Discovery Teaching Fellow
Next-Level Discovery Teaching Fellow, University of California, Berkeley, 2022-2023
First-Step Discovery Teaching Fellow, University of California, Berkeley, 2021-2022
Library of Congress Discovery Pilot Project, University of California, Berkeley, 2018-2019
First-Step Discovery Teaching Fellow, University of California, Berkeley, 2021-2022
Library of Congress Discovery Pilot Project, University of California, Berkeley, 2018-2019
Click the Adobe Spark image above:
"The Meme and the Human: Digital Literacies"
or here to learn more about Carmen's Discovery-based pedagogical materials | Sound on!
My Discovery-based instructional materials show again the communal nature of teaching. They were generated over several years during my participation in these communities: Discovery Initiative Teaching Fellows, BAWP ISI, Digital Pedagogy Fellows, and Lecturer Teaching Fellows (LTF). Created during two LTFs and with LTF support, my Engaging Gen Z website here has been and is a sine qua non of Discovery-based Initiative pedagogy in my classrooms.
During my three years of participation in the campus-wide Discovery Initiative, from Discovery Pilot Project on, my projects have focused on digital literacies, the Mexican American experience, Library of Congress (LC) Teaching with Primary Sources (TPS) work, integrating the LC’s ORQ Method (Observe / Reflect / Question), and autoethnographic writing and research for first- and second-year students. These projects include “Skeptical Surfing: Questioning the Mediascape” (for the Library of Congress Discovery Pilot Project 2018-2019), “Dismantling the Research Evaluation Framework with Students” in all of my courses to address the ongoing paradigmatic changes to the information ecosystem such as increasing mis/dis/malinformation; decentralization of authority away from the academy and other institutions; diversely interconnected sources, creators, processes, filters, stories, formats, platforms, motivations, channels, and audiences; and algorithmically personalized filter bubbles, challenging existing evaluation heuristics like the CRAAP Test and SIFT (for the First-Step Discovery Teaching Fellowship 2021-2022), and students “Writing Themselves into Existence and Community: Collaborative Autoethnographic Reflections by Undergraduate Researchers with Interdisciplinary Backgrounds” (for the Next-Level Discovery Teaching Fellowship 2022-2023 presently).
The selected Discovery activities below demonstrate new teaching techniques, content, and course redesigns for CWR1A and CWR4B to integrate Discovery perspectives and principles. These activities and more that I crafted during my multiyear participation in the Discovery Initiative led by CWP colleague Pat Steenland are found on my Engaging Gen Z website here, here, and here. My 2018 lightning talk slide deck “Surfing Skeptically” here shows the images given below in clearer detail (including of photographer Andrej Vasilenko and his 2007 photograph A Girl and a Dog, misattributed virally, and when I contacted him via social media, he emailed me a photo of himself with his black-and-white negative for it, a case study students explore as one of the digital literacies activity I designed, seen as Activity 4 below.
For my contribution to the 2018-2019 Library of Congress Discovery Pilot Project, as seen in Part 1 below, I created a set of three activities using an immigration-related LC primary source photo (Activity 1 below), designed for my first-year students in the 6-unit CWR1A course with the theme of “Cross-Cultural Conversation.” Bookended by digital literacies Activities 1 and 3, Activity 2 follows the LC’s “Observe, Reflect, Question” (ORQ) approach combined with the Inquiring Minds protocol. Activity 2 is done with the Teaching with Primary Sources (TPS) “analyzing photographs and prints” worksheet in hand here. I used this worksheet in CWR1A with a Twitter hashtag to have students record their impressions—observe, reflect, question—about a primary source, an idea taken from the work of Peggy O’Neill Jones and Kelly Jones-Wagy here.
I also created several Discovery assignments for CWR4B research students that incorporate some of the ideas that O’Neill Jones and Jones-Wagy describe in their webcast “Social Media in Social Studies: Engaging Students in Their Medium” on the LC website here. One is mediating students’ questioning via Tweets to a hashtag on Twitter. O’Neill Jones and Jones-Wagy note this approach often draws out quiet students to contribute more. In trying this approach with LC primary source pedagogy, I discovered that often students did not have Twitter accounts so we pivoted to small group work, using the Twitter accounts of those students who do have them.
