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In this week's newsletter:
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Resources for Racial Trauma + Anti-Racist Action
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The CAT TA Training Program stands firm in our commitment to supporting Black lives, both inside and outside of the classroom. Below you'll find a short roundup of resources to support self-care, deepen your and your students' learning, and to take action in support of Black lives here in Los Angeles and nationwide. You can find additional resources from UCLA here.
DONATE:
LEARN:
REFLECT:
UCLA RESOURCES:
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Workshops and Training Opportunities
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Summer TA Training Workshops
The TA Training Program (TATP) and CIRTL@UCLA are teaming up to offer different workshops for TAs teaching during the summer session.
 Teaching Discussion Sections Remotely (Weds, 6/10 from 2:30-4:00pm)
- Creating Community Remotely (Fri, 6/12 from 12:00-1:30pm)
- Time Management as a TA, Grad Student, and Human (Fri, 6/19 from 12:00-1:30pm)
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Remote Teaching Resources: Instructional Design, Video Production, CCLE and More!
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New to remote teaching or just want to up your game? Check out upcoming opportunities to meet with instructional designers, video producers, and remote learning experts to help you bring your online course ideas to life. Sign up below for workshops or 1-on-1 consulting sessions.
Sign Up Here
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For asynchronous learning resources, check out this helpful step-by-step guide to setting up your CCLE course for summer as well as this checklist to guide you to Day 1 of your summer course.
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In Case You Missed It
In case you missed CAT's workshops this quarter, access previously recorded versions of our workshops, including leading discussions sessions remotely and gathering mid-quarter feedback, anytime on our website.
Access Workshops Anytime Here
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Engaging Asynchronous Discussion Groups
Whether you're new to online learning or have taken or taught online courses in the past, students and teachers alike agree that asynchronous discussion groups are tough to get right. Even when the discussion is well structured and interesting, people can get tired of the same routine week after week.
Check out recommendations from a pair of higher ed instructional designers, below, for tips on how to add a twist to your asynchronous discussion groups.
Five New Twists for Online Discussions
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Maura Lucking
Department: Architecture and Urban Design
Practice: Virtual field experiences
Briefly describe your course.
I am teaching this course as a part of the Collegium for University Teaching Fellows program. The class, Race, Myth and Landscape: The Design of White Supremacy, asked students to apply critical race theory and whiteness studies to a number of artistic media in the US from the 19th and 20th centuries. Specifically, we examine this in works of art that don't include bodies, like landscape paintings, to better understand how this aesthetic tradition imported from European art history impacts our present system and our reactions. Core learning objectives of this class involve rereading works of art and design that weren't thought of explicitly with a lens of race in the past. The goal is to have students work with fine art that on the surface may seem not only to not be about race, but also totally apolitical, and to think about how racial ideas are woven throughout in various ways.
What factors motivated you create virtual field experiences for your course?
The way I had designed the class was to do a number of museum visits here in Los Angeles. However, with COVID-19, that all went out the window. To achieve the goals of the course, I reassessed both the in person visit aspect but also my methods of teaching and what I asked of students for projects and assignments.
What strategies did you use to create virtual field experiences for your students?
To inform their final assignment, creating their own exhibition and gallery, I created a series of virtual museum visits as a substitute to visiting museums in person. A number of major museums were able to get some of their exhibitions online by the time spring quarter started. We toured a 3-D model of an exhibition, watched videos about various works, explored the museum websites to understand how museums create a narrative about pieces of work, had guests visit the class to speak about their area of expertise, and sampled from museum audio guides.
What impact did implementing the virtual field experiences have on your course?
Instead of drawing on works of art from specific museum visits, it allowed me to open up the entire internet to students.
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I moved from individual projects to group projects and cut back on some of my expectations around developing original research, giving students more opportunity to draw on class themes and apply the interdisciplinary principles from the class in small groups.
It was beneficial in a few surprising ways. The museum website is an extension of how the museum communicates. Students were able to assess things like audience, tone, and writing conventions in a way they wouldn't have been able to if we visited in person. It also helped to speak to the politics of the present. One source we used was the 1619 project, which was instrumental for helping students understand the way a historical narrative is crafted.
It also helped me develop more skills-based modules for students, really breaking down the craft of exhibition making into its most discrete skills, and documenting how they could use these skills to develop their final project.
What have you learned about translating in person activities to Zoom more generally?
You can't totally reinvent the wheel, nor should you be trying to as a graduate student juggling many things. I tried to be honest with my students that this was a compromised version of what I had planned and tried to be creative with the materials I did have access to. There were moments where I thought, 'I wish we were at a museum!' but overall I tried to create a virtual version of what I could and support my students in working through the material.
Anything that mimics a small group environment is helpful for engagement. 25 people on a screen isn't conducive to opening up or doing a close reading of a text together. Even if you have some people doing asynchronous work, don't be afraid to have some synchronous group work to help students inform each other's learning.
Is there anything else you would like to share with the TA community?
The landscape tradition is fraught with subtexts of white entitlement to property and resource exploitation, all bound up in what the western tradition has traditionally valued as "beautiful." For their final exhibition project, students are taking these contemporary politics even further, looking at the urban landscapes of protest, suburban development and racial 'passing,' and visual histories of barbed wire fencing from agriculture to internment and incarceration. In light of the instances of police brutality and racial violence we’ve seen this past week, I want to emphasize the importance of this exhibition project allowing students to explore art and design histories connected to their political commitments.
For more information or questions please feel free to contact Maura directly.
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If you have a practice or technique you'd like to share with the TA community in a future Spotlight, please let us know here.
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Please stop by to ask questions, brainstorm ideas with a thought partner, share best-practices with other TAs, vent, breathe - whatever support you need, we are here.
For all TAs, facilitated by Michelle Gaston, CAT
Specific to STEM TAs, facilitated by Katie Dixie, CEILS
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