Letter from the Advisor - January 2020
Welcome to 2020! As we begin a new semester, I am excited to be working with the ASSETT team on several fronts.
I will be piloting the use of Wikipedia in the classroom with the assistance of Amanda McAndrew and Joy Adams from ASSETT and Caroline Sinkinson, associate professor of Library Science. My Performing Voices of Women course is a theory/practice style class that blends an exploration of relevant history, literature, and theory with creative generation of performance on the topic of womxn’s performing voices. Here the idea of voices is broadly conceived to include ideas of agency, self-authorship, and the expressive physical voice. On the surface of this assignment students are being asked to edit a given Wikipedia article about a womxn or an issue related to womxn and then perform that in some way of their choosing. Beneath the surface is an invitation to participate in knowledge production through a self-proclaimed collaborative democratic platform, one plagued by bias but ripe with utopian possibilities. Engaging in this editing becomes a feat of choreography of movement within prevailing customs and a dance of contact improvisation with what is determined to be a credible source. One goal is to restore womxn to the collective knowledge through the roles they played/play and the influence they had/have, the trials they suffered/suffer, the contributions made/make. This is an effort to make easily accessible those accounts historically excluded from what is collectively held as credible representation. Students will be editing/performing within this digital space through a process of their choosing that could encompass research, resistance, cyborging, or embodied witnessing. One of the stated goals of this project is social transformation through student participation in publishing of inclusive knowledge repositories. This project directly relates to my participation in ASSETT’s Innovation Incubator as a member of the Collective to Advance Multimodal Participatory Publishing (CAMPP) group.
On another front, this will be my first year supporting Amanda McAndrew in working with the ASSETT Faculty Fellows Program. We have chosen a wonderful cohort with whom we look forward to creating a community in which to explore teaching, learning, and technology opportunities. We will be engaging in lively, transdisciplinary conversations, workshops, and other events to create dynamic learning experiences for our Arts & Sciences students.
If anyone would like to learn more about ASSETT and ways in which its amazing staff and programs can support your teaching through technology, I would be happy to meet with you over tea or on a walk through campus.