CREEES Fusion Room: an Interdisciplinary Digital Workshop

Cohort: 2016
Fellow: Mary Neuburger

This project entailed the creation of a curricular context and physical space for collaborative interdisciplinary teaching and research for faculty and students interested in Russian, East European and Eurasian studies. This was achieved in two ways. First, I transformed the required gateway course to our major, “Introduction to Russian, East European and Eurasian Studies,” which had been a disjointed “parade of faculty” course with disconnected guest speakers. In its new incarnation, traditional modes of teaching (lecture/test/discussion) were replaced with more interactive teaching and learning, and team-based activities and assignments. The course has improved considerably and continues to evolve, with rotating instructors, operating as a kind of workshop for faculty to try new teaching approaches. The second part of the project served to further push this interdisciplinary interaction into a digital lab environment. It entailed the design and assembly of a permanent digital/tactile workspace and “idea lab” called the “CREEES Fusion Room” on the fourth floor of Burdine. The creation of the CREEES “Fusion Room” in the epicenter of our unit has spawned more than one research lab, and by providing a space with user-friendly tools and technical support for exploring data, building and testing models, and sharing results across disciplines. With the support of the PTF program, Mary redesigned Introduction to Russian, East European and Eurasian Studies, which had calcified into a disjointed “parade of faculty” with a rotating primary instructor and no active/interactive learning, teamwork, or use of digital tools for student assignments. With a team, she reframed its structure and outcomes, developed methodological and thematic modules, and created a more interactive and meaningful student and faculty experience.

The first iteration of the newly designed course was held in the large Learning Lab (http://spark.ctl.utexas.edu/2017/06/20/learning-space/) at the PCL, which enabled exciting discussions and learning processes in a stimulating interdisciplinary environment. Here's one example: during one class, students had to dig through (PCL collection) magazines from the Cold War era produced by Eastern Bloc states for Western consumption. They had to choose and analyze images then produce slides with concise captions on everyday life in Eastern Europe. Student teams then presented and explained their choices at the end of class. Dr. Craig Campbell (a visual anthropologist) and Dr. Neuburger (a historian of this era) provided differing commentaries on life under communism and capitalism in the 1960s and 1970s. This built upon a presentation at the Harry Ransom Center by Dr. Steve Hoelscher (American Studies), who provided a compelling talk on the Elliot Erwitt collection, with its iconic Cold War images.