Teaching Spotlights are Q&A style profiles of UChicago faculty and instructors discussing thoughtful and innovative teaching methods. If you would like to suggest a faculty member or instructor for inclusion in the series, please contact Amanda M. Jungels (amanda.jungels@uchicago.edu).
Teaching Spotlights
Megan McNulty is a Senior Instructional Professor in the Biological Sciences Collegiate Division, and teaches general education biology courses for nonmajors as well as courses for neuroscience majors. She, along with Oscar Pineda-Catalan, co-led an effort to augment the Core Biology curriculum by including hands-on approaches to scientific research and habits of mind through student-designed research projects, which is now included in the Core curriculum for biology.
Oscar Pineda-Catalan is an Associate Senior Instructional Professor in the Biological Sciences Collegiate Division. Pineda-Catalan is a conservation biologist who has developed research and education programs to motivate and engage youth to pursue careers in science.
We spoke with them about leveraging Inquiry-Based Learning in their biology course.
Read Megan McNulty and Oscar Pineda-Catalan's Teaching Spotlight
Jon Satrom is an Assistant Senior Instructional Professor and Associate Director of the Program in Media Arts and Design. Over the past few years, Satrom has worked with his colleagues in Cinema and Media Studies to develop the practice-based Media Arts and Design major and minor. He regularly teaches Core and Capstone courses and irregularly develops special topics courses within the areas of video games, realtime audio/video performance, creative computing, electronic sound, and glitch art. As a teaching artist, Satrom works to craft studio classroom experiences that foster experimentation, criticality, and "creative problem creating.”
We sat down with him to talk about pedagogical approaches to AI's role in art creation, understanding its potential and limitations in meeting artistic expectations.
Tamara Golan (Assistant Professor of Art, Art History) studies and teaches medieval and early modern art from northern Europe. She specializes in the visual and material culture of Switzerland and southern Germany, and her interests range from the intersections of art, science, and the law; paradigms of expertise; artistic fraud and deception; and questions of materiality.
Noel Blanco Mourelle (Assistant Professor of Medieval Iberian Studies, Romance Languages and Literature) is a specialist in medieval Iberian languages and cultures. His teaching and research engages with themes of religious conversion, theories of universalism, political theology and history of the book. He teaches courses in both English and Spanish.
Tamara and Noel co-teach a course called “Witchcraft and the Cultural Imagination” in which students create digital exhibitions using Omeka. We talked with them about this innovative assignment and their approach to co-teaching.
Read Tamara Golan and Noel Blanco Mourelle's Teaching Spotlight
Russell P. Johnson is Assistant Director of the Undergraduate Religious Studies Program and Core Sequence in the University of Chicago Divinity School and a CCTL Associate Pedagogy Fellow. His teaching includes courses on nonviolent direct action, argumentation and epistemology, and religion and film, and contributed an essay, “First Impressions: Expectations and Tone in Syllabus Construction” to the CCTL column Teaching Matters, and “On ChatGPT: A Letter to My Students” to the Divinity School digital magazine Sightings.
We sat down with Russell to talk about humanizing the classroom in response to AI.
Hoyt Long is a Professor of Japanese Literature and East Asian Languages and Civilizations, and is Chair of the Department of East Asian Languages and Civilizations. His teaching and research focus on modern Japan, with specific interests in the history of media and communication, cultural analytics, platform studies, the sociology of literature, book history, and environmental history.
We talked with Hoyt about using AI as historical personae in his courses.