teaching

Fighting Conspiracy Theories

May 7, 2019 / global health, Theory / , , , ,

“Witness Howard Brennan sitting in the identical spot across from the Texas School Book Depository four months after the assassination. Circle “A” indicates where he saw Oswald fire a rifle at the motorcade.” By Howard Leslie Brennan [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons. Caption text from Wikimedia Commons also.
Apart from Murray in Stranger Things, and the Lone Gunmen in the X-files, most conspiracy theorists don’t have secret knowledge that the majority of humanity is unable to accept. Instead, people turn to conspiracy theories when they feel disempowered and desperate. Conspiracy theories thrive during times of crisis, such as a pandemic, or a profound political crisis. They also emerge at times when trust in government is low. I’ve done work (with my wonderful colleague Leopoldo Rodriguez) on a conspiracy theory in Argentina that focused on the death of government prosecutor Alberto Nisman. In the Argentine case, these conspiracy theories absorbed the news and attention of an entire nation. But during the 2009 influenza pandemic, conspiracy theories became truly global, as people told these narratives from Mexico to Europe. I studied this phenomenon in an article that is open access:

Shawn Smallman, “Whom Do You Trust? Doubt and Conspiracy Theories in the 2009 Influenza Pandemic” Journal of International and Global Studies, Vol. 6, No. 2: pp. 1-24. While its helpful to document instances of conspiracy theories, it’s more important to understand how to combat them when they can cause damage, particularly in the field of global health. How do health authorities fight conspiracy theories about vaccination, which are not only making it more difficult to eradicate polio, but also costing health workers their lives?

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Infographics in the classroom

April 9, 2018 / teaching / , , , ,

A guest blog by Dr. Kimberley Brown:

Active learning for many faculty in International/global studies has meant simulations.  Alternatively, faculty could also vary teaching methods and assignments to meet the needs of a broad-base of students by using the principles of Universal Design for Learning. This post focuses on an infographic assignment substituted for a final paper in a section of a new online undergraduate course I taught last winter called “Human Rights and Language.”

Infographics are “a larger graphic design that combines data visualizations, illustrations, texts and images together in a format that tells a complete story” (Krum, 2014, 6). The basic assignment asked students to:

“Peruse our course topics.  Select one of the topics as the foundation for your infographic.  Your infographic will describe a linguistic human rights problem, the population affected by the problem, and solutions.  You will include a map of the area(s) where the problem you have identified occurs. Your goal is to disseminate information about the issue you have researched to diverse audiences. Your infographic should demonstrate a clear understanding of the issue you present and integrate course concepts and terminology.”

I was encouraged to adapt this assignment for my course after a group of colleagues in Community and Public Health (Shanks, Izumi, Sun, Martin and Shanks, 2017) successfully assigned this to their students. You can see their article, “Teaching Undergraduate Students to Visualize and Communicate Public Health Data with Infographics” here. The adaptation was quite extensive and it took many hours of collaboration with our Office of Academic Innovation to get it right. You can see the full directions for the assignment here.

I was anxious but with coaching broke the assignment into weekly parts including references, field testing, revision and reflection. Virtually no one in class had done an infographic before. I prepared written instructions as well as a screencast. Students had access to examples of Infographics. They were encouraged to use either Canva or Piktochart.  Both had tutorials. The results were highly creative. Only one student suggested that the assignment was better suited to a marketing course. Others noted that they had been pushed in unanticipated ways but could use this skill going forward. Four of the infographics are shared here with the permission of their authors. They all convey data very differently.

I adapted a grading rubric from a variety of rubrics for infographics accessed online.

If you would like more information about the assignment, please email me: brownk@pdx.edu

Please see examples of the infographics below:

Infographic on gendered languages by Madison Cheek

The Norway Infographic by Paige Nef

The Sierra Leone Infographic– Gaia Oyarzun

The Ainu Infographic–anonymous.

