NHV PDs

The Nature and Human Values Program offers professional development trainings and community events each semester for its instructors. See below for examples of past offerings. The Fall 2024 PD schedule will be released at the start of the fall semester.

Photo of NHV faculty members working at a table together

Professional Development Workshops for Fall 2024

August 15, 2024 | 10:00 am to 1:00 pm

Beginning of the Semester Meeting for NHV

September 30, 2024 | 12:00-1:00 PM

Heather Fester, Jessica Salazar, Craig Hess, “Strategies for Engaging with Difficult Topics in the Classroom” 

Join us as we brainstorm and discuss potential strategies for when emotionally charged topics emerge in the classroom. Together with Mines HR Director Craig Hess and Mines Associate Counsel Jessica Salazar, we will consider how to juggle multiple perspectives in the midst of a charged conversation with students in NHV, which is especially important this semester with the impending election. In this interactive PD session, we’ll explore scenarios that might occur or have occurred in the classroom. We ask that you come ready to engage and also to share your own experiences, insights, and pedagogical strategies. Lunch will be provided. 

October 14, 2024 | 12:00–1:00 PM

Heather Fester, “NHV Research Essay Workshop” 

One of the most mysterious parts of the NHV curriculum is the signature research paper. Different instructors have tried different approaches to this assignment over time with varying results. We invite you to bring your current paper assignment sheet and workshop it with your fellow instructors. We will start the session by inventory-ing a list of approaches and we hope to send you off with some ideas for preparing your students for the research essay. Lunch will be provided. This session can be joined by Zoom if you want to attend but aren’t on campus on Mondays. Here’s the link to join the call. 

October 23, 2024 | 12:00–1:00 PM

Kim O’Connor and Joe Vuletich, “Getting Our Hands Dirty in NHV: Teaching through Tactile Activities” 

Looking for ideas about how to teach writing or ethical concepts in more hands-on, interactive ways? If so, this may be the PD session for you! In it, we’ll explore some materials-based approaches to teaching key HASS100 concepts. These include examining biases and blind spots through the use of optical illusions, playing with literal lenses (e.g., binoculars, kaleidoscopes) to understand how sources can shape what we see in a reading, building spaghetti towers to test the value of failure and cooperative learning, and cutting up paper handouts to explore the “big three” ethical frameworks and sentence structure. You’ll leave with several activities that can engage students and help make abstract ideas tangible and memorable. Lunch will be provided. 

October 30, 2024 | 4:00–6:00 PM

NHV Pizza Party 

Every semester, NHV teams up with the Writing Center and the Arthur Lakes Library to offer a workshop specifically to assist with final research papers at any stage of the writing and research process. There will be stations to work with NHV faculty, writing consultants, and librarians—and of course, there will also be pizza! Students ask their professors questions or get help with citations and finding and evaluating sources. We will send out a flyer for the event very soon for you to share with students, and we ask that you try to be there and also remind students several times in between now and then about this opportunity. 

November 5, 2024 | 12:30–1:00 PM

Ryan Lambert, “Using Games to Teach Ethical Frameworks: Exploring Pedagogy and Game Studies” 

In this professional development, participants will learn how to use games to teach ethical frameworks. This session will explore pedagogy and game studies, and participants will play some games. Lunch will be provided. 

December 5, 2024 | 9:00–12:00 PM

End of the Semester Meeting for NHV 

Archive

Spring 2024

January 8, 2024, 9:30-11:00 am

Beginning of the Semester Meeting

January 24, 2024

Professional Development: Comparative Ethics II with Dr. Heather Fester

This is a continuation of the Comparative Ethics PD last semester where we will explore a variety of ethical frameworks from across the world. Through short readings and open discussion, you will learn about ethical systems not often studied.   

February 12, 2024

Generative AI Learning Community with Dr. Heather Fester and NHV instructors

The NHV learning community has rotated topics each semester. This semester, join us as we read and discuss current scholarship on generative AI in the writing classroom. Bring your questions and see you online! 

February 26, 2024

Professional Development: Skillshare with Dr. Mairead Case

Dr. Case will share some assignments and classroom tools that have worked especially well over the years in NHV, and then we’ll have a full group roundtable where you can ask questions and share your own resources (specifically, for assignments, texts, or activities you’ve found especially useful for promoting student success or activating key components of NHV). Everyone leaves with some time saved and something new (hopefully also exciting) to try!

March 27, 2024

Professional Development: Recent Developments in Continental Ethics: Levinas and Badiou with Chris Johnson

This PD highlights two of the most significant contributions to continental ethics in the latter half of the 20th century. Though well known in Francophone philosophy, neither Emmanuel Levinas nor Alain Badiou are regularly invoked in discussions on environmental ethics. In order to add to the variety of voices and traditions consulted in environmental philosophy, this PD will consider in what ways these two disparate thinkers might offer solutions to the sorts of questions now familiar to NHV students. Badiou’s attack on what he considers the two poles of contemporary ethics (one Kantian, one Levinasian) will serve as the point of departure for our discussion. After surveying the ethical content of each figure’s work, including their similarities and differences, we’ll conclude by considering in what ways each may proffer answers to pressing questions in environmental ethics. 

April 22, 2024

Professional Development: Some Uses for Poetry in NHV with Dr. Chad Brockman

In this workshop, we will look at poetry as a type of “good writing” that is relevant in our courses and deserves more consideration by NHV students. During the workshop, Dr. Brockman will solicit everyone’s thoughts about ways—and reasons—we might try to incorporate poems and poetic uses of language in our teaching. Also, a few sample poems will be explored. 

