On August 4, 5 and 6, we began our new Teaching and Learning Center at Yale-NUS College, with a series of workshops for incoming faculty. My role is to be the inaugural Director of the Center, and we have a wonderful group that includes Nancy Gleason, Associate Director, and several others from Yale-NUS. Each of the three workshops was geared toward the faculty in the Divisions of Sciences, Social Sciences, and Humanities.

During the talks, we presented ideas for designing courses with Assessable Learning Objectives, explored the Bloom Taxonomy of Learning and the AACU Rubrics, and described ways to create an active classroom, and the technique known as Constructive Alignment, and modified Learning Taxonomies. After the first set of workshops, we hosted a talk by John Kelley on “The Emotions of First Year Teaching” and are planning a number of other workshops during the semester and afterwards.

Our new web site is available at http://teaching.yale-nus.edu.sg, and will include a wide array of resources for faculty, video-recordings of many of our events, and useful materials for designing and assessing courses.

The mission of the center is below:

Topics and Questions the Centre will address with faculty:

• How does one best design and assess interdisciplinary courses?
• How can active learning be incorporated into larger lectures?
• How can experiential and international work be better integrated into undergraduate classes?
• How can teams of instructors be trained to work well together?
• What is the best way to develop faculty for excellent teaching?
• How can one create an institutional culture of teaching excellence?
• How do we assess and communicate what we have learned within our common curriculum to future instructors and to the world outside of Yale-NUS College?
• How does teaching and learning differ within the Asian context from North America?
• How can we integrate technology into our classrooms to create truly global classrooms?
• How can we more effectively assess student learning outcomes and attitudes?
• How effective is liberal arts and interdisciplinary curriculum for advancing student learning?

Efforts of the Centre in the coming Academic Year 2015-16

In the coming year the Centre will begin a series of programs to encourage a lively, social and stimulating set of conversations about teaching at Yale-NUS College. These programs will be developed through collaborations with Yale-NUS faculty and the Teaching, Learning and Assessment (TLA) committee.

1. New Faculty workshop for incoming and other faculty in August of 2015
2. Regular consultations and biweekly meetings with junior faculty and others by appointment.
3. Regular events within the semester to discuss teaching techniques at Yale-NUS College; developed in consultation with the TLA committee.
4. Set of workshops for Teaching and Learning at Yale-NUS for December 2015 will include Leading Discussions, Active Learning, and Technology in the Classroom.
5. A visiting scholar of pedagogy will visit Yale-NUS for an extended period in early 2016, to develop connections across Yale-NUS and NUS.
6. New web site and Teaching and Learning to showcase the best scholarship in Teaching and Learning, with an eye toward materials that can quickly and efficiently help faculty implement research-validated pedagogy in their courses.
7. Development of new forms of assessment at Yale-NUS College, including formative and summative surveys that accurately capture student learning outcomes and attitudes toward subjects.
8. A Conference and Workshop at Yale University on undergraduate education in June 2016 will gather thought leaders in undergraduate education and teams of leaders from top institutions in North America and beyond.
9. A third Liberal Arts in India conference in 2016 will bring together teams of faculty from Singapore, North America and India to work collaboratively on new courses and plan for global classroom sessions.
10. Guides for best practices in Discussion Leading, Active Learning, Assessment, and Team Teaching will be assembled collaboratively with the Yale-NUS College faculty and the Teaching, Learning and Assessment Committee.
11. Plan will be developed for an Asian Teaching and Learning and Undergraduate innovation conference for March 2017, hosted by Yale-NUS College.
12. Global courses will be offered, starting with an Environmental Science course simultaneously taught at Yale and Yale-NUS College.

Below are some photos of John Kelley (University of Chicago), during his presentation on the “Emotions of First Year Teaching.”

On June 15-22, I was one of three leaders for a very interesting exploration of the Four Corners region (New Mexico, Colorado, Utah and Arizona), sponsored by the Crow Canyon Archaeological Center. Our itinerary included major archaeoastronomical sites in the region, ancient settlements from Chacoan peoples, and notable rock art panels. With the other scholars from the group, we climbed up ridges to examine 1200 year old settlements, interpreted alignments between archaeological sites and solstice sunrise and sunset points, and examined panels of very interesting rock art. We also had a chance to float in rafts down the San Juan River in Utah, where we were able to go on shore and see some amazing ancient sites in the Ute Reservation. As part of my work, I gave a talk on archaeoastronomy, and led a “star party” under the clear Utah Skies. We also got to watch the amazing sliver of light at Hovenweep Monument that slices through a sun figure – only on the Summer Solstice sunrise. It was an amazing sight!

