Dr. Roseen Giles and Dr. Thomas Robisheaux will participate in a session organized by Dr. Astrid Giugni for the Pedagogy and Premodern Symposium (March 6-7 at Duke). The three will discuss their experience teaching (mainly) STEM students in their Focus cluster.
According to them "[t]he Medieval and Renaissance Studies cluster is the only Focus cluster centered on premodern humanistic studies. For Fall 2019, [the] cluster consisted three courses: “Engineers, Doctors and Scientists in the Renaissance” (History), “Music, Medicine, and Natural Sciences” (Music), and “Thinkers, Discoverers, and Problem Solvers” (English). Approaching the Renaissance from three different disciplines, [the] cluster introduced first semester students to the study of premodern European culture and science, giving us an opportunity to inform new college students on how to approach the past as it shapes the conceptual framework with which we understand the present...[the] panel will focus on the specific strategies and assignments we used to teach students to understand Renaissance works as reflecting and shaping multivocal, specific, and granular lived experiences."
In addition to this panel, Dr. Robisheaux has organized a workshop where the other conference participants "become freshmen in the seminar on the first day they are introduced to Renaissance books & asked to do a research exercise." This workshop will take place in the Rubenstein Library with the help of Trudi Abel and Racel Ingold (curators at the Rubenstein Library). In this workshop, Session participants will be asked select to work with one of a set of Renaissance books from the Rubenstein Library collection and asked to carry out an analysis of the book as an historical artifact. They are provided with some basic questions and guidelines for how to assess an early printed book. Working individually, and sometimes in teams, they then prepare a report and present it to the others.