Recently in Faculty Category

This spring, in English 297A: Sports/Ethics/Literature, English Professor Debra Hawhee has asked her students to think critically about the ethical dimensions of American sports culture.

Hawhee proposed this course last summer, as the Penn State scandal escalated with the release of the Freeh Report. She saw an urgent need for better ethical decision-making at our institution, and she acted swiftly to address this need. Hawhee's course has provided Penn State students with an opportunity to think carefully about the ethical dilemmas they will face not only in sports, but also in life.

Hawhee has had ample opportunities to think through the nature of American sports culture, as a professor at Penn State and a former NCAA athlete for the University of Tennessee's women's basketball team.

Each Tuesday and Thursday afternoon in 316 Wagner, just a few minutes' walk from Beaver Stadium, Hawhee and her 46 students examine the cultural values that sports reflect. Using literature and dialogue as their main tools, students learn to critically examine these values and question their own belief systems.

On Thursday, February 21, Hawhee and her students wrapped up their unit on Basketball, Ethics, and Literature. They had completed their baseball unit, and they will be moving on to football this week.

Hawhee engaged her class in a discussion of "donkey basketball," a sport popular in many pockets of rural America in which players shoot hoops while riding donkeys. This peculiar activity served as the subject of the day's reading, the short story "Basic Training" by American Indian writer and filmmaker Sherman Alexie.

As Hawhee helped her students understand, Alexie's story is about much more than donkey basketball. "If we read donkey basketball as some sort of grand metaphor," Hawhee asked her class, "how would this play out?"

Hawhee and her students spent the majority of class wrestling with this question as they read and analyzed key passages from the piece. One student drew a connection between the demise of the donkey basketball empire in the story and the decline of the NBA in the 1990s. Hawhee applauded the student for pointing out this "brilliant layer" of the story.

Over the course of the discussion, Hawhee and her students identified additional themes at work in Alexie's story--themes of honor, duty, tradition, and nobility. Hawhee explained that "Basic Training" explores the question of where nobility comes from. Does it stem from following one's individual desires, or from fidelity to one's tribe or family? By the end of class, students may not have had an answer to this question, but they did have an important ethical question with which to grapple. 

This is precisely her goal as an instructor, as she explained it: to encourage students to think through ethical dilemmas in advance of real-world conflicts. She expressed her belief that literature offers a valuable tool for doing so. Over the course of the semester, Hawhee and her students have addressed a number of challenging ethical questions, including the gender politics of the tee shirt that reads, "Ann Arbor is a Whore," a slogan popular among Michigan's rival schools; and Lance Armstrong's use of performance-enhancing drugs. The course encourages students to think through ethical dilemmas with greater care. 

While Hawhee has occasionally brought this discussion closer to home, she has yet to delve fully into the Penn State scandal.  The course's football unit will begin this week, and it remains to be seen where the discussions will lead.

At the end of the day, though, the course's content may be less important than the skills students are acquiring. If English 297A is about sports, ethics, and literature, Hawhee implied that ethics take center stage. "The issues are larger than sports and larger than literature," she said, "which often makes this class hard...and fun."

The following letter was published in the Saturday, December 8, 2012 edition of the Centre Daily Times.  It is shared here in its entirety.

To the Editors:

The faculty of the Latina/o Studies Program at Penn State would like to express their deep sadness about the recent pictures that have appeared on the web of members of the Nu Gamma chapter of Chi Omega sorority.  In them, Penn State students are dressed in mock Mexican attire and bear signs with offensive and stereotypical messages. We clearly condemn this type of behavior and expect the University and the Pan Hellenic council to review the matter carefully, and if necessary, take appropriate action.

The pictures speak for themselves.  They reveal deep ignorance, insensitivity, but worst of all a profound lack of thought about the implications of what these young people clearly thought was acceptable behavior. They probably assumed their actions were harmless good fun, and not meant to hurt anybody.  Perhaps they assumed this display would be seen only by themselves and would not be damaging to anybody else.

The students were wrong on both counts. What people do precisely when they are not thinking, and when they think no one else is watching, reveals deep truths about their true convictions, or worse yet, about their poverty: of knowledge, of maturity, of plain common sense.  We, the faculty of Latino/a Studies, have dedicated our careers to combatting this kind of thoughtlessness by teaching--the history, experience, culture and importance of Latinos, exactly the same hard-working people being mocked by these young women.  We are here to help and hope there are lessons to be learned, not only by these students, but all of the Penn State community and beyond, in this deeply troubling event.

