News from the Graduate Program in Critical & Creative Thinking
University of Massachusetts Boston15 October 2019
Student Matters
Registration opens for spring 2020 courses on November 4. Please see this page for links to open courses. Some courses are open to non-degree registration when space is available. Please inquire to cct@umb.edu for confirmations. Note formats below: register for the appropriate section based on face-to-face or online attendance.
CrCrTh 602, Creative Thinking (online only format) Limited synchronous meetings, occasionally on Wednesdays, 7:00pm).
CrCrTh 603/PHIL 501, Foundations of Philosophical Thought (hybrid format). Thursdays, 7:00-9:45pm.
CrCrTh 649,
Scientific and Political Change (hybrid format). Tuesdays, 4:00-6:45pm.
CrCrTh 670, Thinking, Learning, and Computers (hybrid format). Thursdays, 4:00-6:45pm.
CrCrTh 688, Reflective Practice
(hybrid format, with limited synchronous meetings).
CrCrTh 693, Action Research for Educational, Professional, and Personal Change (synchronous online format). Mondays, 7:00-9:45pm. Matriculated students only.
CrCrTh 694, Synthesis of Theory and Practice (synchronous online format). Mondays, 4:00pm or Tuesdays, 7:00pm (to be confirmed). Matriculated students only.
CCT Community
See future newsletters for announcements related to the CCT community.
CCT Events
See future newsletters for announcements about upcoming events.
Alum and CCT associates Notes
Luanne Witkowski (CCT '03 and faculty) is presenting her artwork, Same Not Same, at the Kingston Gallery (Boston, MA) through October 27th, 2019: In a return to her early roots in printmaking, Witkowski offers a new series of collagraph and intaglio monoprints. She repeats, reflects and revises the familiar and unfamiliar using traditional and non-tradition processes, techniques, and materials. In these she further explores her interests in nature and perception, fragility and tenacity, pattern, form and color.
CCT graduates recently starting PhD studies this fall:
Lizzie Casanave (CCT '99), Leadership in Education, UMass Lowell
Jeremy Szteiter (CCT '06), Global Inclusion and Social Development, UMass Boston
CCT alums and associates are encouraged to send items of interest to
the Critical and Creative Thinking community to be included in future
newsletters. Please submit events, announcements, and opportunities
through this form: http://bit.ly/CCTSICWi
Events
UMass Boston 3rd Annual Fall Symposium of the UMB Social Science Research Council / Transdisciplinary Dissertation Proposal Development Program
Monday, October 21, 2019
10:00am-2:15pm
UMass Boston campus, Alumni Lounge (Campus Center, Room 2551)
10:00am Opening Remarks and Introductions
10:15am Research Panel #1
11:30am Poster Session
12:30pm Lunch
1:00pm Research Panel #2
Local Ecologies: On Exhibit in the UMass Boston University Hall Gallery
September 3, 2019 – October 26, 2019
LOCAL ECOLOGIES is an exhibition, newly commissioned artworks, and public programming across three UMass campuses. Spanning Eastern Massachusetts, the campuses of UMass Boston, UMass Dartmouth, and UMass Lowell belong to landscapes with diverse coastal and river ecosystems, as well as layered indigenous, colonial, and industrial histories. The LOCAL ECOLOGIES initiative presents contemporary, place-based art practices that bring our ecologies and land use histories into new focus. The centerpiece of LOCAL ECOLOGIES are multidisciplinary artworks commissioned from artists who have lived and worked in Eastern Massachusetts. These will include both site-specific works for individual campuses, and additional works featured in a touring exhibition to be presented in Boston, Lowell, and New Bedford throughout fall 2019 and spring 2020. The initiative includes programming specific to each campus community and a scholarly catalogue.
LASER Boston: "Beauty and the Brain"
Where: swissnex Boston (Cambridge, MA)
When: October 18, 6-8pm
How do art and design influence our perception of the world? How does what we see affect how we feel? How can aesthetics deepen our understanding of science and medicine?
On October 18th, LASER Boston will explore these questions and more as we hear from three speakers across the arts and sciences. With the ultimate goal of fostering cross-disciplinary discovery and dialogue, this event will feature psychologist and designer Claire Reymond, sculptor Ralph Helmick and cognitive neuroscience researcher Sarah Schwettmann. For more information and to RSVP, see the web site.
Doing Feminisms in Troubled Times: Rage, Respectability, and Resistance
October 29, 2019 at 5:00-7:00pm
Location: Northeastern University Cabral Center, 40 Leon Street, Boston MA
Sponsored by the MIT Consortium in Gender, Culture, Women, and Sexuality and the Northeastern Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies program.
