then (in a class that Jonas attended) we did more brainstorming on what they might change. Get them to think about what’s on hand, and what they could do to disrupt conventional systems by manipulating that space.”

That brainstorming was an important step, as that is exactly what the art professors are trying to get the freshmen to do with experiencing their own place on the campus and in the community: Mapping the space they frequent, interacting in that space and then intervening by changing their own behavior to question and explore those interactions.

“It fits with the freshman experience. How do you fit in? How do you relate? How do you branch out more and more and have an impact on that social space,” Cohen said. “Paul did a wonderful job, and the students were really excited that an international artist was coming to talk to them personally.”

Jonas said that an illuminating part of the course came when students realized that an exchange that would change interaction did not have to be money or something else usually considered valuable: it could be a wave or even a “secret.”

“I think introducing students to art through public art is a sound idea,” Jonas said. “Everyone already knows public art and has experienced it. Their experience has probably been dismal, but there is familiarity and a basis to start from. Also, for non-art majors, it is so much easier to connect public art to other disciplines and concerns.”

And at least one of the first-year students was reconsidering branching out from her strategic communications major and including some form of art as a minor, or perhaps a double major.

“It was amazing and a valuable experience for freshmen as you are trying to get involved with something,” said Jordan Altergott of Denver, who now professes to be a big fan of Jonas. “To have him in such an intimate setting was phenomenal.”

First-Year Seminar taught by art professors aims to help students broaden their horizons even beyond the realm of art,

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CU Boulder pollster emphasizes need for rigor in political surveys

Anonymous — Wed, 28 Nov 2018 18:11:26 +0000

CU Boulder pollster emphasizes need for rigor in political surveys Anonymous (not verified) Wed, 11/28/2018 - 11:11

Sarah Schleifer

Carey Stapleton, PhD candidate at CU Boulder, was survey lead for the American Politics Research Lab’s Colorado Political Climate Survey

The nature of political polling is changing in the United States, and Carey Stapleton, a PhD student in American politics and methodology at the �鶹��Ƶ, is equipping his undergraduate Survey Design and Analysis class, to meet these changes head-on.

Carey Stapleton

The result of this class was the recently released Colorado Political Climate Survey. Through creating a class centered around surveys and polls from CU’s American Politics Research Lab (APRL), Stapleton is teaching his students not only to think critically about politics and survey design, but also how to analyze the data of a large-scale poll.

Stapleton, who has “a substantial background in survey design,” was approached two years ago by Professors Scott Adler, Anand Sokhey and David Brown to create a class in survey design and political polling.

“We all sat around and developed the syllabus for the course, and we finally started teaching it last fall.” He says the class has grown by a factor of three in two years, and is continuing to pick up speed.

Stapleton says the Colorado Political Climate Survey took a couple years to perfect. “We tried to get both information that's relevant to Colorado specifically, but also kind of how Coloradans feel about broader national issues.”

It’s why the poll features questions ranging from intent to vote in the gubernatorial election to opinions on sports gambling, recreational marijuana laws, and if “Dreamers” should be allowed to remain in the country.

In 33 pages packed with data and analysis, the survey “is designed to gauge the public’s political and partisan leanings,” and correctly predicted the outcomes of the gubernatorial and congressional races, but revealed inconsistencies in polling with issues on the ballot like Propositions 73, 74 and 112.

In this midterm election, pollsters stood poised to redefine the relevance and format of political polls and surveys after the stunning upset in the 2016 presidential election defied the predictions of many major polls.

I tell my students all the time, ‘I don't care what you think in this class. I care that we do science in the appropriate way so that we can get to the reality, rather than what we want to be true.’”

On the nature of polls and the argument that they might yield biased information, Stapleton argues, “We're not here to tell people what to think about the results. We do this to get this information out there.” His responsibility is to be an impartial arbiter of the reality that the poll is reporting, he says.

Stapleton argues that transparency is key among polls and pollsters, citing the intersection of science and politics as an area that should be free from biases. He observes: “I tell my students all the time, ‘I don't care what you think in this class. I care that we do science in the appropriate way so that we can get to the reality, rather than what we want to be true.’”

Undergrads “are just now learning to think things through and come to conclusions,” which is why making sure students analyze the reason certain conclusions are reached is critical.

In his own research, Stapleton focuses on the role anger plays in American politics: “Emotions are critically important to our daily lives, and one thing that politicians can do is use their own emotional projections to influence how the public feels.”

The prevalence of emotional manipulation in today’s politics only reinforces the importance of unbiased, science-based surveys, he says. According to Stapleton, the goal of a survey like APRL’s is to create a more nuanced view of politics among voters and his students.

