News2016January
News from the Graduate Program in Critical & Creative Thinking
University of Massachusetts Boston12 January 2016
Student Matters
Spring 2016 Courses
Some space remains in spring 2016 courses; please check here for details and registration: http://caps-courses.umb.edu/courses/spring/cr/gr/crcrth/
Hybrid courses involve face-to-face meetings on campus and allow students at a distance to join via web conference during weekly meetings. Please register for either the face-to-face or online section based on how you'll participate.
CRCRTH 602 Creative Thinking (hybrid), 4:00-6:45pm Mondays, starts January 25 (Face-to-face: class #8136, online: class #7815).
CRCRTH 616 Dialogue Processes (online), Starts February 1 (Class #7816).
CRCRTH 649L Scientific and Political Change (hybrid), 4:00-6:45pm Wednesdays, starts February 3 (Face-to-face: class #7814, online: class #7817).
CRCRTH 688 Reflective Practice (hybrid), Class meetings overlap with CCT program events, with first meeting on Monday, February 8th (Face-to-face: class #6963, online: class #7819).
CRCRTH 693 Action Research for Educational, Professional, and Personal Change (hybrid), 4:00-6:45pm Tuesdays, starts February 2 (Face-to-face: class #6956, online: class #7818).
CRCRTH 697 Special Topics Course: Positive Psychology (hybrid), 1:00-3:45pm Mondays, starts January 25 (class #13320).
CCT Community
The Amherst College Men's Soccer Team, coached by CCT student Justin Serpone, won the NCAA Division III's national championship in December. Justin was also named the coach of the year by the National Soccer Coaches Association of America. Congratulations to Justin and his team for their achievements!
CCT Events
All are invited to join the Spring 2016 CCT Community Open Houses, including prospective and current students, faculty, and other guests. These events (held on campus and/or online) provide a chance to learn more about the CCT program, current projects and course offerings, and achievements of students and graduates in bringing critical and creative thinking to professional and personal settings. The events often involve discussions, activities, or presentations as well as time to speak to others about your interests. Open houses are scheduled for spring 2016 for evenings of February 8th and tentatively March 7th, April 4, and May 2nd & 3rd. Please see upcoming newsletters for more details or contact cct@umb.edu.
CCT Open House: Monday, February 8th, 7:00-8:30pm, EST (on campus in Wheatley Hall, 4th floor room 170, or online via Google Hangout)
Theme: Spring 2016 Welcome - Developing as Reflective Practitioners
Join us to speak with students and faculty, learn more about the CCT program and how the study of critical and creative thinking supports us as development of "reflective practitioners" and what this means in bringing change to our work and lives. RSVP: cct@umb.edu for details to join online.
Intersecting Processes: New England Workshop on Science and Social Change
Saturday, May 28 - Wednesday, June 1, 2016
Location: Old Fire Station, Woods Hole MA, USA
For more information and costs: http://sicw.wikispaces.com/newssc16
In this five-day workshop participants will create spaces, interactions, and support in formulating plans to extend our own projects of inquiry and engagement around "intersecting processes."
Taylor and García Barrios (1995; following Wolf 1982, 387 ) introduced the term to capture the ways that social and environmental change involves processes operating at different spatial and temporal scales and drawing on elements as diverse as the local climate and geo-morphology, social norms, work relations, and national political economic policy. Such intersecting processes are interlinked in the production of any outcome and in their own on-going transformation. An equivalent picture fits the changing structures we face in many areas, such as biomedicine and epidemiology, agriculture and ecological restoration, political economy and mental illness, science and social theory, project-based learning and fostering creativity. To understand such complexity requires our attention to the ways the intersecting processes transgress boundaries and restructure “internal” dynamics, thus ensuring that the situations do not have clearly defined boundaries and are not simply governed by coherent, internally driven dynamics. Engaging with some complexity invites agents to link "transversally" across different kinds of agents and scale, not to focus on one class or place or dynamic.
Alum and CCT associates Notes
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
The UMass Boston Film Series continues in the spring with the first screening on February 2 at 7:00pm in the UMass Boston Campus Center Ballroom. Films continue throughout the spring, and all are free and open to the public. Films focus on key social and political issues and are followed by Q&A with filmmakers. For more information, see: https://www.umb.edu/filmseries
The XII International Transformative Learning Conference
October 20-23, 2016
Pacific Lutheran University
Tacoma, WA, USA
“Engaging at the Intersections”
Call for Proposals: Due February 1, 2016 (see here for instructions)
We invite educators, consultants, facilitators, practitioners, researchers and students from around the world to join in exploring the nature and practice of transformative learning at the intersections. Whether you are new to the field of transformative learning or long familiar, you bring vitality to the conversation. By bringing together an international community of theorists and practitioners, we will create, generate and explore points of intersection which hold transformative potential...more
Opportunities
Call for Proposals: Performing the World 2016 Conference
Conference: September 23-25, 2016 in New York City.
Deadline for proposals: February 21, 2016
More information: http://www.performingtheworld.org/
Can We Perform Our Way To Power? It is from this perspective, that we come to the theme of Performing the World 2016: Can We Perform Our Way To Power? The current distribution of power is, at best, limiting and, at worst, destructive to humanity. Performance challenges the status quoby creating new ways of relating, new ways of learning, new ways of seeing and feeling, new kinds of institutions-new possibilities of all sorts. Performing the World is a gathering in which to explore and celebrate performance as a catalyst for human and community development and culture change-and thereby, create a new and more humane world. We welcome proposals that relate to this theme from a variety of perspectives, practices, disciplines and settings.
We invite participation from performers and performance scholars, psychologists and social workers, physicians and nurses, educators and youth workers, community organizers and activists, and all others for whom performance offers a new kind of tool in their human development, community building and political organizing work.
Resources
The New York Public Library has recently updated its digital collection of over 600,000 materials, including an extensive collection of high-quality public domain items, which are free to download and can be used without licensing or restriction for educational or any other purpose. See the entire collection at http://digitalcollections.nypl.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)
To Watch:
On the Reality of "Productivity": I'm Doing Work
To Read:
NPR Special Series on "the value of a college education"
Why Ghana Started a Space Program
Destroyed monument to be recreated using huge 3D printer
Why Exactly Is Spotify Being Sued and What Does This Mean?
Billionaire Bonanza: The Forbes 400 and the Rest of Us
40 brilliant idioms that simply can’t be translated literally
Human gene editing research gets green light
The most misleading charts of 2015, fixed
5 things people get wrong about mindfulness
The Witness: Opening our eyes to the nature of this earth
Canadian inventor tests new prototype of record-setting hoverboard
The Open-Office Trap
The concept of different “learning styles” is one of the greatest neuroscience myths
#FieldWorkFail Lets Scientists Share Their Hilariously Less-Impressive Moments
Education As Activating Social Fields
The science myths that will not die
National Innovation and Science Agenda of Australia
Humor
Correlation and Causation