Below is the itinerary for the trip!

Summer Solstice v. 7.2.14

Archaeoastronomy in the Four Corners

 Summer solstice in the Southwest! Join us for a week of exploration, discovery, and dialogue in places where the paths of light and shadow have long been observed by Pueblo Indians. In our study of archaeoastronomy—the astronomy of ancient peoples—visit centuries-old observatories, examine astronomical alignments and features, and look at rock art imagery. Learn how celestial cycles continue to influence significant events in the daily and ceremonial lives of Pueblo people. The highlight of the week: experiencing summer solstice among the masonry towers at Hovenweep National Monument.  Also on the itinerary: Chimney Rock National Monument, Ute Mountain Tribal Park, and a great house in southeast Utah. Summer solstice occurs on Sunday, June 19.

Tuesday, June 16 – Monday, June 22, 2015

Scholars: Dr. Bryan E. Penprase, Phillip TuwaletstiwaGuest Scholars: Virginia Wolf, Sally Cole, Jonathan Till

EDUCATIONAL OBJECTIVES

Discover the human experience of the sky across the centuries and across cultures

Learn about the significance of astronomical events in Pueblo culture

The use of astronomy and astronomical measurements in archaeology to understand the past

ITINERARY

Tuesday, June 16:Arrive Durango, Colorado by 4:00PM. Dinner and introduction to the week’s activities. Phillip and Bryan discuss the many ways that societies around the world understand and describe celestial events. Overnight Durango, Colorado. (D)

Wednesday, June 17: Chimney Rock National Monument

Built in the late A.D. 1000s the Chimney Rock great house is located at the base of two dramatic stone pinnacles on an exposed ridge high above the perennial streams and fertile lowlands. Discuss the great house’s location for viewing a remarkable celestial event: the culmination of a 19-year lunar cycle marked by the full moon rising between the twin buttes. Dinner on your own. Overnight Durango, Colorado. (B, L)

Thursday, June 18: Ute Mountain Tribal Ute Park

With archaeoastronomer Virginia Wolf, visit seldom-seen sites in the Ute Mountain Ute Tribal Park, a vast and remote area of canyons and mesas located southwest of Mesa Verde National Park. Virginia was the first to document many of the sun calendars within the park and shares her knowledge of how shadows interact with rock art during summer and winter solstices. Phillip shares the significance of oral traditions from a Hopi perspective that help us learn about the interconnectedness of people, landscape, and the cosmos. Dinner on your own. Overnight Bluff, Utah. (B, L)

Friday, June 19: Montezuma Canyon

In Montezuma Canyon explore the little known site of Coal Bed, a large multi-terraced village site dating to the A.D. 1100s. Unique to this site is a line of standing monoliths. Virginia points out the celestial architecture and shares her observations of the winter and summer solstice. Bryan links the past to the present and discusses how modern societies are infused with cosmological symbolism. Dinner on your own. Overnight Bluff, Utah. (B, L)

Saturday, June 20: Bluff

Beneath the towering landform of Twin Rocks, visit a Pueblo I Site with archaeologist Jonathan Till and discuss the equinox relationship with the nearby Bluff Great House. Embark on18-foot inflatable rafts and float down the San Juan River to visit the Dance Plaza Site where Virginia is currently studying significant solar alignments related to the Bluff Great House. Enjoy dinner and a discussion of what we have experienced so far. Witness sunset from the Bluff Great House where the equinox and summer/winter solstice alignments can be observed. Overnight Bluff, Utah. (B, L, D)

Sunday, June 21: Hovenweep National Monument

Accompanied by rock art specialist, Sally Cole, we wake well before dawn and observe summer solstice at Holly House in Hovenweep National Monument. As the sun rises we consider the measurement of time and the sophistication of ancient civilizations. With keen observation and astronomical record keeping, societies around the world connected human activities with the cycles of nature. Later, visit the Square Tower Complex and Cahone, both of which are believed to exhibit astronomical alignments in their architecture. Enjoy a farewell dinner in Cortez. Overnight Cortez, Colorado. (B, L, D)

Below are some amazing pictures from this trip! It was a real joy to meet the very interesting scholars and participants – many of whom were scholars in their own right!