We live in troubled times, in a moment that has challenged what it means to do feminist work across intellectual fields and geopolitical spaces. Gender and sexuality studies programs and departments across the globe are facing increasing opposition, and have become key ideological sites upon which citizens and governments are waging political wars about free speech and the place of higher education in our world today. This panel engages how we think about our political present using feminist and queer methods. Focused on key issues of rage, respectability, and resistance, panelists will critically address what it means to write feminist and queer scholarship in a moment of profound uncertainty for students and faculty who focus on gender and sexuality in work across academic disciplines.
See the web site for full details.
The UMass Boston Osher Lifelong Learning Institute (OLLI) is seeking master’s and doctoral students to teach a 5-6 week, non-credit course in their area of study or area of interest (1.5 hours per week). OLLI is a lifelong learning program for adults 50 and older at UMass Boston. Part of the Gerontology Institute at the John W. McCormack Graduate School of Policy and Global Studies, OLLI has over 1,100 retired and semi-retired members who are enthusiastic and motivated learners. Teaching with OLLI is an excellent way to develop your own course and engage with a friendly audience, receiving guidance and mentorship along the way. Upon completion of teaching the course with positive student evaluations, instructors will receive a $500 stipend. Applications to teach during OLLI’s 2020 spring semester (March - May) are due by November 4, 2019. To apply please submit: 1) Course Proposal Form available on the OLLI website at https://www.umb.edu/olli/about/teach 2) A brief outline of the course plan; 3) A brief bio and resume; 4) A reference (letter or email) from a UMass Boston faculty member. Please send your submission to Genevieve Peterson at genevieve.peterson@umb.edu.
More information about the OLLI program is available on their website at www.olli.umb.edu.
Campaign Positions with Fund for the Public Interest
The Fund for the Public Interest is hiring students to work on top environmental and social change issues! We're a national non-profit that builds the people power it takes to win hard-fought campaigns and make real change on some of the most important issues of our day. That's why the Fund is hiring people to work this semester on campaigns for America's leading grassroots action groups to protect the environment and public health across the nation. Click here to find out more.
Currently, we’re working with MASSPIRG to ban polystyrene or styrofoam. Because it takes so long to degrade every piece of foam we’ve ever made is still out there, clogging our landfills, littering our streets, and polluting our rivers and oceans. Most plastics, but especially
polystyrene, are prohibitively difficult to recycle, and only 5% of America's plastic waste was recycled last year. The only way to dispose of this waste is to burn it or put it in a hole where it will sit for generations. We have a better answer, ban it.
We’re working to make Massachusetts the next state to ban foam cups and containers. When you take a campaign job with the Fund, you’ll work on real-world issues like this one and others, like global warming, big money in politics, or stopping the overuse of antibiotics on factory farms. You’ll get real-world training, building the people power it takes to win on these issues, and gaining leadership experience, all while getting paid. We're hiring for a number of different positions including campaign staff, field managers, and directors for our summer campaign season. There are available positions in our 30+ offices all across the country, so apply today to help make change happen. Learn more at www.jobsthatmatter.org or apply online here.
The Data Justice Special Issue of the Information, Communication & Society, Volume 22, Issue 7, June 2019 is available online on Taylor & Francis Online. https://lnkd.in/evhNcB9 This Special issue on Data Justice contains articles exploring Data Justice conceptions, applications and directions, with a sample of the titles listed below:
Exploring Data Justice: Conceptions, Applications and Directions
Decentering technology in discourse on discrimination |
Where fairness fails: data, algorithms, and the limits of antidiscrimination discourse
Datafying anti-poverty programmes: implications for data justice
Exclusion by design: intersections of social, digital and data exclusion
Online course: Learning Creative Learning
A free, online six-week course supported by an online community offered by the MIT Media Lab. Learning Creative Learning is an opportunity for educators and learners around the world to connect and share ideas, strategies, and projects around creative learning. The themes support educators and others to help others develop as creative thinkers, explore topics such as design principles, play, and creative society. See the web site to register.
Asynchronous Online Course: Infusing Critical Thinking into Your Courses
The Magna Online Course Infusing Critical Thinking into Your Courses gives teachers the tools to light a path for their students. Led by Linda B. Nilson, PhD, the founding director of Clemson University’s Office of Teaching Effectiveness and Innovation, it presents research-based, classroom-tested best practices that can be immediately applied in the classroom. This comprehensive, module-based program is an invaluable resource for educators at any career stage. Designed for asynchronous learning, it can be started any time, and completed at any pace, from virtually any device. Regular learning checks gauge understanding of the content, and a final check leads to a certificate of completion.
