2017 Excellence, Innovation, and Technology Summit

The 2017 summit will feature a number of outstanding CMC faculty members who will share their perspectives and experiences about Academic Advising, Technology Across the Liberal Arts, and Inclusive Teaching: Incorporating everyone in the Classroom.

The first panel will address “Excellence in Teaching at CMC: Academic Advising.” Academic Advising is an essential component to teaching our students. This panel will feature Dean Uvin, Professors Amy Kind, Marc Massoud, and Ellen Rentz, together with our Registrar (and students’ favorite homegirl) Elizabeth Morgan, who will all share their insights and perspectives on advising our students with their peers.

In “Technology Across the Liberal Arts,”  Dustin Locke will discuss his new course, "Fact, Fiction, and Simulation," centered on the ethics, metaphysics, and epistemology of simulated and fictional worlds, for which he and his students use virtual reality headsets.  For his Arabic language course, Bassam Frangieh developed expansive original content, produced collaboratively with his students, and made available in an online format. These supplements provide greater cultural context and allow students to see Arabic in action. He also transitioned away from an aging delivery mode with specific hardware requirements to a platform that makes content even more easily available to students, as well as more accessible via a wider range of devices. Assistant Vice President Janice Marino will provide updates about some of the exciting innovations in technology and teaching.

The third and last panel concerns “Inclusive Teaching: Incorporating everyone in the Classroom.” Our panelists—Dean Lee Skinner and Professors Wei-Chin Hwang, Sam Nelson, Diana Selig, and Nancy Williams—will discuss their thoughts and techniques supporting inclusive teaching, and offer ways to help us think together about how we might advance our teaching, mentoring, and otherwise serving our diverse student body.

This year, the Summit will close with featured speaker Wei-Chin Hwang, who will share insights gleaned from his clinical practice and research on ethnic minority psychology, cross-cultural difference, cultural competence, and adaptive responses, to help us think together about how we might advance our teaching, mentoring, and otherwise serving our diverse student body.
A schedule of the summit and a program of the summit are available for download.