A new feature of the Caltech ZTF project is the “Summer Undergraduate Astronomy Institute” which is designed to help students learn about the science and technology surrounding their summer research projects, and to learn more about ZTF – the Zwicky Transient Factory. ZTF promises to be the premier instrument for discovering supernovae, variable stars and new asteroids, and this Institute will give you a great overview of techniques in time-domain astrophysics, observational astronomy and instrument development.

The institute was conducted on four days – June 24-27. It began at Caltech with two days of talks, lab tours, and lectures (with a visit to Mt. Wilson), followed by two days at Pomona College with hands-on observing, and the use of the brand-new planetarium facility at Pomona College. Our group included seven undergraduates working on SURF projects at Caltech, and seven students working on SURP programs from Pomona College. Highlights from the program included an opening dinner at the Atheneum, with a talk by Caltech author Sean Carroll (author of the new book “The Particle at the End of the Universe: How the Hunt for the Higgs Boson Leads Us to the Edge of a New World”), a night of visual observing with the Mt. Wilson 60” telescope, tours of Caltech instrument labs, and hands-on observing and data analysis clinics at Pomona College, and a night of observations at the Pomona College Brackett Observatory. A few days later we took the entire group up to Palomar Observatory, where we enjoyed a tour of the site, and got a chance to watch the 200″ telescope in action. It was an amazing experience!

More information on the program, the participants, and resources and datasets are provided on the web site for the program at http://ztf.commons.yale-nus.edu.sg/.

Below are some pictures from the program – which began this year in 2015 and will continue for four more years. Please email me if you have questions or would like to participate as an institution, or join our Undergraduate Astronomy Institute!

On May 20-21, 2015, I attended a fascinating meeting entitled the “Global Dialog on Liberal Arts and Science Education” at the Harvard Center, Shanghai, China. The meeting included leaders from across Asia, and North American, as well as a very interesting cross section of European leaders. It was striking to compare their notions of 21st century education – a buzzword used in many different institutions, but having very different meanings in different cultural contexts. The educational discussion seemed to center on a set of “virtues” which in ancient Chinese tradition is known as the “Great Learning.”  The qualities needed for an educated person in 2015 are not completely different from those virtues identified in ancient China, and these qualities seem well developed within the form of education known as “Liberal Arts and Sciences.”  Making students competent to navigate between diverse cultures and disciplines, developing graduates who are creative and inventive to help solve the problems of their generation, and equipping them to be capable of managing the explosion of information and ambiguity from a surplus of information are all core missions of higher education today, and the leaders gathered offered perspectives from new liberal arts programs in China, Japan, India, and in Europe. The new concept of a University College of Liberal Arts and Science seems to be taking root within many countries in Europe, especially in the Netherlands and the UK. It was refreshing and interesting to hear perspectives from the University of Amsterdam, University College London and Warwick University, alongside the best universities within Asia. Our Yale-NUS College was represented by Pericles Lewis, President, who gave a great talk about the qualities of an educated person described by Confucious, which recognized that “the gentleman is not a vessel” and that such educated people need to be of “broad spirit” and “intellectually agile.” Pericles Lewis also discussed a “fusion of horizons” which incorporates a range of visions that are seen from a particular location. In all the educational institution should be designed to foster “conversation, character, and community,” according to Lewis.  My role was to learn all I could about the proliferation of interest and new models of higher education that incorporate interdisciplinary and liberal arts principles. I also presented a paper on the liberal arts in India, based on my three years working to build a community within the Liberal Arts and Sciences in India.  A link to my paper, entitled “New Liberal Arts and Science Institutions in India and Singapore – the role of STEM Education” is below – and I would appreciate any thoughts or comments!  The paper should be published in a forthcoming volume of papers presented at the Harvard Center conference.

