Individual Fellow Initiatives

The idea for this pilot course grows directly out of departmental and university goals to increase opportunities for Experiential Learning and for new technology exposure in the Humanities; and to involve more undergraduate students in original faculty research.

This project is directed at students with no prior knowledge of computer programming languages. When introducing complex and new skills such as computer programming in a classroom, teachers are often confronted with a lot of worried students and great numbers of very different questions, especially in humanities departments. The lecture setting is not well suited to address the needs of individual students.

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.

This project started out with a simple idea: From my original proposal, we noted that “Current historical timelines are not interactive, nor do they enable students to understand connections between different events. They are good at showing chronology, but are not good at illustrating how specific events are influenced by a whole host of different historical factors.”