2014 Fall call Winners
Tamara STEGER
Department of Environmental Sciences and Policy
Strengthening Teaching Effectiveness through Student Evaluation Innovation
(Dept. of Environmental Sciences and Policy, Environmental Politics: Environmental
Communications and Activism class)
The goal of this project is to enhance teaching effectiveness based on an integrated student evaluation process that focuses on what helps (and doesn't help) students to learn. An evaluation process has been designed and tested in the Environmental Politics course on "Environmental Communication and Activism," with implications for both improving the course based on student experiences and insights, as well as contributing to and sharing knowledge on innovative student evaluation methods focused on improving student learning.
Vera ELIASOVA
Department of Gender Studies
Missing Voices of Contemporary Mobilities
The project, "Missing Voices of Contemporary Mobilities," engaged students in experimental and exploratory work with the outcome of compiling a collection of texts – a mini-anthology - in a digital format.
Students were asked to find and introduce - to their fellow students as well as the wider CEU community - new writings on mobility that have been recently emerging in the contemporary world. They discover and present a new, emerging writer, journalist, blogger, etc. whose work on mobility crosses genders and genres, but is still marginalized or even absent from the canon or mainstream publishing. Their own discovery and presentation of the "missing voice" made a part of the collective class project: compiling a collection of Missing Voices of Contemporary Mobilities, i.e. a collection of new, contemporary writings that cross cultures, genres, or genders. One of the questions, for example, inquired how the relation between gender and mobility has been currently changing in the texts by transgender or transnational writers.
This project was designed as an integral part the course, Forms of Female Mobility in Literature, taught as an optional 4-credit seminar at the Department of Gender Studies in the winter semester 2015. This course focuses on the examination of literary texts and theories with a common theme of mobility in relation to gender. Mobility, one of the defining characteristics of the contemporary world, is examined as a multifaceted phenomenon: it encompasses moving across spaces such as cities, countries, or continents (migration, tourism, etc.) as well as centuries, genres and national literatures.
The goal of the project is to engage students in an experimental, cross-cultural and interdisciplinary intellectual work that reaches well beyond the classroom walls. The project increased student learning by engaging creative as well as critical skills in individual and innovative ways: students found their own "missing voice," a writer who appeals to their own interest, thus actively creating their own intellectual position and perspective on the issues of mobility. This individual approach simultaneously enabled students to reflect on their own mobilities – as international students, as everyday "tourists" of virtual realities, or as citizens of the world. Importantly, the project sought to be a collective endeavor -students present the "missing voice" to other students: they evaluate critically two other "voices" (presented by other students) and finally compiled a mini-anthology of these voices (together with their critical evaluations).