NFCDS Pedagogy Fellowship


About // Important Dates // Apply // Meet the Fellows // Questions


About

The Navari Family Center for Digital Scholarship Pedagogy Fellowship is an opportunity for Notre Dame PhD students to build their teaching expertise, gain instructional experience, and engage in a community of practice. In addition to devising and delivering digital scholarship learning opportunities (including, but not limited to, geographic information systems, data analysis/visualization, natural language processing, and discipline-specific computational tools), fellows will gain experience in evidence-based and innovative instructional methods, collaborative teamwork, and communicating their research and scholarly interests outside of their discipline.

Check out our brochure that highlights the activities and accomplishments of the 2021-2022 cohort.

Eligibility Criteria

  • Any Notre Dame College of Arts & Letters, College of Science, or College of Engineering PhD student is eligible to apply. If you are not affiliated with these colleges but are interested in exploring whether you may be able to participate in this fellowship, please email nfcds-pedagogy-fellowship-list@nd.edu with more information about your interest and circumstances.
  • Applicants should have some familiarity with any computational, data science, digital scholarship, or other technology-enabled approaches they are interested in teaching.
  • Note: Applicants who are offered a fellowship must provide confirmation that advisor support for participation has been secured prior to the program start date.

Selection Criteria

  • Provides compelling action items to address existing barriers and amplify marginalized voices in the classroom and digital teaching and learning spaces
  • Feasibility of proposed teaching agenda
  • The candidate demonstrates how the program aligns with their vision, including but not limited to:
    • What they are interested in learning
    • What skills they hope to develop
    • What they they hope to take away

Program Goals and Activities

Goals

  • Goal 1 — Learn: Understand, apply, analyze, and reflect on evidence-based practices and principles related to the teaching and learning of computational, technological, (digital) methodological skills.
  • Goal 2 — Teach: Engage in teaching observation activities as both a teacher and an observer.
  • Goal 3 — Collaborate: Serve as a member of the fellowship community of practice and the NFCDS team.

Activities

Fall
  • Orientation.
  • Book discussion group participation.
  • Meet with cohort weekly for discussions on pedagogy and professional development, training in workshop delivery and inclusive pedagogy, virtual or in-person consultations with invited speakers, and other activities.
  • Dedicate time to mastering appropriate digital skills through project-based learning.
  • Develop a new curriculum module for the NFCDS workshop series.
  • Deliver a test-run of their workshop series for fellows, mentors, and the ND community.
  • Implement a class assessment for fellows to provide feedback and troubleshoot.
  • Meet with mentors to discuss pedagogy, professionalization, and career discernment, including academic job-market specific documents (teaching philosophy).
Spring
  • Continue to meet with cohort weekly for discussions, training, interaction with invited speakers, and other opportunities.
  • Lead book discussions.
  • Deliver and attend fellow-to-fellow train-the-trainer skill sharing workshops.
  • Implement a class assessment for students to provide feedback to instructors.
  • Revise the workshop series into an element of a larger hypothetical course/syllabus.
  • Identify and pursue appropriate professional venues to showcase the workshop, the design process, and/or lessons learned from iteration (e.g. open-access syllabus on GitHub Pages, public humanities or digital pedagogy peer-reviewed journal).
  • Meet with mentors to discuss pedagogy, professionalization, and career discernment, including academic job-market specific documents (teaching philosophy).
  • Record "teaching observation" and screencasts of an introductory module of their workshop with help from the ND Office of Digital Learning.
  • Exit interview.

Compensation

NFCDS Pedagogy Fellows will receive a stipend of $5,000 for approximately 5 hours per week of work over the course of an academic year.

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Important Dates

Application opens

Approximately end of March

Application deadline

Approximately end of April

30-minute interviews (scheduled via email with finalists)

Approximately end of April

Fellowship offers sent via email

Approximately end of May

Deadline for email response to fellowship offers

Approximately mid-June

Orientation

Approximately first week of fall term

Weekly meetings begin

Approximately second week of fall term


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Apply

The NFCDS Pedagogy Fellowship will not be accepting new applications for the 2023-2024 academic year as we take the 2023-2024 academic year to evaluate the program. We appreciate your interest, and invite you to please check back at this web page for updates in the spring 2024 semester!

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Meet the Fellows

Cohort 3, (Senior Fellow Cohort), Fall 2023 - Spring 2024

Stephen Bothwell (Senior Fellow)

Stephen is a fourth-year graduate student in the Computer Science and Engineering program. Advised by David Chiang, he applies and extends natural language processing techniques in the context of low-resource languages—especially ancient ones. One branch of his research seeks to computationally capture rhetorical features (e.g., parallel structure) for the sake of stylistic analysis. Another strives to characterize diachronic sound change more precisely by improving methods for interpreting neural networks.

Jacob Swisher (2nd Year Senior Fellow)

Jacob is a fourth-year graduate student in the Department of History. His research focuses on the entangled histories of people, animals, and commodities in New Mexico’s Rio Grande Basin. Jacob also has broad interests in environmental history, the history of the North American West, and the digital humanities.