The full reference to our colleagues’ outstanding on article on infographics is:

Shanks, J., Izumi, B., Sun, C., Martin, A., & Byker Shanks, C. 2017. Teaching Undergraduate Students to Visualize and Communicate Public Health Data with Infographics. Frontiers in Public Health, 5, 315.

For another key reference see: Krum, R. 2014. Cool Infographics. Indianapolis: John Wiley and Sons.

Small victories and language

November 29, 2017 / language / , ,

I’ve been studying Chinese for about two and a half years now, and I’m making slow progress. Very slow. I am certainly at that point in language study at which I say “after all this time, is this really the best that I’m able to speak Mandarin?” Last summer I was in China, and had a humiliating time at a ticket counter in Shenzhen, where I found that I couldn’t even explain to the ticket seller that I wanted to travel to Hong Kong (bad verb choice). I am certainly not someone who is good at languages. I should have learned the personal infinitive in Portuguese in an hour. It took me twenty years. But I love studying languages, which is what matters.  If you are someone who is studying a language and needs a little inspiration to keep going, I recommend this blog post. Sometimes it’s the small things that count.

Shawn Smallman, 2018

Universal Design in Global Studies

January 8, 2018 / teaching /

My colleagues Kim Brown, Rosa David and I have just published an open-access article titled Adopting the Principles of Universal Design into International and Global Studies’ Programs and Curriculum. Here is the paper’s abstract:

The ideals of universal design have profoundly impacted instruction, policy, and infrastructure in course architecture and design within elementary education and at some universities. Within international and global studies, however, these principles have not deeply affected either pedagogy or scholarship despite the fact that classes in international studies may include more international students and third culture kids than classes in other programs. Instead, in North America (as well as in much of Latin America and Europe), the current pedagogical model calls for students either to develop strategies on their own to succeed in class or to self-identify with documented disabilities if they need particular assistance or accommodation. This approach relies on a banking model for education, which does not focus upon learner agency. This paper argues that by adopting three principles—learner autonomy, the negotiated syllabus, and universal design—international and global studies programs can better meet the needs of diverse learners and reflect the field’s commitment to inclusion and social justice.

Shawn Smallman, 2018

Fake News Resource

March 26, 2019 / teaching / , , ,

We all try to instill critical thinking through our classes, particularly the ability to evaluate information. As one of my colleagues often says: “How do we get information about what’s happening globally? Through the news.” His point is that an understanding of the media is essential to any International and Global Studies class. And evaluating the media is particularly difficult in the current era, as more information has become digital, and there are fewer gatekeepers to information.

Kimberly Pendell at the PSU library has developed (with help from Beth Pickard) an amazing ‘fake news’ resource, which is itself an adaption of one created by librarians at Loyola Marymount University. You can find this great teaching resource here. The website talks about what is fake news, provides examples, and helps students to factcheck and contextualize information. It also provides key definitions, such as for the terms confirmation bias and click bait. I particularly liked the examples that the website gives, which help students to think more critically about the media. Over the last few years I’ve done a great deal of work around conspiracy theories, from the alleged murder of the investigator Alberto Nisman in Argentina (a paper that I wrote with Leopoldo Rodriguez), to competing narratives about the 2009 influenza pandemic. For this reason, my favorite example was #3, which showed how sources that peddle conspiracy theories can make themselves appear to authoritative. Finally, the resource has an embedded clip of Stephen Colbert discussing “truthiness.” Of course. …

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The Campus Politics of Online Teaching

October 5, 2017 / academia / , ,

A few years ago I moved my teaching entirely online. One of the joys of online teaching is that it allows faculty to better know our students. In a conventional classroom, I would come to know the four or five students who spoke the most. In my online class every student must do two detailed discussion posts a week. There is always someone in the class who finishes their first lengthy post by saying, “I don’t normally talk in class, so this is unusual for me to say so much . . . ” Teaching online also allows for greater creativity, and has enabled me to rethink my pedagogy. Over the last two years I have become inspired by the principles of the negotiated syllabus, in which students choose their content in the course. In my classes students take increasing responsibility for the content as the course progresses. For example, in my Global Drug Trade course this quarter every student creates a 12-15 page research paper, which they share with their peers in the final week of the class. This is the only content in the course for this week. At the same time that my course is based upon a negotiated syllabus, the entire content of the class is shaped around the principle of Universal Design, which fosters the learning of diverse groups, such as people for whom English is a second language, and those with different learning needs. I teach at a public university that has historically has an access mission, and I believe that teaching online enables me to continue to serve those students who would otherwise have difficulty completing their degree. As such, online education reflects our core institutional values. …

