Join us for our next talk in TLL’s Speaker Series: Reigniting the Spark of Learning.

During the pandemic, many instructors realized the importance of community, wellbeing, and belonging in student learning, and the central role that they themselves played in developing the structures and processes to create supportive and inclusive learning environments.

In this talk, members of the RIC16 Ad Hoc Committee* will discuss their year-long work to understand and document how MIT instructors and faculty fostered community, wellbeing and belonging during remote teaching and how these strategies continue to be used in classrooms and other learning spaces across campus. TLL’s Director and member of the committee, Janet Rankin, will moderate.

All are welcome!

For Zoom details, please register via Eventbrite below.

Panel

Katrina LaCurts Senior Lecturer & Undergraduate Officer, Electrical Engineering & Computer Science. (EECS) Katrina’s academic interests lie in the intersection of computer systems and society. She specializes in teaching large undergraduate systems courses. and currently, teaches 6.02 (Introduction to EECS via Communication Networks), 6.033 (Computer Systems Engineering), and 6.S057 (Computer Systems and Society). LaCurts received the inaugural School of Engineering Distinguished Educator Award. LaCurts received her MS and PhD in CS from MIT.

David McGee, Associate Professor, Earth, Atmospheric & Planetary Science. (EAPS) David came to MIT in 2012 after graduate studies at Tulane and Columbia Universities and a postdoc at the University of Minnesota. Prior to grad school, he taught secondary school science for 6 years. Outside of the lab group, he directs the Terrascope first-year learning community and serves as the departmental faculty lead for diversity, equity and inclusion.

Meghan Perdue, MITx Digital Learning Scientist, School of Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences. (SHASS) Meghan Perdue is the Digital Learning Scientist for the School of Humanities, Arts and Social Sciences. She works to produce innovative massive open online courses for SHASS. She also works with faculty to incorporate best practices from digital learning technologies into residential courses. She does research on a variety of topics looking at improving pedagogy in online learning, and is currently finishing a Doctorate in Education at Northeastern.

Krishna Rajagopal, William A. M. Burden Professor of Physics. Professor Rajagopal’s research areas are quantum gravity and field theory, strong interactions and Nuclear Theory. Professor Rajagopal did his undergraduate work at Queen’s University in Kingston, Canada. He then spent one year at Caltech before coming to MIT in 1997. He became the Associate Head of the Department of Physics in 2009, served as the Chair of the MIT faculty from 2015 to 2017 and as MIT’s Dean for Digital Learning from 2017 to 2021.

*The committee was formed in response to a recommendation from RIC16 (Undergraduate and Graduate Living and Learning Refinement and Implementation Committee) of Task Force 2021 and Beyond.

The full report of the ad hoc committee is available on TLL’s website, and is featured in a recent MIT News article about the work of the committee.