--John Ochoa, Director of Latina/o Studies, on behalf of its faculty. 

Dr. Sophia McClennen, Professor of International Affairs and Comparative Literature, Center for Democratic Deliberation Affiliate Faculty, and author of Colbert's America: Satire and Democracy, appeared as a guest on the Wall Street Journal "Live Lunch Break" on Thursday, October 4, 2012.  Dr. McClennen talked about the power of political comedy and elections as it relates to the Rumble 2012: Stewart vs O'Reilly debate. 

Video from McClennen's appearance is available on the WSJ Live website.

The third iteration of the Liberal Arts Scholarship and Technology Summit (LASTS) was held on Thursday, August 16, 2012, in Foster Auditorium.  The College of the Liberal Arts again partnered with Education Technology Services (ETS) and University Libraries to provide Liberal Arts faculty and graduate students a forum in which to share insights and learn from one another regarding the use of technology for teaching and research. 

A new feature to LASTS was the addition of a pre-conference workshop held on Wednesday, August 15, 2012.  The workshop provided a forum for attendees to explore and discuss the nature of digital humanities and its role at Penn State.  More information about the pre-conference workshop can be found on the Humanities @ Penn State Libraries blog.

Thursday's event featured presenters from Liberal Arts, Education Technology Services, and the Libraries, as well as a keynote address from Cole Camplese, Senior Director for Penn State Teaching & Learning with Technology. 

The two-day event included technology presentations, breakout sessions, hands-on workshops, and panel discussions, and the conference was attended by faculty and graduate students both in person and online through live streaming video.

Pictures from the event can be viewed on the LAUS Flickr site, and below is an overview of the speakers and their topics, as well as links to their archived presentation videos and resources: 

Dawn Childress (University Libraries)
Presentation Link
Brief summary of the pre-conference workshop on digital humanities.

Cole Camplese (TLT)
Presentation Link
Keynote address from the Senior Director of Penn State's Teaching and Learning with Technology.

Christopher Long (LAUS/Philosophy)
Presentation Link
Discussion on how the research for his book, Socratic and Platonic Politics, was carried out in public through his Digital Dialogue podcast and his blog, The Long Road.

Mike Furlough (University Libraries)
Presentation Link
Overview of how some libraries around the country have supported digital humanities research, as well as one example at Penn State.

Allan Gyorke (ETS)
Presentation Link
Overview of key technology trends in higher education--including MOOCs, badge systems, learning analytics, and electronic textbooks--and how they are connected to activities occurring across the university.

Brian Young (ETS)
Presentation Link
Demonstration of Doceri, a software that allows control of a computer (podium computer or laptop) with an iPad.

Jessica O'Hara (ENGL)
Presentation Link
Discussion on how "intensive blogging" has been implemented in first-year honors rhetoric and composition courses.

Mark Fisher (PHIL) and Christopher Long (LAUS/PHIL)
Presentation Link
Description of plans for an open peer-reviewed online journal of public philosophy.  

Daniel Tripp (ENGL)
Presentation Link
Discussion on instances when the technologies that make digital scholarship possible threaten it with obsolescence, as related to the post-publication history of Red Planet: Scientific and Cultural Encounters with Mars.

Chris Stubbs (ETS)
Presentation Link  /  Presentation Resources
Overview of the creation, design, and student testing of EconU, a brand new web-based economics game.

Emily Rimland (Libraries)
Presentation Link  /  Presentation Resources
Discussion of the Research Project Calculator and the Penn State iPad User Group.


We would like to thank all of our attendees, speakers, and organizing partners for helping to make the event a success!

The third iteration of the Liberal Arts Scholarship and Technology Summit (LASTS) will be held on Thursday, August 16, 2012, in Foster Auditorium.  The College of the Liberal Arts is again partnering with Education Technology Services (ETS) and University Libraries to provide Liberal Arts faculty and graduate students a forum in which to share insights and learn from one another regarding the use of technology for teaching and research. 

A new feature to LASTS is the addition of a pre-conference workshop to be held on Wednesday, August 15, 2012.  The workshop will provide a forum for attendees to explore and discuss the nature of digital humanities and its role at Penn State.  More information about the pre-conference workshop can be found on the Humanities @ Penn State Libraries blog.

Thursday's event will feature presenters from Liberal Arts, Education Technology Services, and the Libraries, as well as a keynote address from Cole Camplese, Senior Director for Penn State Teaching & Learning with Technology.  Below is an overview of the presenters and their topics:

9:05-9:15: Dawn Childress (University Libraries)
Brief summary of the pre-conference workshop on digital humanities.