May 2, 2024

End of the Semester Meeting

Fall 2023

August 18, 2023

Beginning of the Semester Meeting 

September 22, 2023

Professional Development: GEM Anscombe’s Philosophy of Intention Regarding Tech with Dr. Nate McCabe

A philosopher active at the University of Oxford in the midcentury, G.E.M. Anscombe (also known as Elizabeth Anscombe), was a student of Ludwig Wittgenstein who translated his Philosophical Investigations into English, a friend of Philippa Foot, a mother to seven children, the coiner of the term “consequentialism,” and a formidable challenger of the philosophical status quo. While well-known in the fields of analytic philosophy and ethics, her thought has rarely been brought into conversation with the philosophies of technology and engineering, especially in the ways they are discussed in NHV. This talk remedies that neglect by introducing the general tendencies of her thought and highlighting their relevance to questions regarding the use of nuclear force, the weight of an action’s “effects” in ethical consideration, and her important ideas about an action’s “intentions.” 

September 25 & October 24, 2023

Alternative Grading Learning Community (NHV) – with Dr. Heather Fester and NHV Instructors

In this NHV learning community, we will explore the book Ungrading by Susan Blum and talk about possible applications of alternative grading principles in NHV courses.

October 23 and 24, 2023

Professional Development: Research Essay Workshop with Dr. Heather Fester

One of the most mysterious parts of the NHV curriculum is the signature research paper. Different instructors have tried different approaches to this assignment over time with varying results. We invite you to bring your current paper assignment sheet and workshop it with your fellow instructors. We will start the session by inventory-ing a list of approaches and we hope to send you off with some ideas for preparing your students for the research essay.

November 6, 2023

Professional Development: Media and Information Literacy with Sam Reichman 

In this PD, we’ll discuss how to prepare students to conduct strong research in the age of digital media and disinformation. Topics include ways to create a safe, brave environment for students to share their opinions and analyses; the broader context of the media landscape, including professional media consolidation and amateur media proliferation; ethics in journalism; polarization and media bias; and techniques for identifying and dispelling mis/disinformation 

November 16, 2023

Professional Development: Comparative Ethics with Dr. Heather Fester

In this PD, we will explore a variety of ethical frameworks from across the world. Through short readings and open discussion, you will learn about ethical systems not often studied in NHV.  

December 11, 2023

End of the Semester Meeting

Spring 2023

January 7 and 8, 2023  

NHV Faculty Retreat 

January 8, 2023

Beginning of the Semester Meeting

February 14, 2023 

Professional Development: Unleashing Creativity in the NHV Classroom with Kimberly O’Connor

In this lunchtime PD, we’ll identify the defining characteristics of “creativity” and some reasons why we should devote time and space to open-ended, arts-based activities in the NHV classroom. Then, we’ll engage in a collage project that invites us to explore some big questions related to NHV, and wrap up by reflecting on the process, as well as what challenges and rewards exist in adding similar activities in our own course schedules. 

February 27, 2023 

Professional Development: Building Rapport with Students with Anna Angeli

Join us for a workshop on building student rapport. Prof. Angeli will  share a few of her assignments/methods, and then she will ask everyone to share something that works well for them in a discussion. 

March 15, 2023

Professional Development: “Good People, Well Spoken”: Rhetoric, Ethics, and Teaching Writing with Dr. John Duffy

Scholars of public argument have documented the polarization, irrationality, and dysfunction characteristic of contemporary public discourse, a condition widely perceived to undermine democratic practice and weaken the bonds of civic culture. We seem increasingly incapable, as political theorist Danielle S. Allen puts it, of “talking to strangers,” or engaging those with whom we disagree . 

In this talk, Dr. Duffy argues that teachers of writing and students learning rhetoric have a central role to play in addressing the dysfunctions of contemporary public argument. This is so because the teaching and learning of writing always and inevitably involves the teaching of ethics and ethical discourse practices, or what Dr. Duffy calls the “rhetorical virtues” of honesty, generosity, humility, intellectual courage, and related dispositions. Should teachers of writing engage the ethical dimensions of their work in the classroom, they can provide students with a healthier, more constructive model of argument that may have implications for public discourse and the common good. 

April 18, 2023

Professional Development: End of Semester and Reflection Activities with Laura Heller

After a long semester, with the pressure building inexorably towards exams and final papers, students (and instructors) may be feeling overwhelmed, stressed, discouraged, or burnt out, or just wondering what it was all about.    

Come join us to learn about and share ways to end the semester effectively and meaningfully, by integrating lessons from the semester, final portfolio activities, and the last days of class.  

We will discuss the purpose and requirements of the final NHV portfolio, focusing on the creative project aspect, and we will share ideas and examples for using that assignment to end the semester on a reflective and positive note.  We will also share some ideas for creative last-day-of-class activities that are independent of the portfolio requirements. 

May 4, 2024 

End of the Semester Meeting

Fall 2022

August 18, 2022 

Beginning of the Semester Meeting

September 26 and 29, 2022  

Professional Development: Why and How [and How Not to] Use Case Studies to Teach Ethics to Engineering Students with Dr. Ali Kerr

October 24 and 25, 2022  

Professional Development: #LandBack: Content and Conversations with Meredith Parker

Prof. Parker will be sharing information, materials, and reflections on the Indigenous rights movement in South Dakota. 

December 8, 2022 

End of the Semester Meeting