“I think that's our goal ultimately,” he muses. “Do people leave your class with a better grasp of reality and the truth? My hope is they do. And then do they take that and apply it in the real world? My hope is they do.”

Through creating a class centered around surveys from CU’s American Politics Research Lab, grad student teaches his students not only to think critically about politics and survey design, but also how to analyze the data of a large-scale poll.

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Students make rhyme and reason of the Periodic Table

Anonymous — Tue, 27 Nov 2018 18:01:39 +0000

Students make rhyme and reason of the Periodic Table Anonymous (not verified) Tue, 11/27/2018 - 11:01

Sarah Schleifer

In ‘Poetic Table of the Elements,’ students of Danny Long combine art and science, old and new

Who could refrain, that had a periodic poem to write, and in that poem, courage to make an element known (apologies to Shakespeare).

From bottom left to right, Sara Nebreda Perez, Michael Gonzales, Gabe Raymondi, Julia Seko, Susan Guinn-Chipman and Arsen Bassenov work to typeset student poems by hand as part of Danny Long's class. At the top of the page, a poem is typeset; the text is backwards so that it will print correctly. Photos by Sarah Schleifer.

Students of Danny Long’s Radical Science Writing class (WRTG 3030) have the poem to write and the courage to make it happen, and the final project will be displayed on a giant Poetic Table of the Elements later this year in the �鶹��Ƶ’s Norlin Library.

Long’s students are getting a hands-on lesson in attention to detail with their latest project in which they compose, typeset and hand-print 118 poems for the elements of the Periodic Table.

The goal of the poem itself is to “teach a little kernel of information” about each element, whether that be the etymology of its name, discovery or function. “My students write about so many different things and yet never have we even talked about the periodic table as a form of writing, as a way of communicating science,” Long explains, citing it as an “untapped resource.”

With the help of Gregory Robl and Susan Guinn-Chipman of the Special Collections, Archives, and Preservation Department and Julia Seko of Scholarly Resource Development, students learned to handset and print the type using techniques that encourage “mindfulness,” as one of Long's students, Sara Nebreda Perez, observed.

“So much of what we do on campus anymore is intangible, and so maybe there’s something about just getting to sit down and create things by hand,” Long says of this project, which requires the slow and deliberate setting of tiny metal letters—upside down and backwards—into “furniture” that holds it in place to be printed.

These poem cards will be mounted onto a 5 ½-foot-tall x 10-foot-wide Poetic Table of the Elements and displayed at the University Libraries with the help of Andrew Violet of the Administration Department, with additional copies going to Special Collections and the staff and students involved. There are also plans to sell one copy to another institution through Vamp and Tramp booksellers.

Examples of student poems:

Ruthenium—44
By Ryan Henley
The Russian-named number 44,
A metal found in platinum ore.
Found sparsely in the Ural range,
I cost a hefty hunk of change.

Tin—50
By DiemMy Nguyen
Mix me with copper, you’ll surely get bronze.
Those so-called tin cans? Well, they are all cons.
I cry when I’m bent, but I am still strong.
Coat metals with me, and they will last long.

Manganese—25
By Jason DesVeaux
Alone I am weak,
but with others I shine:
To bodies, bones, and metals
I am divine.

Long, an instructor in the Program for Writing and Rhetoric at CU Boulder, says he likes incorporating creative projects into his science-writing class and that students also respond well to his self-proclaimed “radical” syllabus. Past projects of his include children’s books to teach first graders math and science.

Robl, who helps students set their type and print their poems, calls this project, which mixes science writing, poetry and traditional typesetting, “pretty radical on many levels for instruction for undergraduates” and, also, “just too cool.”

Long says some unexpected benefits of this project were the in-depth discussions he had with his students about grammar and punctuation. Talking about everything from the rhetorical effects of different punctuation to sentence structure while “focusing in on a really small piece of writing” was a productive way to look analytically at these mechanisms and “get a lot of punch out of it.”

He calls the Poetic Table assignment a good metaphor for the “radical” course name. The term “radical” is “often used to describe something that’s extreme, but it also comes from the Latin word meaning ‘root,’” Long says. In addition to describing something new and unusual, he notes, it also describes something old.

He agrees that it’s an apt way of looking at his class, which examines “the history of scientific communication and plays around with old forms of communication in slightly new ways.” The Poetic Table combines an old example of scientific communication that’s been developing over several centuries with a contemporary poetic twist.

“It’s been fun listening to the students explain to me why they wrote what they wrote.” Long quips that “usually it goes over my head because I’m not a scientist,” but says the amount of research and effort the students put into their poems is “encouraging and inspiring.”

Danny Long’s students are getting a hands-on lesson in attention to detail as they compose, typeset and hand-print 118 poems for the elements of the Periodic Table.

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