For registration, costs, and course access, see the web site.
The Foundation for Critical Thinking announces its new Center for Critical Thinking Community Online, an interactive learning and communications membership platform, offering a multitude of avenues through which our community can now come together to further develop your critical thinking abilities and virtues, and to share with one another your victories, your challenges, and your mutual commitment to making fairminded critical thinking a foundation of daily life and society at large. For more information and membership/subscription requirements, see the web site: https://community.criticalthinking.org/
Food for Thought
(additional web links and posts can also be found on CCT's Diigo pages. General critical and creative thinking focus: https://groups.diigo.com/group/ccreflect; Science in a Changing World focus: https://groups.diigo.com/group/sicwumb)
Video:
Professional storyteller, Bec Bignell (YouTube)
Relative Cosmic Velocities (YouTube)
Ambiguous Cylinder Illusion (YouTube)
A Table Is A Table (YouTube)
Intro to the Cocreation Foundation (YouTube)
Alike short film (YouTube)
Articles:
Essay on Gods of the Upper Air: How a Circle of Renegade Anthropologists Reinveted Race, Sex and Gender (The Washington Post)
The 9% Lie: Industrial Food and Climate Change (Independent Science News)
Mars mission: What will it take to set foot on the red planet? (CS Monitor)
Podcast S2E39: Bem Le Hunte – How we need to innovate our university education system (Idea to Value)
'Sesame Street' tackles addiction with kid-friendly dialogue (CS Monitor)
Ocean Cleaning Device Succeeds in Removing Plastic for the First Time (EcoWatch)
All learning is a consequence of thinking (The Learner’s Way)
That Great Pacific Garbage Patch Cleaning Device Is Finally Working Properly (Science Alert)
Mind-Bending Quantum Experiment Puts 2,000 Atoms in Two Places at the Same Time (Live Science)
What all schools can learn from failing ones (The Boston Globe)
MacArthur ‘Genius’ Vanessa Ruta on creativity in science (STAT News)
Labradoodle creator Wally Conron says he made ‘Frankenstein's monster’ (The Washington Post)
California bill to ban single-use plastic by 2030 failed (Big Think)
This Illustrated Periodic Table Shows How We Regularly Interact With Each Element (Mental Floss)
Does Your Dog Really Love You and What Does That Really Mean? A Journey in Cognitive Science and Moral Philosophy (Brain Pickings)
A mini revolution in brain science (Financial Times)
UMass plans national online college aimed at adult learners (The Boston Globe)
Thinking and learning in the postnormal era (Learner’s Way)
Study Finds Pay-As-You-Throw Programs Are Reducing Waste In New Hampshire (Green Matters)
Inclusive cities start with safe streets (Curbed)
White Supremacy and Artificial Intelligence by Ruha Benjamin (YES! Magazine)
How to Be Interesting? Read These 10 Fascintating Books (BookBub)
The banana as we know it is doomed (Popular Science)
A Table is a Table (The White Review)
How “Peanuts” Created a Space for Thinking (The New Yorker)
Silicon Valley’s Chinese-style social credit system (Fast Company)
Freeing the arts from the yoke of neoliberalism (ArtsHub Australia)
Neoliberalism and the Arts (Colouring in Culture)
The Latest Way to Understand Creativity (Psychology Today)
How to Find Your Artistic Voice: Ben Folds on Empathy, Creativity, and the Courage to Know Yourself (Brain Pickings)
10 Findings That Contradict Medical Wisdom. Doctors, Take Note. (The New York Times)
Keep Hustling: Four Cartoonists on Their Gig Economy Experiences - by The Response (The Nib)
The Untold Benefits of Climate Change - by Kendra Wells (The Nib)
Why Do We Treat Women's Creativity Differently? (Psychology Today)
Minneapolis to drop ProQA - wants 911 workers to talk & think for themselves (Statter 911)
Creatives Can Win One Week on a Private Island to Develop Their Ideas (My Modern Met)
Camera that can see around corners created by UW scientists (Journal Sentinel Online)
New Outdoor Preschool in the Arnold Arboretum, Opening This Fall (Jamaica Plain News)
China has started a grand experiment in AI education. It could reshape how the world learns (MIT Technology Review)
Irish Teenager Wins Google Science Award for Removing Microplastics From Oceans (EcoWatch)
What If: An Illustrated Celebration of the Utopian Imagination and the Will to Change the World (Brain Pickings)
Humor
List: Honest Academic Job Postings (McSweeney’s)
The Carbonaro Effect - Girl Genius Revealed (YouTube)