New group of course grant recipients ready to transform learning

The Hive is pleased to announce that we have awarded 11 grants to teams of faculty and staff from the Claremont Colleges to infuse creative collaboration and active learning into their courses and teaching. This semester, we have awarded eight course activity grants for Fall ’17 courses to support course activities by individual faculty members and interdisciplinary or intercollegiate teams and three new course development grants to develop or transform a course or courses during Fall ’17 which will be taught in Spring ’18. These varied proposals experiment with experiential learning, cross-disciplinary and cross-campus approaches, collaboration among students, ambitious challenges, and a learning environment of curiosity, openness, flexibility, and experimentation for both grant recipients and students.

In Fall 2017, students supported by the Hive course activity grants will:

• Create community among Portuguese students at the Claremont Colleges and practice group expression through Brazilian music and related workshops and projects

  • Juanita Aristizábal (Pitzer; Modern Languages, Literature, and Cultures) and Norman Valencia (Claremont McKenna; Romance Languages) for PORT 001: Introductory Portuguese I, PORT 033: Introductory Portuguese I, PORT 035: Portuguese Virtual Learning Community, and PONT 100: Introduction to Brazilian Literature and Culture

• Visit a Mexican border city to conduct interviews about public health issues and develop related research projects

  • Arianna Alfaro (Pitzer; Modern Languages, Literature, and Cultures) for SPAN 045 PZ: Public Health in Latin America

• Build a big data infrastructure to analyze and communicate the library collections as data in collaboration with librarians and digital humanities faculty and staff.

  • Madelynn Dickerson (Claremont Colleges Library), Ashley Sanders (CUC; Digital Research Studio), Lydia Bello (Claremont Colleges Library), Margaret Hogarth (Claremont Colleges LIbrary), and Mariam Salloum (Claremont McKenna; Computer Science) for CSCI 181 CMC: Big Data Platforms/Applications

• Clip, rip, hack, burn, and reverse engineer to physically transform a copy of Super Mario Bros into a newly made NES game on original hardware

  • Carlin Wing (Scripps; Media Studies) for MS 57: Introduction to Game Design

• Learn a technique called Action Coding to perform computer coding as an embodied and physical practice – somewhere between sport, hip-hop, and sign language – and explore the wide range of possible relationships between bodies and computers

  • Carlin Wing (Scripps; Media Studies) for CORE 003 SC-19: Bodies in Motion: Representation and Simulation

• Explore the relationship between art and mathematics in images of fluids

  • Rachel Levy (Harvey Mudd; Mathematics) for MATH 49: Fluidity

• Collaborate with Gabrielino/Tongva tribe members to develop a California version of the Blanket Exercise, an interactive learning experience that was developed in Canada to teach the Indigenous rights history of those lands

  • Erich Steinman (Pitzer; Sociology), Joyce Lu (Pomona; Theatre & Dance), and Scott Scoggins (Pitzer and Pomona; Native American Initiatives) for SOC 074: Indigenous Educational Access and Mentorship and THEA 001G: Basic Acting – Acting for Social Change

• Performing tales from the Decameron as a theatrical “translation” to be compared with other literary traditions and cinematic translations of the famous Italian work

  • Mario Forlino (Scripps; Italian) and Esther Hernandez (Claremont McKenna; Modern Languages and Literatures) for ITAL 142: Italian Literature & Cinema (Il Decameron: Tradizioni, Traduzioni e Tradimenti)

Also in Fall 2017, teams supported by the Hive course development grants will grow, fill out, and test their ideas for Spring 2018 courses about the following topics:

• Ethnography, Narrative, Fiction

  • Jonathan Lethem (Pomona; English) and Pardis Mahdavi (Pomona; Anthropology)

• Chemistry, Sustainability, and Art

  • Eric Doehne (Scripps; Art Conservation), Jerry Van Hecke (Harvey Mudd; Chemistry), Hal Van Ryswyk (Harvey Mudd; Chemistry), and Tanja Srebotnjak (Harvey Mudd; Hixon Center for Sustainable Environmental Design)

• Microbiome and Fermentation

  • Christy Spackman (Harvey Mudd; Humanities, Social Sciences, and the Arts)

Congratulations to the grant recipients, and we are excited to work with you! Watch this space for their stories throughout the semester.