Past Recipients

Professor Theodosiou’s project, “Electric City Cottage: A Mobile Cross-Disciplinary Platform for Science Communication,” brought together science, engineering, theater, dance and technical design. It teamed students, faculty and community youth that created a mobile learning center during a summer mini-term, developed a course on science communication that integrated these many disciplines and delivered creative learning modules to urban and rural areas in need.

At the heart of Professor Theodosiou’s proposal was a broad and integrative learning experience that empowered students to delve deeply and broadly into dynamic, fun, and purpose-driven learning experiences. From a collaborative classroom environment, they took their ideas into the community and applied them, gaining the opportunity to perceive, digest, and re-frame what they knew, and made new and bold choices about how they engaged and related to their world going forward.

Professor Nelson-Mukherjee’s project is titled “The Salve of Stories: Creating Community through Shared Narrative Practices.” She will use the fellowship to develop a course that addresses the larger issues of death, dying, and human destruction.

Professor Nelson-Mukherjee proposes that it is through stories that we make sense of our lives, communicate our thoughts, express ideas, create a shared sense of purpose, experience community, and enable others to know more about our individual hopes, dreams, lives, insights, histories, backgrounds and cultures. The courage to share our stories of struggles and triumphs with care, authenticity, and vulnerability can help expand our empathy and understanding of others. Our willingness to enter into the still silent, unknown spaces of ourselves can give voice to our own unheard narratives and allow us to find commonality and imagine together something new. It might just prove to be a remedy we need for some of our social ills, a salve for our modern day souls. Rita Charon calls such an approach to communal stories “Narrative Medicine”. Along with her colleagues at Columbia University, she demonstrates and teach that the principles and practices of regular communal reading practices, personal reflective writing and the sharing of stories contribute to a good self-care and better health care for other people’s well-being.

The Nichols Fellowship will enable Professor Nelson-Mukherjee to engage students more deeply and meaningfully in Narrative Medicine’s practice of parallel chars by complementing the academic work she does with individual and communal reading, listening, and reflective writing practices as a means of strengthening the power of the individual voice and the presence of a compassionate, collaborative community. She will create a course, offered as a Modern Languages in Translation class on Narratives of Suffering and Healing, which would include works by German language authors Franz Kafka, Rainer Maria Rilke, Paul Celan, Jenny Erpenbeck, Julia Franck, Doris Dorrie, and Herta Muller, whose works speak to these issues with great richness of description and insight. The fellowship also will support conference attendance with students at the University of Iowa, a conference at Union with filmmaker and author Doris Dörrie, and a joint paper with student participants in the University of Iowa’s The Examined Life Journal.

The course is planned to be taught in Winter 2019.

“Justice is contention. Through contention all things come to be.” ~Heraclitus of Ephesus

Matter invades every aspect of human existence. It is inescapable and unassailable and so are its furtive and sometimes indescribable influences. The material world communicates through what it is as well as what it means. Hence, material objects covertly shape the immaterial—how we think and what we feel, our affect and essence. In Phenomenology of Spirit, Hegel suggests there is no fundamental separation between humanity and materiality, as everything we are emanates from our perception of self that is a symbiotic reflection of the mirror image out of which we create form.

My Nichols Fellowship course, “Theory of Things,” focuses on the tangible and intangible things that human beings encounter throughout their lives and the way in which material objects influence us, and, more importantly, how the lack of material objects adversely affects marginalized, displaced, and dispossessed individuals. Most people desire and value things, and in most Western cultures, much emphasis is placed on acquiring objects. While the objects themselves do not create conflict, the value individuals place on things can generate adverse consequences, particularly for those who do not have the economic means to obtain those objects or who are themselves viewed as objects. Indeed, the “desire” to own something and the “value” that is placed on acquiring objects are themselves intangible ‘things’ that produce other intangible things, such as greed, envy, arrogance, violence, deceit, and insecurity.

Best Practices

As class evaluations have demonstrated, students feel challenged in this course and find the material compelling and thought-provoking. As one student recently told me: “This course changed my life! It made me think about things in ways I never imagined.” The course also includes several field trips that provide students with an opportunity to consider material objects from a variety of perspectives and immerse themselves in the material world in ways they may not have considered prior to taking this course. Various assignments students work on throughout the course—“The After-Life of Things Walkabout,” “The Body as Thing Video Project,” “Literary Things Perusall Project,” and their final Maker-Space projects—help challenge students’ perceptions of themselves and the world around them.

One of the most rewarding aspects of developing these courses was having the opportunity to involve students in the process.  By engaging students in the design of the Humanism in Medicine course, they were able to contribute to the intellectual environment of the College and “own” the learning process.

It was also personally rewarding to see students move from thinking about a class as a presentation of facts to an active experience capable of producing “ah ha!” moments. In several planning sessions, we reversed roles as the students became instructors, and I became their student. These sessions provided me with a better window to student learning and the opportunity to share my own style and philosophy of teaching. Sharing my passion for teaching and personal goals as an instructor was affirming and professionally energizing. The Fellowship has allowed me to think more critically about my own teaching and ways to continually improve it.

An unexpected result of receiving the Byron Nichols Fellowship was that it has helped me to make connections with faculty at other institutions who are interested in the personal and professional development of students both in and outside of the classroom.

The grant provided an opportunity for me to think deeply about my teaching and how I connect with students both in and out of the classroom.  I am more at ease taking risks in the classroom and find myself more comfortable and capable of engaging students in the learning process.

Best Practices:

Reverse roles with students and allow them opportunities to teach you (the professor), leaving ample time to discuss the art of teaching and techniques that are engaging any audience.

Create opportunities for personal interaction outside of the classroom (I invited students to my house for a film discussion over Sunday brunch, took students on a field trip to an art studio, spent an afternoon outdoors firing pottery, and organized a retreat at the Kelly Adirondack Center).

Resist the urge to treat the classroom as a place for the presentation of facts, and instead be open to the classroom as a space where active interchange and engaging experiences can create “ah ha” moments and an enthusiasm for the learning process.  This may require letting go of some content, which can be very difficult when one has identified a syllabus packed with learning outcomes!