Into Practice, a biweekly communication distributed from the Office of the Vice Provost for Advances in Learning to active instructors during the academic year was inspired by a successful 2012 HILT grant project. The e-letter highlights the pedagogical practices of individual faculty members from across Schools and delivers timely, evidence-based teaching advice, contributing to and strengthening a University-wide community of practice around teaching.

Below is a catalog of all the Into Practice issues sorted by the publication date. To subscribe to Into Practice, please sign-up via our Mailing List page.

• Keeping students engaged and learning through the “human hook”

  Maya Jasanoff, X. D. and Nancy Yang Professor of Arts and Sciences and Coolidge Professor of History, uses narratives to engage students and deepen their understanding of course content. From her Gen Ed course Ancestry to her upper-level seminar Narrative History: Art and Argument, Jasanoff demonstrates that “stories do not necessarily mean fiction; rather, stories are simply arguments based on the evidence. The former cannot exist without the latter.”

• MuRealities

  The media experiment project aims to workshop digital surveys that explore these main research questions: how does this mural serve as an “interactive” map for storytelling and navigating narratives?

• One person’s story as entry to complex historical issues

  Gabriela Soto Laveaga, Professor of the History of Science, illustrates how combining nineteenth century documents with oral histories can help unpack complex current issues and disrupt certain assumptions on topics such as undocumented border crossings, addiction, and disease along our southern border.

• Perspective-taking and humility training with medical case studies

  Dr. Sadath Sayeed, Assistant Professor of Global Health and Social Medicine, introduces issues of ethical reasoning in medicine (e.g., confidentiality, professional boundaries, conflicts of interest, informed consent) with hypothetical cases and vignettes.

• Creative projects: Interpreting history through various media

  Vincent Brown, Charles Warren Professor of American History and Professor of African and African American Studies, trains students to interpret history through various media including graphics, data visualizations, videos, and art installations.

• Whiteness: An Ethnographic Question

  Awardee will use an ethnographic lens to spark an interdisciplinary and intergenerational conversation on the role of whiteness in research, pedagogy, and institutional life.

• Development of Student-run Podcasts as an Innovative Learning and Communication Tool

  Awardees will develop training workshops to teach students to communicate technical knowledge to broader audiences through podcasting.

• Virtual reality narratives in foreign language pedagogy

  Awardees will engage foreign language students in cultural and linguistic immersion through virtual reality (VR) film narratives.

• The Videographic essay: Innovating a multimedia pedagogical tool for 21st Century scholarship

  Awardee will articulate the scholarly development of the use of the “videographic essay” as a method for communicating knowledge, compiling research, and synthesizing arguments, and organize a 2015 special workshop on multimedia methods.

• Portraits in multimedia: A social engagement project in African and African American Studies

  Awardees plan to create a digital archive of “social portraits” (short video interviews with African leaders and residents) for widespread use in humanities courses.