I am interested in the beneficial convergences of social media, Gen Z, and pedagogy. By meeting Gen Z on social media, we can have a productive pedagogical exchange, in my experience. For example, in Fall 2018 in CWR1A, to teach the academic register, I created activities on the Snapchat register, asking students to explain Snapchat’s posting rules in written form to me; then they had to do the same with the academic register, creating a rubric for it. Earlier, with millennials, I used Facebook successfully to create conversations online with students about composition, punctuation, and other topics. Part 2 has activities (using Twitter) that I created in fall 2018 for my spring 2019 CWR4B (“The Meme and the Human: Digital Literacies”). That activity is here at “Know Your Meme” on EGZ. My LC-TPS activities show a bifurcated view: to use a diversity of selected LC primary sources (photos, prints, sound recordings, and manuscripts) for students to observe, reflect on, and question, and to incorporate digital literacies exercises. They use both old-school approaches (pen and paper) and new technology (such as social media).
The Berkeley LC Discovery Pilot Project activities seem to have much in common with the AASL (American Association of School Librarians) Standards Framework for Learners here: Think (inquire, gain knowledge); Create (draw conclusions, make informed decisions, apply knowledge to new situations, create new knowledge); Share (share knowledge and participate ethically and productively as members of our democratic society); and Grow (pursue personal and aesthetic growth).
During my three years of participation in the campus-wide Discovery Initiative, from Discovery Pilot Project on, my projects have focused on digital literacies, the Mexican American experience, Library of Congress (LC) Teaching with Primary Sources (TPS) work, integrating the LC’s ORQ Method (Observe / Reflect / Question), and autoethnographic writing and research for first- and second-year students. These projects include “Skeptical Surfing: Questioning the Mediascape” (for the Library of Congress Discovery Pilot Project 2018-2019), “Dismantling the Research Evaluation Framework with Students” in all of my courses to address the ongoing paradigmatic changes to the information ecosystem such as increasing mis/dis/malinformation; decentralization of authority away from the academy and other institutions; diversely interconnected sources, creators, processes, filters, stories, formats, platforms, motivations, channels, and audiences; and algorithmically personalized filter bubbles, challenging existing evaluation heuristics like the CRAAP Test and SIFT (for the First-Step Discovery Teaching Fellowship 2021-2022), and students “Writing Themselves into Existence and Community: Collaborative Autoethnographic Reflections by Undergraduate Researchers with Interdisciplinary Backgrounds” (for the Next-Level Discovery Teaching Fellowship 2022-2023 presently).
The selected Discovery activities below demonstrate new teaching techniques, content, and course redesigns for CWR1A and CWR4B to integrate Discovery perspectives and principles. These activities and more that I crafted during my multiyear participation in the Discovery Initiative led by CWP colleague Pat Steenland are found on my Engaging Gen Z website here, here, and here. My 2018 lightning talk slide deck “Surfing Skeptically” here shows the images given below in clearer detail (including of photographer Andrej Vasilenko and his 2007 photograph A Girl and a Dog, misattributed virally, and when I contacted him via social media, he emailed me a photo of himself with his black-and-white negative for it, a case study students explore as one of the digital literacies activity I designed, seen as Activity 4 below.
For my contribution to the 2018-2019 Library of Congress Discovery Pilot Project, as seen in Part 1 below, I created a set of three activities using an immigration-related LC primary source photo (Activity 1 below), designed for my first-year students in the 6-unit CWR1A course with the theme of “Cross-Cultural Conversation.” Bookended by digital literacies Activities 1 and 3, Activity 2 follows the LC’s “Observe, Reflect, Question” (ORQ) approach combined with the Inquiring Minds protocol. Activity 2 is done with the Teaching with Primary Sources (TPS) “analyzing photographs and prints” worksheet in hand here. I used this worksheet in CWR1A with a Twitter hashtag to have students record their impressions—observe, reflect, question—about a primary source, an idea taken from the work of Peggy O’Neill Jones and Kelly Jones-Wagy here.
I also created several Discovery assignments for CWR4B research students that incorporate some of the ideas that O’Neill Jones and Jones-Wagy describe in their webcast “Social Media in Social Studies: Engaging Students in Their Medium” on the LC website here. One is mediating students’ questioning via Tweets to a hashtag on Twitter. O’Neill Jones and Jones-Wagy note this approach often draws out quiet students to contribute more. In trying this approach with LC primary source pedagogy, I discovered that often students did not have Twitter accounts so we pivoted to small group work, using the Twitter accounts of those students who do have them.
