Fellows | 18 May 2023

CFA: Humanizing Technology Teaching Fellowships

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HUMANIZING TECHNOLOGY TEACHING FELLOWSHIPS

Deadline: Applications due June 1, 2023

Call: We are seeking applications from qualified PhD students to serve as part of a second cohort of teaching fellows for the Humanities Division’s Humanizing Technology Certificate Program (HTCP), now in its second year. Teaching fellows selected for the program will work alongside faculty and graduate student mentors who have previously taught in the program to redesign one of the certificate courses for Summer 2024, which the fellow will teach as a Graduate Student Instructor. 

Award: Students will receive a $2,500 fellowship in Summer 2023 to participate in a design institute, conduct research, and complete a new version of a syllabus for one of the certificate courses. In addition, students will be paid a GSI salary in Summer 2024 to teach the new version of their certificate course in one of the summer sessions (assuming summer session enrollment requirements are met).

Certificate Program Details: Humanizing Technology is a new certificate program that provides humanities training targeted to early-career engineering undergraduate students at UC Santa Cruz. Funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities under their Humanities Initiatives at Hispanic-Serving Institutions program, the project brings humanistic methods and thinking to contemporary issues in technology and engineering. It is led by principal investigator Jasmine Alinder (Dean of Humanities) and co-principal investigators, Pranav Anand (Professor of Linguistics) and Laura Martin (Porter College Lecturer and Project Manager at The Humanities Institute).  

The program encourages students to explore the impacts of new and existing technologies. At the same time, it helps students develop their critical thinking about social and cultural systems that inform these technologies, and provides them with tools for becoming socially responsible professionals. The HTCP offers engineering students a pathway to fulfill GE requirements with courses that have a direct relevance to their majors and career interests, and it gives students an opportunity to develop community and a sense of belonging in smaller learning environments.

The courses integrate humanities concerns and approaches with the biotechnological, computational, robotic, electronic, and data scientific technologies engineering students study and will develop in their careers after graduation. Overall, the certificate courses and program aim to give students a humanistic foundation for designing and implementing new technologies and to encourage a consistent awareness about the consequences of new and existing technologies as well as the historical, social, and political contexts of technological design and application, based on extensive case studies.

During summer 2022, the courses were developed in an innovative, collaborative, and interdisciplinary framework, and were informed by stakeholder conversations with faculty, students, and staff in the Baskin School of Engineering. Partnering with The Humanities Institute and UC Santa Cruz’s Center for Innovations in Teaching and Learning (CITL), the Humanities Division convened an instructional community of faculty and graduate students to plan and devise the certificate courses. Kendra Dority, Associate Director of Graduate Programs at CITL, created and led the summer course design institute, and, along with CITL’s Founding Director, Jody Greene, facilitated the workshops. Together, they guided the instructional teams through an evidence-based design process to develop their course themes, syllabi, learning objectives, assignments, and assessments. This summer’s institute will be continuing this work by creating new versions of the blueprint courses that were developed last summer. 

Certificate Program Courses:

  • HUMN 15 Ethics and Technology (Perspectives on Technology Gen Ed):  This course explores ethical, social, and political issues raised by existing and emerging technologies. Watch the course description videos featuring Humanities and Baskin Engineering faculty.
  • HUMN 25 Humans and Machines (Textual Analysis Gen Ed):  This course explores the tension between humans and machines, between people and objects increasingly resembling them.  Watch the course description videos featuring Humanities and Baskin Engineering faculty.
  • HUMN 35 Language Technology (Cross-Cultural Analysis Gen Ed):  This course provides a comparative, historical framing of the development of communication technologies and practices, considering a variety of cultures and societies across human history. Watch the course description videos featuring Humanities and Baskin Engineering faculty.
  • HUMN 45 Race and Technology (Ethnicity and Race Gen Ed):  This course examines how the construction of race connects with constructs in science and technology. Watch the course description videos featuring Humanities and Baskin Engineering faculty.
  • HUMN 55 Technologies of Representation (Interpreting Arts and Media Gen Ed):  Focusing on technologies of representation like photographs, selfies, and surveillance data, this course explores how viewers and makers derive meaning from images and how power operates in their creation and circulation. Watch the course description videos featuring Humanities and Baskin Engineering faculty.

Participant Requirements: All graduate students must commit to fully participating in the summer institute in July/August 2023 and working closely with their peer mentor to produce a final course syllabus by the end of the summer. Participation includes the following:

  1. July/August 2023: Attend the summer course redesign institute with other Humanizing Technology Teaching Fellows, mentors, and program leads. This institute will be held remotely from 10am-noon on 4 days in July/August (once a week for four weeks): Monday, July 31; Monday, August 7; Monday, August 14; and Monday, August 21.  
  2. August/September 2023: Conduct research related to the certificate course, attend regular meetings with mentor, redesign the syllabus, submit a final version of the syllabus by the end of the summer.
  3. Summer 2024: Teach a 35-person (max) seminar as a Graduate Student Instructor. As a GSI, you will be appointed under a separate contract and will receive additional support from faculty and peer mentors, including at least one classroom visit. Final teaching assignments are subject to meeting Summer Session enrollment requirements. 

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 courses, broadly construed.
  3. Applicants must be currently registered to apply and enrolled during the 2023-24 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 design cohort and 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 2023-2024?; 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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