Teaching Tables

Teaching Tables are all-campus workshops that focus on shared readings and discuss specific topics that are of relevance to the entire Emory community. They are usually held during lunchtime in the Jones Room of the Woodruff Library. In the past, they have included such topics as “Civil Discourse and Diversity in the Classroom” and “Who Are Our Students? Millennial Learners, Net Geners, and New Learning Styles in the Classroom.”

Teaching Tables usually involve a follow-up or series of follow up workshops. They are smaller “lunch and learns” that focus on continuing discussion from an earlier Teaching Table. CFDE staff gathers the concerns that faculty have expressed in the initial workshop through survey data and informal feedback, and creates sessions specifically geared to those concerns. For example, the “Millennial Learners” workshop resulted in a five part year long “Teaching Table” series that focuses on various philosophical and practical elements of teaching with technology in the twenty first century classroom.

Topics for Teaching Tables in AY 2009-10

Millennial Learner Series

This is a five part series on the theory and practice of teaching with technology:

1. Wikipedia and its (dis)contents?
   Wednesday, September 16, 2009
   11:30-1:00 pm
   Jones Room, Woodruff Library
   Facilitated by: Connie Moon Sehat & Wayne Morse
   A 20-minute edited podcast of this event is available here.
   A one-page summary of this event is available here.
2. Getting Your Content Online: A Foundational Review
   Tuesday, October 27, 2009
   11:30-1:00 pm
   Jones Room, Woodruff Library
   Facilitated by: Alan Cattier
   A one-page summary of this event is available here.
3. Identity and the Internet
   Monday, November 9, 2009
   11:30-1:00 pm
   Jones Room, Woodruff Library
   Facilitated by: Sarah Toton and Carole Meyers
   A summary of this event is available here.
   A seventeen-minute edited podcast of this event is available here.
4. Copyright & Millennial Learners
   Thursday, February 11, 2010
   11:30-1:00 pm
   Jones Room, Woodruff Library
   Facilitated by: Lisa Macklin
   A 20-minute edited podcast of this event is available here.
5. Podcasting and Pedagogy
   Friday, March 26, 2010
   11:30-1:00 pm
   Jones Room, Woodruff Library
   Facilitated by: Shannon O’Daniel & Chris Fearrington

Civil Discourse at the University

In this series of Teaching Tables, we are following up on a workshop we sponsored last year, based on case studies developed here at Emory. We learned from the workshop that civil discourse challenges are different in different arenas of intellectual inquiry. Based on this insight, we decided to design our Teaching Tables accordingly. For the 2009-2010 academic year, our Civil Discourse workshops are based on general fields of inquiry: health sciences, humanities, social sciences, business, law, and basic science.

In each of these arenas we have invited two or three professors to have a conversation about civil discourse in their fields, and a respondent from outside their field but familiar with its basic commitments and intellectual contours.

In other arenas, “civil discourse” might be called “courageous conversations” or “difficult dialogues” and these discussions may connect in some ways to conflict resolution and questions of hate speech, free speech, and academic freedom.

What we hope to accomplish with these workshops is to stimulate new ways of thinking about talking across difference. How do we “agree to disagree” about “hot-button” issues in our respective fields? Can we learn to co-exist in classrooms, labs, and offices with different opinions and avoid destructive coping mechanisms that undermine intellectual community?

Planned Events:

1. Civil Discourse in the Health Sciences
   Thursday, October 30, 2009
   11:30-1:00pm
   Panel: Iris Smith, Maureen Kelly, Nicolas Krawiecki, and Benjamin Reiss (outside respondent).
   A sixteen-minute edited podcast of this event is available here.
   A one-page summary of this event is available here.
2. Civil Discourse in the Humanities
   Thursday, November 12, 2009
   11:30-1:00pm
   Thee Smith, Sheila Tefft, Kevin Corrigan

Future Events (please check for confirmation):

1. Civil Discourse in the Law School
   Details TBA
2. Civil Discourse in the Social Sciences
   Details TBA
3. Civil Discourse in the Basic Sciences
   Details TBA
4. Civil Discourse in the Business School
   Details TBA

Past Events:

1. Civil Discourse and Addressing Differences in the Classroom
   April 7, 2009
   Rosemarie Garland-Thomson and Kimberly Wallace-Sanders
   A 20-minute edited podcast of this event is available here.

Teaching Portfolio Session

Details to be announced soon.