9:15-9:50: Cole Camplese (TLT)
Keynote address from the Senior Director of Penn State's Teaching and Learning with Technology.

9:50-10:05: Christopher Long (LAUS/Philosophy)
Discussion on how the research for his book, Socratic and Platonic Politics, was carried out in public through his Digital Dialogue podcast and his blog, The Long Road.

10:05-10:20: Mike Furlough (University Libraries)
Overview of how some libraries around the country have supported digital humanities research, as well as one example at Penn State.

10:20-10:35: Allan Gyorke (ETS)
Overview of key technology trends in higher education--including MOOCs, badge systems, learning analytics, and electronic textbooks--and how they are connected to activities occurring across the university.

10:55-11:10: Brian Young (ETS)
Demonstration of Doceri, a software that allows control of a computer (podium computer or laptop) with an iPad.

11:10-11:25: Jessica O'Hara (ENGL)
Discussion on how "intensive blogging" has been implemented in first-year honors rhetoric and composition courses.

1:20-1:35: Mark Fisher (PHIL) and Christopher Long (LAUS/PHIL)
Description of plans for an open peer-reviewed online journal of public philosophy.  

1:35-1:50: Daniel Tripp (ENGL)
Discussion on instances when the technologies that make digital scholarship possible threaten it with obsolescence, as related to the post-publication history of Red Planet: Scientific and Cultural Encounters with Mars.

1:50-2:05: Chris Stubbs (ETS)
Overview of the creation, design, and student testing of EconU, a brand new web-based economics game.

2:05-2:20: Emily Rimland (Libraries)
Discussion of the Research Project Calculator and the Penn State iPad User Group.

More information on the presenters and their topics can be found on the complete schedule.

For those unable to attend in person, we invite you to join us online, where we will be streaming live at http://www.ustream.tv/channel/lasts-12. 

The event can also be followed on Twitter at hashtag #LASTS12.

Videos and slide handouts will be posted here after the event, so be sure to check back for additional resources.

Amy Dietz, lecturer in the Department of Labor Studies and Employment Relations, was awarded the Superior Service to Adult Learners Award by the Penn State Commission for Adult Learners.  The award recognizes her dedication to improving the lives of Penn State adult learners through direct service to students. 

In addition to teaching Penn State World Campus courses, Dietz is the program administrator and adviser for the department's online master of professional studies in human resources, as well as the program administrator for the department's online bachelor of arts and bachelor of science in labor and employment relations.

To find out more about Dietz's Superior Service to Adult Learners Award, please visit this article.

Photo Credit: Penn State Live

The Modern Language Association of America announced it is awarding its eighteenth annual Aldo and Jeanne Scaglione Prize for Comparative Literary Studies to Penn State Comparative Literature Professor Alexander C. Y. Huang his for book Chinese Shakespeares: Two Centuries of Cultural Exchange, published by Columbia University Press. The prize is awarded annually for an outstanding scholarly work that is written by a member of the association and that involves at least two literatures.

Professor Huang will be officially presented with this award during the MLA Annual Convention in January 2011. The award selection committee provides the following account of Professor Huang's book:

"Alexander C. Y. Huang's Chinese Shakespeares: Two Centuries of Cultural Exchange maps new territory for the most promising project in comparative literature today. Huang's object is the movement of cultural forms across geographical space, but he regards such movement not as mere diffusion or even as exchange. Instead he examines the way movement across geographical and geopolitical fault lines reaches into cultural forms and changes their meanings from the inside, often revealing possibilities that had lain dormant, unnoticed, or submerged in the texts' cultures of origin. Remarkable not only for its sophistication but also for its scholarly depth, Chinese Shakespeares is a landmark in the renewal of comparative literature as a discipline."

Professor Huang is the cofounder and coeditor of two open-access performance archives, Global Shakespeares and Shakespeare Performance in Asia. Visit our LAUS Announcements blog to find out information about the Global Shakespeare course that is being offered in the spring.  

Congratulations to Professor Huang!  For more details about this award, please visit the Modern Language Association website.

Hi everyone!

Let me start off by introducing myself! My name is Marlee Kattler and I am a senior Public Relations student. Last year I decided to join a Communications Committee for THON 2010. I fell in love with the cause and I instantly knew that I wanted to do more. Now I am the Campus Outreach Faculty Communications Captain for THON 2011.

Looking back on my four years here at Penn State, it all seems a blur. What sticks out in my mind as my best memories are my THON memories.

