On Wednesday May 19^th UConn Early College Experience and the UConn ECE Faculty Coordinator for Art, Department Head, ad interim and Professor of Illustration Cora Lynn Deibler met with certified Art Instructors for their professional development workshop.

The group started the day with a round table discussion about teaching studio art during the pandemic—trials, tribulations and best practices.  Later UConn ECE Instructor’s shared student work with each other and discussed grading strategies.  After a short break the instructors spoke about teaching and being an artist—how to balance two full time professions and not go crazy!

UConn Art courses offered through Early College Experience.

Due to the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, all UConn ECE professional development workshops will remain virtual for the Fall 2021 semester. Workshop dates will be posted on the “Dates to Remember” section of the ECE website and as always shared with each discipline specific group via the listserv. We hope to reconvene in-person professional development workshops during the Spring 2022 semester.

On Tuesday, May 25^th  UConn Early College Experience and Faculty from UConn’s Music Department, Blake Taylor, Dr. Eric Rice and Dr. Daniel Goldberg  met with certified Music Instructors for their annual professional development workshop.

The group started the day with a round table discussion about teaching ear training during the pandemic. Topics discussed included how the courses ran at UConn, how the courses ran in the high schools and what new resources were used due to the remote nature of the courses this year. Later in the morning, Prof. Daniel Goldberg, UConn Assistant Professor in Residence shared a presentation and discussed ear training and how to help struggling students in the course move forward.

UConn Music courses offered through Early College Experience.

On Tuesday, April 20th, UConn Early College Experience and colleagues from UConn’s Babbidge Library met with ECE Library Media Specialists from our partner high schools for their spring professional development training. Topics included Allied Health resources, Citation Management, Primary Resources, and Google Tools.

On Thursday, April 22^nd  UConn Early College Experience and the UConn ECE Faculty Coordinator for Medieval History, Prof. Sherri Olson met with certified HIST 1300 Instructors for their annual professional development workshop. Instructors were asked to read Carlo Ginzburg’s, The Night Battles: Witchcraft & Agrarian Cults in the Sixteenth & Seventeenth Centuries (first published in Italian in 1966, first English translation 1983). The group had an interactive conversation about teaching during COVID-19 and later held a scholarly discussion about the text.

If you’re interested in looking at the text, it is available free of charge at archive.org (direct link: https://archive.org/details/nightbattleswitc00ginz/mode/2up). To read it you can create a free account which allows you to check it out for one hour or for 14 days.

UConn ECE History courses offered through ECE.

On Tuesday, April 27^th  UConn Early College Experience and the UConn ECE Faculty Coordinator for Natural Resources and the Environment, Dr. Morty Ortega met with certified NRE 1000E: Environmental Science Instructors for their annual professional development workshop. The meeting was focused on “Environmental Justice in Your Community” with a special presentation by Parker McMullen Bushman Director of Extension for the City and County of Denver from Colorado State University.

Later in the morning Dr. Ortega spoke with the certified Instructors about COVID -19 and Wildlife and later how the pandemic has affected the class environment.

UConn ECE Environmental Science courses offered through ECE.

On Wednesday, April 28^th UConn Early College Experience and the UConn ECE Faculty Coordinators for Animal Science, Dr. Jenifer Nadeau and Dr. Amy Safran met with certified Animal Science Instructors for their annual professional development workshop. Drs. Safran and Nadeau went over guidelines for all ECE instructors including sample syllabi with course description and philosophy, required books, and grading policies. The group also discussed and shared helpful resources used in their classrooms. Later, Violet Jiménez Sims, Ed.D., Associate Director of Teacher Education (School-University Partnerships), UConn, met with instructors and spoke about “Including Diversity via Culturally and Linguistically Responsive Teaching”.

UConn ECE Animal Science courses offered through ECE.

On Thursday, April 29^th UConn Early College Experience and the UConn ECE Faculty Coordinator for French, Florence Marsal (Associate Professor in Residence) met with certified French Instructors for their annual professional development workshop. Instructors received a copy of L’art de perdre by Alice Zeniter and participated in a discussion about the novel.

After the book discussion, the group listened to parts of the music album “Pili pili sur un croissant au beurre”, by Gaël Faye. Which reference exile, nostalgia, and dual identity.

Prof, Marsal shared that both the novel and the music album can help us teach history (wars in Algeria and Rwanda, France’s military actions there) with a more personal and human approach, thanks to the young narrators. But these two resources can also start discussions with our students about childhood and youth, about family origins and one’s sense of identity, and about writing one’s own story to make sense of it.

After a short break the group reconvened to hear from Adrienne Eldredge, (French Adjunct Faculty, UConn) about “The Italianization of les passions in 17th-century France.” Adrienne Eldregde’s talk focused on emotions in Italian theater, through the lens of French and Italian philosophy, theater treatises, and plays.

At the end of the meeting UConn’s French 3250 and 3251 were discussed by Elisabeth Buzay, (Visiting Assistant Professor, UConn). Elisabeth Buzay spoke about the two recent culture and conversation courses she taught in a hybrid format: her 3251 syllabus focused on the “10 arts of the 21st century”, and the final project was to create a digital story. In her 3250 course, she implemented a crowd-sourced syllabus, and students created a final project in one of the following formats: a TV newscast, a radio show, or a podcast.

UConn French Courses offered through ECE.

On Tuesday, May 5^th UConn Early College Experience and the UConn ECE Faculty Coordinator for Classics, Sara Johnson (Associate Professor, Classics and Ancient Mediterranean Studies) met with certified Classics Instructors for their annual professional development workshop.

Instructors received an electronic copy of “Ethnicity in the Ancient World – Did it matter” by Erich S. Gruen.

The group divided up the text to provide brief summaries of each chapter and share questions and their thoughts.  Chapter topics are listed below:

• Were Barbarians Barbaric?
• Herodotus and Greekness
• The Racial Judgments of Polybius
• Rome’s Multiple Identities and Tangled Perspectives
• Constructed Ethnicities in Republican Italy
• The Chosen People and Mixed Marriages
• Did Hellenistic Jews Consider Themselves a Race or a Religion?
• Philo and Jewish Ethnicity
• The Ethnic Vocabulary of Josephus
• The Racial Reflections of Paul
• Christians as a “Third Race”

UConn Classics courses offered through Early College Experience.

On Wednesday, March 10^th  UConn Early College Experience and UConn ECE Faculty Coordinator for American Studies Laurie Wolfley, Faculty Coordinator for Latino and Latin American Studies Anne Gebelein, and Faculty Coordinator for U.S. History Matt McKenzie met with ECE American Studies, Latino and Latin American and U.S. History Instructors for a professional development conference.

Prof. Gebelein spoke about “Mass Deportation” and engaged in a Q&A session with the group afterwards. Later, certified UConn ECE Instructors Veda Harris (Waterbury Schools) offered resources for teachers teaching Latino studies and Kim Childress and Matt Hay (Hartford Schools) shared how they integrate Latino and African-American voices into their 11^th grade US History class. After a short break, Instructors broke into groups to encourage listening across disciplines for collaborative potential.

UConn American Studies, U.S. History, Latino and Latin American Studies courses offered through UConn ECE.