I am interested in the beneficial convergences of social media, Gen Z, and pedagogy. By meeting Gen Z on social media, we can have a productive pedagogical exchange, in my experience. For example, in Fall 2018 in CWR1A, to teach the academic register, I created activities on the Snapchat register, asking students to explain Snapchat’s posting rules in written form to me; then they had to do the same with the academic register, creating a rubric for it. Earlier, with millennials, I used Facebook successfully to create conversations online with students about composition, punctuation, and other topics. Part 2 has activities (using Twitter) that I created in fall 2018 for my spring 2019 CWR4B (“The Meme and the Human: Digital Literacies”). That activity is here at “Know Your Meme” on EGZ. My LC-TPS activities show a bifurcated view: to use a diversity of selected LC primary sources (photos, prints, sound recordings, and manuscripts) for students to observe, reflect on, and question, and to incorporate digital literacies exercises. They use both old-school approaches (pen and paper) and new technology (such as social media).
The Berkeley LC Discovery Pilot Project activities seem to have much in common with the AASL (American Association of School Librarians) Standards Framework for Learners here: Think (inquire, gain knowledge); Create (draw conclusions, make informed decisions, apply knowledge to new situations, create new knowledge); Share (share knowledge and participate ethically and productively as members of our democratic society); and Grow (pursue personal and aesthetic growth).
What Students Say
At semester’s end, CWR4B students were asked to give one-sentence responses to prompts in a survey on April 19, 2022, and below is an excerpt from their responses, which show their deepened understanding of research from engaging in Discovery-based assignments, which help students experience it as social, conversational, messy, recursive, requiring persistence, communal, factual, directed toward the common welfare and mindful of the margins of an inequitable society and economy, problem-solving, curiosity-based, creative, and based also on honoring each researcher’s voice. When asked, “What was your definition of research coming into CW R4B, and what is your definition now of research here in our last weeks of CW R4B?” students responded as follows:
- My definition of research now is the process of discovery and generation of new ideas through the conversation of multiple and diverse sources of information.
- My definition of research coming into R4B was I think something along the lines of: the exploration of information, or something simple like that, but now I would add to it and say that my new definition is:
- The curiosity, questioning, exploration, collection, and revision of information in order to better understand a question or concept.
- Finding facts and evidence to support my claims was how I viewed research prior to coming to R4B but now I view it as an opportunity to deepen the conversation I have with my peers, understand how publications tie together, and how research serves as a way to further your love for a subject and hopefully make a positive contribution to the world.
- My definition of research coming into CW R4B was diving deeper into a subject or topic that interests you and finding out more than what a normal person would know. My definition of research NOW is being passionate about a topic and being willing to stay open and not form a premature opinion so you can do your best to discover the strongest evidence and understand the problem well and also how you can solve the problem or make others aware.
- Coming into CW R4B my definition of research was a bit one-sided thinking that only STEM majors did research to look into and discover new technological advances in order to add to the conversation—now I believe research is anything you are passionate about that you feel like further discovering in order to better the conversation and make a difference for a more equitable world.
- Before, my definition of research was to explore unknowns using existing evidence, and now my definition of research is to explore the unknowns and try to apply the results to solve problems.
- The biggest change in my definition of research is that I've learned research is continuous: it isn't 3-4 hours in one day of looking stuff up, but it's continuously gathering new information from different sources/perspectives that can easily change your opinion as you go deeper into your research.
- My definition of research before was just looking things up for a certain topic but now I view research as a way to figure out supporting evidence on topics I am interested in and/or concerned about.
- Coming into CW R4B, my definition of research was that it is doing a deep dive into a particular topic in order to learn more about it. Now, my definition is that research is a recursive process which involves finding and synthesizing multiple reputable sources in order to gain a better understanding of a topic, add to the conversation, and help make positive change.
- My definition of research coming in was very based on the definition of research in the academic world, but now I also attribute it to people’s passions. Seeing others in the class very excited about their particular passions they presented on and wanting to contribute to the Common Good made me realize that academic research can also be just a passive act accomplished by someone not seeking out to do anything in particular beyond extending their own interests.
- Before, I thought it was finding an answer with evidence. My definition now has changed to coming up with discoveries that summarize your curiosity and don’t let your curiosity just fade away. Keep discovering.
- My definition was the search for information about a subject with the intent to come to a conclusion based on that information, but now I think of it less as a simple searching, but discovering, finding, learning, (repeat), and presenting information needed to come to a well-rounded conclusion.
- I still believe that research is gathering and utilizing information to direct further investigation, however it is more clear to me that this process can be very complex in practice.
- My definition of research coming into R4B is to learn deeply about a topic through reading a variety of articles, and my understanding of research now is to delve into the nuances of an issue and view it from various perspectives.