Fellows | 8 April 2022

CFA: Humanizing Technology Teaching Fellowships

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HUMANIZING TECHNOLOGY TEACHING FELLOWSHIPS

Deadline: Applications due April 29th, 2022

Call: We are seeking applications from qualified PhD students to serve as part of an instructional community for the Humanities Division’s recently awarded National Endowment for the Humanities grant “Humanizing Technology.” The goal of the grant is to develop a 5-course certificate program at the intersection of humanistic thought and contemporary issues in engineering. Teaching fellows selected for the program will work alongside faculty to collaboratively design one of these courses during Summer 2022. All graduate students will also be able to teach the course they helped design as a Graduate Student Instructor (GSI) in Winter, Spring, or Summer 2023.

Award: Students will receive a $5,000 summer fellowship. Those who serve as instructors during the academic year will be paid a GSI salary for the relevant quarter, including in-state tuition, fees and health insurance.

Course Details: The goal of the NEH Initiatives for Hispanic Serving Institutions grant “Humanizing Technology” is to construct and launch a new Certificate in the Humanities that will provide humanistic training for engineering students at UC Santa Cruz. The Certificate will develop students’ capacities as deliberative, critical thinkers about social and cultural systems; encourage them to explore the impacts of new technologies; and, more broadly, provide them tools for navigating their values and place in the world. The Certificate will require students to complete three of five designated courses as well as complete a capstone experience.

Over Summer 2022, an instructional community of faculty and graduate students will assemble to collectively design the five new courses for the Certificate in the Humanities, each tailored to a distinct General Education requirement. These courses will draw from and integrate themes that connect directly with the impacts of the biotechnological, computational, and data scientific technologies engineering students will study and develop in their careers post-graduation. As an overarching goal, the courses will also work to lead students to cultivate a sense of epistemic humility — to decenter the present moment, problematize conventional narratives, and reckon with unintended consequences of their field. Each course will have a set of course leads (drawn from faculty and graduate students) who will work closely together to develop a syllabus and assignments and shepherd the course through the course approval process.

The five proposed courses are as follows:

  • Ethics and Technology (Perspectives on Technology Gen Ed): This course explores ethical, social, and political issues raised by data scientific approaches to technology.
  • Global History of Communication (Cross-Cultural Analysis Gen Ed): This course provides a historical framing of the development of communication technologies and practices, considering a variety of cultures and societies across human history.
  • Humans and Machines, a History (Textual Analysis Gen Ed): This course explores the tension between humans and machines, between people and objects increasingly resembling them.
  • Representing the Self and the Other (Interpreting Arts & Media Gen Ed): Focusing on paintings, prints, photographs, selfies, and avatars, this course considers how the composition and form of an image is shaped by the maker’s goals, by the technology, and by its audience.
  • Race and Technology (Ethnicity & Race Gen Ed): This course examines how the construction of race connects with constructs in science and technology.

During Summer 2022, as part of the course design, the instructional community will partner with CITL, whose Project REAL (Redesigning courses for Equity and Advancing Learning) helps instructors use an evidence-based course design process. 

Participant Requirements: All graduate students must commit to fully participating in the instructional community. Participation includes:

  1. Early Summer 2022: Attend summer course design institute for all instructional community members. This institute is conducted by CITL and will be held remotely from 10am-1pm on six days in July (twice a week for three weeks): Wed. July 6, Fri. July 8, Mon. July 11, Wed. July 13, Mon. July 18, and Wed. July 20.
  2. Late Summer 2022: Attend regular meetings with faculty course leads to design the syllabus and prepare the course for university approval.
  3. Winter, Spring, or Summer 2023 (optional): Teach a 30-person (max) seminar as a Graduate Student Instructor; GSIs will be appointed under a separate contract, and they will receive additional support from faculty and peer mentors, including at least one classroom visit.

Eligibility:

  1. PhD students must be in good academic standing and within normative time.
  2. PhD students need to be engaged in research and to have taught as a teaching assistant or GSI in a graduate program at UC Santa Cruz. Students from outside the Humanities Division will be considered if their research engages the themes of the grant, broadly construed.
  3. Applicants must be registered and in residence during the 2022-23 academic year. Students are ineligible to apply while on leave.
  4. Advancement to candidacy strongly preferred.

Application consists of:

  1. Cover letter of no more than 2 pages describing why the applicant wants to join the Humanizing Technology instructional community. The letter should include relevant qualifications and describe which one(s) of the five courses are of particular interest and why.
  2. Graduate Director Form signed by your department Graduate Director confirming that you are within normative time and in good academic standing (Download form here).
  3. One-page CV
  4. Application form: please be prepared to answer the following on the Google form: 1) are you currently employed as a Teaching Fellow and how many quarters have you served in a GSI/TA title?; 2) what year will you be in your program in AY 2022-2023?; 3) are you advanced to candidacy?; 4) who is your faculty advisor? (advisors will be contacted during the application process); 5) are you interested in teaching a certificate course as a GSI? If so, in which quarters (Winter, Spring, Summer)?

APPLY

*PLEASE NOTE: You must be logged into your ucsc.edu Google account to use this application form.

Questions? Please contact Laura Martin, Program Manager, THI, at lemartin@ucsc.edu

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