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The Value of Lectures

August 21, 2017 / teaching /

I’m writing this post for my teaching colleagues. One of the things that I have loved about moving to entirely online teaching was that it has encouraged me to thinking deeply about pedagogy. Over the last two years I have become a passionate advocate of the negotiated syllabus and universal design, which I have incorporated into online classes. Still, for twenty years I taught primarily using the lecture format. I would break lectures up with small discussion groups. Perhaps students might read a historical document from Brazil, which they would discuss in their small group, then report out briefly. Or perhaps I would have them collectively draw a map of all the theorists covered in my theory class, and how these people connected. We’d then share these maps with the class. These assignments helped to create a sense of community in the class, and to break up lectures.  …

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Teaching Evaluations

July 18, 2017 / teaching /

“The University of Bologna in Italy, founded in 1088, is the oldest university in the world, the word university (Latin: universitas) having been coined at its foundation.” By Gaspa (Flickr) [CC BY 2.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0)], via Wikimedia Commons
Like most faculty I take teaching evaluations very seriously. Every year I read mine, and rethink assignments and readings based on student feedback. As at most universities, teaching evaluations in my department are also a key instrument to measure faculty performance for promotion and tenure decisions. But what if teaching evaluations are inherently biased?

One of my colleagues recently shared a post at the LSE Impact Blog, which discussed in detail evidence that female instructors rated lower on teaching evaluations. In one particular case, the students were taking classes with a common final exam, so there was a means to evaluate how effective instructors were in teaching the learning outcomes. The bottom line was that female instructors tended to measure more poorly than their male peers on course evaluations because of bias. I think that this particular blog post, and the articles that it refers to, all merit reading and careful discussion. …

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Courses and Students in Global Studies

May 23, 2017 / curriculum / ,

Unlike most of my posts, I’ve written this piece mainly for department chairs and program directors in International and Global Studies. This post is unlikely to be of much interest to anyone else, as it doesn’t deal with issues that most of us are passionate about in the field, but rather the pragmatics of running a program. I’ve been a department chair for three terms, and a dean for four years. As at many state-based institutions, our university is moving towards performance based budgeting, which means that there is intense attention to student credit hours (SCH), which is sometimes called the “coin of the realm.” For this reason, I’ve invested a lot of time in thinking about enrollment trends and how to draw more students into classes in International and Global Studies. Here are some thoughts on this issue, which I believe apply to our program, although I don’t know if these observations will be true at other institutions. …

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How to encourage reading

November 19, 2016 / teaching /

As we start a new academic year, as faculty it’s worth thinking about our teaching strategies. Angela Jenks has a great piece, “Why don’t students read?” in Cultural Anthropology. What I like about the essay is both its honesty, and its practical discussion of tips to ensure that our students do the reading. In most of my classes, I now have a weekly reading quiz, which asks a simple question based on the reading, and entails a one to three paragraph response. I also agree with Jenk’s point that we can’t assign too much. Although we need to hold student’s accountable for the work, but also need to have realistic recommendations. Lastly, there is no substitute for an engaging book or essay. Yes, it’s still a struggle to have students read, but when we choose readings it’s also important to be mindful of what’s realistic to ask of our students at this point in their college experience. Want to see some syllabi for International and Global Studies classes? Here are some choices, including a syllabus for an introductory class. If you are using our textbook for the “Introduction to International Studies” course, we also have exam questions. Rosa David has also created a set of recommended films for an introductory course in the field.

Shawn Smallman, 2016

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