As part of teaching the Fall 2020 course - Problems & Methods in Middle Eastern Studies - the individual events from the series, Digital Forays & Global Uprising, were integrated with class.
This was meant to address:
What it means to teach in this moment of Zoom by developing meaningful asynchronous material for class.
Encourage cohort building amongst the incoming students by working/thinking together.
Not just speak of public engagement with our thinking and writing - but to actually model it!
We asked students to create “extensions” for each event, which required them to write reflections, assemble media and resources, and create public facing additions to the virtual panels. In this way, we struck upon a novel method for cohort building and integrating asynchronous material into the classroom that could serve as a model for public scholarship in a time of distance and remote teaching.
Through sustained engagement across platforms our public engagement series became cornerstones of our pedagogy and curriculum, and, in turn, our student-centered work reinforces and supplements our public events so that they lead a digital (and public) life well beyond the usual span of a single conversation.