Note: Below is the announcement posted prior to this workshop. This activity was part of the FaCE Project Phase I, which operated from Fall 2004 through Spring 2008. For information about current FaCE Project Phase II activities, go to the FaCE home page.

Teaching the City

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• A Common Interest Workshop funded by the ACM Mellon FaCE Project
• Dates: April 11-12, 2008
• Host: Lawrence University in Appleton, WI
• Contact: Betsy Hutula at ACM (312-263-5000)
• Deadline to identify participants: February 20, 2008

A workshop on "Teaching the City" will be held at Lawrence University on April 11-12, 2008.

Goal of the workshop

The goal of this workshop is to bring together an interdisciplinary group of faculty interested in discussing the theoretical and pedagogical challenges that surround teaching cities.

Importance of the workshop

Several factors are presently converging which make the teaching of cities particularly important.

• GoogleEarth and related geo-tagging programs have made maps more accessible and interactive. In addition GoogleEarth makes possible a new type of assignment in which students work traditional sources onto online maps.
• A second factor is the growing interest in internationalization. The recognition that language acquisition and travel abroad are essential parts of higher education makes the city an ever more attractive topic.
• A third factor is the broad cultural consensus that has developed in the years following 9/11 and Hurricane Katrina that cities are important cultural assets that ought to be valued and preserved. Discussions about the reconstruction of New Orleans has put into wider circulation notions about the readability and constructed nature of cities.

These factors, along with a growing scholarly interest in cities (see January 2007 issue of PMLA dedicated to cities), point to the timeliness of reflecting on the practical aspects of teaching the city.

Workshop outcomes

The primary outcome of this conference will be allowing professors to exchange ideas about how to go about teaching a city. In order to allow professors to continue contact after the conference a website will be set up that contains useful links to databases or visual resources. In addition syllabi for courses could be exchanged and some multi-media student projects could be posted. This kind of site will continue the work of connecting professors in multiple departments who face similar methodological issues in teaching a city. To our knowledge there is currently no forum for this kind of interdisciplinary exchange, based as it is on a pedagogic issue and not on direct overlap of subject. This conference will also seek to make more widely known the utility of teaching cities at every level of the college curriculum.

Workshop speaker

Dr. Darren Kelly is an urban and cultural geographer based in Dublin, Ireland. Currently Fulbright Scholar-in-Residence at Beloit College, his research studies the impact on Dublin of its rapid economic development, tied to globalization. His dissertation on "Dublin's Spatial Narrative: The Transition from Essentially Mono-Cultural Places to Poly-Cultural Spaces" looks at issues surrounding urbanization, immigration and identity politics in contemporary Ireland and uses interdisciplinary methodologies and theories ranging from geography and literary theory to philosophy. For several years he has taught literature at St. Patrick's College, Dublin, as well as a course on the semiotics of the city for the study abroad provider IES. At Beloit College, he is teaching courses that engage students with the city of Beloit.

To participate in the workshop

ACM campuses are invited to nominate one or two faculty members who teach courses connected to cities or who work closely with study abroad programs to attend this workshop.

Participants should be identified to Betsy Hutula (ehutula@acm.edu) by February 20, 2008.

FaCE and ACM will cover travel and lodging (at the conference hotel) for up to two people per campus.

Workshop schedule

Friday, April 11

5:30 pm: Dinner followed by opening remarks on the workshop and keynote address from Darren Kelly.

Saturday, April 12

9:00-11:30 am: Panel #1-- Virtual and Actual Visits to the City

This panel will look at ways to get students to engage with the landscape of a city, either through an actual visit to the city or through a virtual visit using web resources such as Google Earth and other software tools.

11:30 am - 12:30 pm: Soup and sandwich lunch with discussion about communicating the experience of a city in the classroom.

1:00-3:30 pm: Panel #2 -- The City and Internationalization

This panel will take up questions that relate specifically to study abroad programs and the kinds of classes and programs that can give students to interpret and understand the city in which they will live for a term or a year.

3:45-4:30 pm: Screening of short documentary -- Dearborn USA: Islam in the American Landscape

6:00-8:00 pm: Sit-down dinner with dessert and hot drinks, ending with concluding discussion of topics covered in panels.