ASSETT Newsletter - January 2022

As we embark on a new semester in the wake of the devastating Marshall Fires, a new wave of Covid variant, and myriad other challenges facing our students, our loved ones, and other members of our community, many of us are experiencing some level of compassion fatigue. And, yet, we still rise each morning expecting to show-up for family, friends, colleagues, students, and work. For many, this is getting really hard to do.

Compassion fatigue, according to the American Psychological Association, is “the burnout and stress-related symptoms experienced by caregivers and other helping professionals in reaction to working with traumatized people over an extended period of time." Our team at ASSETT has been reaching out to our faculty colleagues to learn about the ways that they are managing their own compassion fatigue, as well as searching for ways to navigate compassion fatigue in the classroom using simple activities and technological tools... continue reading

Events starting Wednesday, January 19, 2021 and continuing through Monday, February 21, 2021 - What is great teaching, and how do departments recognize and reward it? These are questions the Quality Teaching Initiative (QTI) embraces and seeks to answer. To support departments in developing updated teaching evaluation plans, ASSETT and QTI will offer our workshop series again this spring. Join us for one or more of our upcoming QTI events!

Tuesday, January 25, 2022 from 4:00pm-5:30pm MT - Join Rolf Norgaard from the Program in Writing and Rhetoric for a virtual discussion on key strategies for supporting undergraduate students through the phases of a major writing project, including research or creative work, honors thesis, or capstone project. Faculty and staff who mentor students in undergraduate research, Honors, and senior capstone projects are encouraged to attend. Please register to receive the Zoom link.

Do you have questions about student learning in your course or in a course series? Thinking about your assessment strategy but you are not sure where to begin? CTL Learning Assessment Micro-Grants provide a small amount of funding and assessment staff expertise to plan and conduct small learning assessment projects. Applications for Spring 2022 are due January 28, 2022.

Wednesday, February 2, 2021 from 11:00am-12:00pm MT - Join the Digital Accessibility Office (DAO) for a presentation on getting started with digital accessibility. This presentation will include content accessibility best practices that attendees can apply to their work. At the end of the presentation, attendees will be able to apply digital accessibility principles to create digital content that is more accessible to people with disabilities.

On Thursday, February 3, 2022 at 2pm MT, join us for a virtual conversation with Professor Andrew Piper from McGill University where he directs .txtlab, a laboratory for cultural analytics at McGill and is editor of the Journal of Cultural Analytics.

Andrew Piper is Professor and William Dawson Scholar in the Department of Languages, Literatures, and Cultures at McGill University. He is the director of .txtlab, a laboratory for cultural analytics, and editor of the Journal of Cultural Analytics, an open-access journal dedicated to the computational study of culture. He is the author of numerous books and articles on the relationship of technology and reading, including Book Was There: Reading in Electronic Times (Chicago 2012), Enumerations: Data and Literary Study (Chicago 2018), and Can We Be Wrong? The Problem of Textual Evidence in a Time of Data (Cambridge 2020).  

This event is co-sponsored by ASSETT and the Department of English. Register for this event!

The conference coordinators met this week and decided to postpone this event, originally scheduled for February 4-5, 2022. We’d like to respect our colleagues and friends whose lives were devastated by the unprecedented Marshall wildfire that impacted the Town of Superior and City of Louisville. We also want to do our part in mitigating the spread of the Omicron variant. 

As we work to reschedule the conference, we’d like your feedback to inform the process. Please fill out this quick poll and tell us your general availability to attend a rescheduled event. 

And, for those of you who already paid to register for the conference, please keep an eye out for an email from our partners at the Reacting Consortium regarding your conference fees.

Thank you and we look forward to seeing you at our event!