Every week something new is happening or in the works involving THON. There is always something new to learn, and I continue to learn every week.

Since this is my very first blog, I figured I should give you all a little look into what your students are doing outside of the classroom when they are involved in THON. So much has happened thus far, so stick with me as I try to catch you up!

As a Captain we have our weekly meetings every Monday night. It is here that our Overall Chairperson runs our meeting and keeps us up-to-date and informed about everything happening with THON. This can include things like fundraising events, blood drives, and merchandise sales.

This year I get the privilege to have a Committee of 30 members who my Co-Captain and I interviewed at the beginning of the semester. We have our meetings on Wednesday nights where we go over important dates to remember and brainstorm ideas to increase Faculty and Staff involvement as that is our specific role within THON.

November 16th marked the fourth annual Faculty and Staff Luncheon held at the Hintz Alumni Center. This was my Committee's big event! I began working on planning this event at the beginning of the semester with my Overall, Elaine. I worked with the Public Relations Graphic Design Captain in order to design an invitation for the event, which came out awesome, she is so creative! Once we had a general idea of how many invitations we were going to need we got them ordered and printed at ProCopy. Then the distribution began and RSVPs started rolling in.

The luncheon was held at the Hintz Alumni Center from 12-2. All Faculty and Staff were encouraged to come and go at their convenience. Once everyone was settled with their food, the presentation began. The presentation included facts and figures about THON and what it is all about. I was pretty nervous about speaking, but once I got going I felt at ease! We were fortunate enough to have two Faculty members who are also Four Diamond parents speak about their personal encounters, which was extremely moving. Two THON Captains who are Four Diamond Families also spoke at the event which gave a very powerful perspective to everyone in attendance.The turn-out at the event was great, and I felt it ran very smoothly! You can all look forward to another luncheon next year that will be hosted by my successor.

This week my Committee and I will be making THONvelopes before our meeting on Wednesday. It's always more fun to do it with  friends!! For those of you who don't already know, THONvelopes are another way that we fundraise FTK (For The Kids). They are letters that we send out to our families and friends that explain what THON is and encourage them to donate. The THONvelopes include an addressed return envelope, making it simple for them to mail their donations back.

This weekend is the second Canning trip and my Committee is going to Pittsburgh. There are four designated Canning weekends throughout the year where student volunteers stand outside of store fronts requesting donations from passerbys. No matter the weather conditions, you can be sure to see Penn State students bundled up with their signs and cans!  

Stay tuned for a recap of how the weekend went. Keep your fingers crossed for no snow and rain!

Until next time!

For The Kids,

Marlee

The College of the Liberal Arts congratulates Robin Becker, acclaimed poet and professor of English and women's studies, for being named the 2010-2011 Penn State Laureate.  The Penn State Laureate is charged with bringing increased social, cultural, artistic, and human perspective and awareness to a wide variety of audiences.   Becker is the third Penn State laureate, and the first from the College of the Liberal Arts:  she succeeds Anthony T. Leach, associate professor of music and music education; and Kim Cook, professor of music in cello.

For additional information on Professor Becker's impressive publication and teaching record, check out her bio on the Department of English Web site.

This year we are encouraging faculty in the College of the Liberal Arts who are teaching First Year Seminars to consider integrating social media technology into their courses to engage students around learning objectives central to their academic success.

At three points during the Fall 2010 semester, we will be feeding case studies and vignettes to the Penn State Rock Ethics Institute blog intended to encourage a conversation about the Penn State Principles and academic integrity. Hopefully, students will comment directly on the blog, adding to a College-wide conversation on ethical issues relevant to undergraduate education.

We also plan on holding two information sessions for freshmen to learn more about the opportunities and resources available to them as students in the College of the Liberal Arts.
One presentation will cover call enrichment activities like internships, education abroad, undergraduate research, and involvement in student and community organizations. The other session will (tentatively) cover advising and university resources (learning centers, CAPS, disability services, etc.)

For those faculty interested in thinking more broadly about how to integrate technology into their course, we are planning a First Year Seminar Summer workshop. The workshop will introduce ways to incorporate such social media technologies as blogging, podcasting, wikis, twitter, and YouTube into the First Year Seminar experience.  FYS faculty interested in this workshop should contact me at: longc@psu.edu. (Or you can direct message twitter me @LAUSDeanLong).

In the spirit of the dialogue these initiatives are designed to cultivate, I thought I might conclude with a specific question to all faculty and students who have read this post to this point:

Can you think of specific examples of how social media technology could be used in a First-Year seminar to deepen the educational experience of students and faculty?