global.liberal.arts.dialog.paper.by.penprase.APA

As part of our trip to Shanghai for the “Global Dialog on Liberal Arts” we visited NYU Shanghai and met with their leadership team, which included Jeffrey S. Lehman, former President of Cornell, and now Vice Chancellor of NYU Shanghai, David Fitch, their Dean of Arts and Sciences, Keith Ross, Dean of Engineering and Computer Science, and Jun Zhang, Co-Director of the Applied Math Laboratory at the Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences. The group met with me and Yale-NUS College President Pericles Lewis, and we discussed a number of aspects of the NYU Shanghai curriculum, and toured their campus, which is located in a single tall building close to the center of Shanghai. Jeffrey Lehman was especially interesting and had a number of great ideas for faculty development and I discussed with him the possibility of collaborating on some workshops for online education and active pedagogy that could leverage the connections between NYU and NYU Shanghai and Yale and Yale-NUS. The parallels between NYU Shanghai and Yale-NUS were also apparent as both institutions are providing a unique and new form of education to a student body that provides a different classroom dynamic than the US and that offers great opportunities for faculty and student to combine the best of Asian and Western cultures.

In late May, I had the privilege of visiting Duke Kunshan University, or DKU, with Pericles Lewis, the Yale-NUS College President. At our meeting we met with the DKU Chancellor, Lui Jingnan, and his Executive Vice Chancellor, Mary Brown Bullock, along with Patrick S. Moreton, Associate Dean for Graduate Programs, Luke Li, director of the Chancellor’s office and Keith Dear, who is working on studying health effects from global climate change. The DKU campus was remarkable (photos are below), with very advanced facilities for global classrooms – with video cameras that can track the speaker and provide real time interactive classrooms with partner institutions such as Duke, and any other institutions with high-speed internet. The campus has been used as a conference center and home to the DKY Global Learning Semester, which with its partner from Wuhan University, has been offering innovative courses for a mix of Chinese and American students. These courses are often offered by visiting Duke professors, such as my friend and fellow ACE fellow, Noah Pickus who described his experience teaching at DKU in his blog piece entitled a “Kushan Diary.” In the piece he describes a classroom dynamic reminiscent of Yale-NSU College in Singapore, where students are coming from very different backgrounds from the US, and both student and faculty are gaining deep insights from the sharing of their cultures.

We discussed some aspects of the curriculum that DKU hopes to offer when it begins its work as an undergraduate and graduate university in about 2018. The curriculum is being developed by a group at Duke University, and our team at Yale-NUS College met with them in North Carolina back in 2013, when both Yale-NUS and DKU were just drawings on blueprints. It is remarkable to see DKU come together, and our team at Yale-NUS looks forward to working with them as they design their curriculum. A very nice tour of the campus and delicious 8 course Chinese lunch concluded our visit. We wish DKU the best and look forward to hosting them as Yale-NUS formally opens it campus on October 11-12, 2015.

During late April, I had the opportunity to observe with the 2.3-meter telescope at the Vainu Bappu Observatory, in Tamil Nadu, India. This observatory was built in the 1960’s and for a long time had India’s largest telescope. My project involved using the telescope to detect absorption lines from interstellar clouds in front of stars, to map the locations of these clouds in our local galaxy. This “galactic cartography” project builds on some earlier work and extends the map of interstellar clouds beyond 300pc out to about 600 pc, or 1800 light years. The observing was slowed quite a bit by the weather – India was experiencing the monsoon a bit earlier than usual!  As a result my four nights reduced to just about 6-7 hours of observing; and some of those through clouds. This did not prevent me from having a wonderful experience walking through the region – which is home to many animals including monkees, elephants, very interesting birds, and a cast of exotic butterflies, bats, and beetles.  The walks also featured beautiful flowering plants – a long stand of Jacaranda trees forms an axis through the center of the observatory, and Frangipani trees, Bougainvillea, and other flowering trees made for a riot of color. Nearby the observatory are two small villages, which I walked to and was greeted by several in the town who were wondering why I was walking about in the remote part of Tamil Nadu in the middle of the day. There were also some fantastic people at the site – a crew of graduate students who were working on their masters degree from Indian Institute of Astrophysics in astronomical instrumentation, and professor Arun Mangalam was up on site, having a chance to write some very interesting papers with his students on the magnetic fields of our galaxy, and its halo. There is something special about being at the VBO, or any observatory. On this trip I had a chance to talk with the other astronomers over dhosas and idlis, and to think deeply about astrophysics!  I also managed to get a good chunk of a paper written during the four days too, so despite the unreliable weather, the visit was productive scientifically – and a wonderful experience!