Cohort 2, Fall 2022 - Spring 2023

Stephen Bothwell

Stephen is a third-year graduate student in the Computer Science and Engineering program. Advised by David Chiang, he applies and extends natural language processing techniques in the context of low-resource languages—especially ancient ones. One branch of his research seeks to computationally capture rhetorical features (e.g., parallel structure) for the sake of stylistic analysis. Another strives to characterize diachronic sound change more precisely by improving methods for interpreting neural networks. In the 2022-2023 academic year, he aims to create workshops which will introduce neural networks to those without a background in computer science. Mainly, he hopes to give those interested in interdisciplinary work a space to explore neural networks in more detail, highlighting both the strengths and the limitations of said networks.

Elizabeth Brooks (senior fellow)

Elizabeth is a fifth-year graduate student in the Department of Biology. Her research is focused on using genomics techniques to investigate the impact of environmental change on phenotypically divergent natural populations. It is her goal to deliver a workshop that leverages the experience that many researchers have in R programming to reinforce best practices in data analysis. This will lead to learning command line basics, and how the command line can be used with R and BASH scripting to develop custom data analysis pipelines.

Sally Hansen

Sally Hansen is a third-year graduate student in the English Department, and her research examines the rhythmic transmission of memory and desire in 20th century American poetry. She’s excited to develop a workshop that explores pedagogical applications of digital sound studies. The workshop will provide theoretical avenues and practical support for instructors who seek to incorporate audio projects into their syllabi and research.

Shuyue Li

Shuyue is a fifth-year graduate student in the Department of Biology. She studies the dynamics of terrestrial ecosystems under climate change and human influence, with a focus on the factors constraining carbon cycling. As a NFCDS fellow Shuyue aims to develop a workshop that introduces open-source platforms to do spatial-related analysis and visualization. This will include the introduction to various R-based tools, such as leaflet and Rshiny. Her goal for the workshop is to assist participants from various backgrounds in conducting spatial-based quantitative analysis or visualizing their research outcomes over a space.

Jacob Swisher (senior fellow)

Jacob is a third-year graduate student in the Department of History. His research focuses on the entangled histories of people, animals, and commodities in New Mexico’s Rio Grande Basin. Jacob also has broad interests in environmental history, the history of the North American West, and the digital humanities. During the 2022-2023 academic year, Jacob is excited about continuing to develop workshops for graduate and undergraduate students who are interested in learning to use Geographic Information Systems (GIS) to conduct scholarly research and communicate with a variety of audiences.

Cohort 1, Fall 2021 — Spring 2022

Check out our brochure that highlights the activities and accomplishments of the 2021-2022 cohort.

Elizabeth Brooks

Elizabeth is a fourth-year graduate student in the Department of Biology. Her research is focused on using genomics techniques to investigate the impact of environmental change on phenotypically divergent natural populations. It is her goal to deliver a workshop that leverages the experience that many researchers have in R programming to reinforce best practices in data analysis. This will lead to learning command line basics, and how the command line can be used with R and BASH scripting to develop custom data analysis pipelines.

Kenya Lee

Kenya is a third-year graduate student in the Sociology program. Her research focuses on school discipline, institutions, and the school-to-prison nexus. As a NFCDS fellow, Kenya aims to develop a workshop that encourages local high school students to think critically about data and how it shapes the world, through activities that focus on how students can start their own critical data analysis and visualization work. Her goal for the workshop series is for every participant to see themselves as a social scientist and critical consumer of data.

Jacob Swisher

Jacob is a second-year graduate student in the Department of History. His research focuses on the entangled histories of people, animals, and commodities in the early modern Rio Grande Basin. Jacob also has broad interests in environmental history, the history of the North American West, and the digital humanities. During the 2021-2022 academic year, Jacob is excited about developing a workshop for humanities students who are interested in learning to use Geographic Information Systems (GIS) to conduct scholarly research and communicate with a variety of audiences.

Craig Waitt

Craig is a fifth-year graduate student in the Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry. He is currently working with William Schneider in the Chemical Engineering department, where they have been developing computational models to understand molecular structure and catalytic reactivity at the atomic level. His goal as a NFCDS fellow is to design and implement a workshop or workshop series that introduces students to the basics of LaTeX: How do you create a document? How can you change the document format? How do you compile (or export) your document? This workshop will provide introductory guidance that will help students create publications, resumes, and letters in LaTeX.

Yuyi (Wynona) Wan

Wynona is a second-year graduate student in the Department of Physics, specializing in experimental particle physics. Her research work with professor Kevin Lannon and Randal Ruchti focuses on the CMS experiment at CERN and scintillating material studies for the hadron calorimeter. While academic life is not merely a unitary practice of course materials, Wan is also interested in enhancing her abilities as a speaker and instructor. The NFCDS fellowship provides a great opportunity to inspect, explore and learn. Through developing and delivering workshops, fellows are able to improve their instructing, lecturing, and communicating skills that are crucial to all career circumstances. Wan aims to design workshops that bring physics-related digital knowledge such as circuits, electromagnetic waves, optics, etc., to the Notre Dame non-physics community. It’s important to her that the subject she is passionate about can also bring excitement and change to her students’ view of the world.

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Questions

Email the NFCDS Pedagogy Fellowship Team at nfcds-pedagogy-fellowship-list@nd.edu.

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