Views of the grounds of the Vainu Bappu Observatory – showing the beautiful flowering trees and quiet countryside

Soeme of the VBO telescopes – which features a solar telescope (left), a 1-meter telescope (center) and the 2.3-meter telescope (right)

The 2.3-meter telescope in Panorama mode – this was the telescope I was using, with its amazing echelle spectrograph

The surroundings featured a village with a nice temple, some friendly goats, and a large number of monkees – who were everywhere!

    g

During my trip to India, I had a wonderful opportunity to meet with some of the staff at the Indian Institute for Human Settlements, Bangalore to learn more about their innovative approaches to studying the rapid expansion of India’s urban areas. The IIHS runs a Master’s program in Urban Practice (http://iihs.co.in/teaching-and-learning/mup/) , and conducts research that combines demographic data, GIS, and satellite imaging to give a snapshot of India’s urban areas and other settlements, and the future of those cities and villages. This sort of interdisciplinary work is very important for enabling comprehension of the complex interfaces between politics, economic development and the environment – especially as India grapples with the compounding effects of global climate change that will have huge impacts on the Indian water supplies and agriculture. They are hoping to expand to a new campus and offer undergraduate programs as well, using teams of undergraduates to help study the challenges facing India in case studies, field work and original research, as they learn techniques to help India plan for its future decades.

In my meetings I discussed with Neha Sami, some of the ways in which IIHS is able to visualize data with overlays of GIS and demographic research. She presented some very interesting figures that documented some of the movements within India of labor and some of the breakdown within India by gender in literacy, workforce participation and other variables. These visualization come from the IIHS “Urban Informatics Lab” and very powerfully document shifts of millions of Indians from rural to urban areas, and inequities within India that prevent women from achieving full participation in the workforce and in literacy.

In the evening I also had a great chance to give a public talk at IIHS about my book “The Power of Stars – How Celestial Observations have Shaped Civilization.” The talk drew a good crowd of about 25 people from Bangalore and we had a fun discussion about all aspects of astronomy, alignments within both ancient and modern cities, and constellation lore and the large-scale structure of the universe. You can see the entire talk on YouTube at this link:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pQ5SyxYnfEI

A few weeks ago, we took our daughter Asha to see the Leonardo da Vinci exhibit in Singapore. A few things were remarkable about the exhibit. From the beginning it emphasized the interconnections between the different aspects of Leonardo’s work, and with nature, politics, and the entire cultural milieu of his time. The theme of “everything connects” opens the exhibit, and emphasizes that Leonardo viewed the natural world as “living, dynamic, and profoundly interconnected” which is an approach that inspired his work.

The other realization that came from viewing the exhibit was in the end of the sentence – Leonardo “relentlessly pursued” these interconnections. Within the exhibit are displays of pages from his notebooks, and models of some of his inventions. The notebooks reveal the “relentless” effort of Leonardo’s mind – which often one imagines brought insight and discovery effortlessly. Instead Leonardo filled page after page with sketches of birds in flight, as he tried to see how to design a flying machine, literally hundreds of different figures with inscribed polygons within circles within triangles as he sought geometric principles that he would later apply to his (failed) bid to design the Milan cathedral, and within these analytical pursuits of underlying fundamental principles emerges great beauty. The pages explode with beauty in the form of sketches that reveal a mind at work – both breaking down and analyzing the object at hand, while creating a unique synthesis that reveals how these principles connect to large systems being considered – flying machines, military forts, cathedrals.

This simultaneous display of analysis and synthesis itself is a source of wonder, and brings great beauty to his notebooks and a sensibility that is rare to see in any age. The exhibit was great to remind us about how important it is to preserve inspiration, and to look for those interconnections – something that our universities might call “interdisciplinary work.”  The exhibit wonderfully emphasizes that this form of “systemic thinking” is of vital importance as we seek solutions to the complex problems facing our world. Thankfully our new Yale-NUS College is taking this approach in our science curriculum – and our Foundations of Science class next year will have students work in interdisciplinary teams to solve “grand challenge problems” facing our environment using the kind of interconnected and systemic thinking pioneered by Leonardo.  It is exciting to be reminded of both the beauty and urgency of this kind of thought.