22 March 2021
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Student Matters
Registration for summer 2021 is now open for CCT courses. Note that the UMass Boston campus will continue to operate remotely during the summer. Contact cct@umb.edu for more information. See here to register and view more information (search for code CRCRTH to find Critical and Creative Thinking offerings), or contact cct@umb.edu for more details.
- CrCrTh 612, Seminar in Creativity; June 1-July 15; synchronous online, weekly meetings TBD (#2040)
- CrCrTh 619 Biomedical Ethics; July 19-August 26; asynchronous online (#2041)
- CrCrTh 627 Issues and Controversies in Antiracist and Multicultural Education; July 19-August 26; synchronous online, weekly meetings TBD (#2042)
CCT Events
All are welcome to join in the following Spring 2021 CCT Community Hour events (online). Please see the full descriptions for more information. Register for events individually using the links below to receive Zoom login information.
Alum panel: Critical and Creative Thinking About Our Persistent Challenges
Tuesday, March 30, 7:00-8:00pm EDT
Online in Zoom. RSVP here for login details.
Hear from a panel of graduates of the CCT program, who will share about their ongoing work. Panelists will comment on the persistent challenges that keep coming up in their work — the ones that keep reappearing or never seems to quite go away. Come and learn from our alums how they continue to extend critical and creative thinking beyond the program of study as we consider the diverse ways that this can happen across different fields of work.
Dialogue Hour: Reflective Practice in a Changing World
Theme: Downsizing, Decluttering, Minimizing, Simplifying
Friday, April 9, 12:00-1:00pm EDT
Online in Zoom. RSVP here for login details.
In this participatory, structured dialogue process, we explore and reflect together about the complexity in our workplaces and lives, and where we find opportunities and challenges in how we face complexity. Plenty of self-help guides are available to help us to simplify and streamline our physical materials and spaces, schedules, to-do lists, media consumption, professional practices, and community and family life, but how did these areas of our lives become unmanageable in the first place? When does it benefit us to embrace complexity in these areas along with the critical and creative thinking that comes from doing so? What cultural messages and personal influences shape the way that we think about accumulation and reduction?
Taking Yourself Seriously Across the CCT Community
Sunday, April 18, 2:00-3:00pm EDT
Online in Zoom. RSVP here for login details.
All in the CCT community are invited to join this participatory discussion about the ways that we “take ourselves seriously”. During the hour, each participant will have about 5 minutes to introduce themselves and describe one example of some area in professional or personal life where that has happened for you. Taking yourself seriously, in this case, refers to doing something that you couldn’t have imagined doing at some previous point in life. This could be a work-related project or achievement, involvement in community activity, or pursuit of some issue important to your lifelong learning, for example. Samples of work, images, or writings are welcome if appropriate (to be shared through Zoom). Please see this page for additional background on Taking Yourself Seriously.
Alum, Student, and CCT Associates Notables
CCT students, alums and associates are encouraged to send items about accomplishments, new publications, or offerings to the Critical and Creative Thinking community to be included in future newsletters. Please submit items here.
Events
Brown Bag Talk: Anti-Oppressive Gender Re-Socialization: Connecting Past, Present & Future
Date: March 23, 2021, Time: 3:00–4:00pm EDT, in Zoom
Co-sponsored by the Departments of Curriculum and Instruction and Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at the University of Massachusetts, Boston
Speakers: Dr. Christopher Martell (Department of Curriculum & Instruction), Dr. Cassandra Alexopoulos (Communication Department) and Dr. Kerrie-Wilkins Yel (Department of Counseling & School Psychology).
This Brown Bag is part of a series on gender re-socialization and co-sponsored by the Departments of Curriculum and Instruction and Women’s Gender, and Sexuality Studies at the University of Massachusetts, Boston. The series is grounded in an intersectional perspective on identity development. The series explores personal, social, and structural factors of gender development starting with a person-centered focus in early childhood and embedded in cultural and contextual ecologies throughout the lifespan.
For more information, please see the full flyer for Zoom login information.
Opportunities and Resources
Opportunity for CCT students to present your work:
College of Education and Human Development
Student Success Showcase, May 6th, 6:00-8:00pm online.
Deadline for proposal: April 5th, 2021
Two years ago, CEHD launched our Student Success Showcase, which was an opportunity for our students to showcase their “work” or “work-in-progress” through posters. It was quite a success, and while we chose to skip last Spring’s poster session given the workload facing everybody in the transition to remote teaching and learning, we now plan to build on our previous success. This Spring, we will virtually hold our Showcase on May 6th from 6-8 pm.
The goal of the poster session is to present students’ current scholarly engagement and provide an opportunity for informal discussion of the work with students, faculty, staff, and administrators. Students can choose to present on any type of work that is meaningful to them, including student assignments. Please submit applications by April 5, 2021 to Bernice (Bernice.fair@umb.edu).
Bridgewater State University: First Annual Graduate Research Virtual Conference: May 19th-21st
Theme: Transcending Justice in Research and Action
This is a virtual conference to highlight graduate research and action during a time of a global pandemic and social unrest. We welcome presentations of graduate level research, action, policy initiatives, and art that relate to a theme of justice during a time when many students are disconnected from their peers and other faculty. We believe the theme and formats are open to a wide range of disciplines and topics to provide an opportunity to share their work and generate conversations between graduate students across the United States and beyond
Submission Deadline: April 1st, 2021
Registration cost is $15 for all non-Bridgewater State University affiliations, due at registration.
Submit your 250-word abstract here: https://forms.gle/M3HzX3nLyhMrBwFV9
Presentations can be in one of the following formats: Poster, Poster with voice narration, PowerPoint presentation, PowerPoint with voice narration, Short video, Oral presentation delivered during a live thematic session
Food for Thought
Video:
Articles:
- “My Creativity Kept Me Going”: Six Photographers Share Images From Their COVID Year (Vanity Fair)
- RTL Today – Tom Weber: Masks, self-care, critical thinking: What we can learn from the pandemic (RTL Today)
- 7 ways to avoid becoming a misinformation superspreader (Buffalo News)
- NC Lt. Governor is wrong about ‘indoctrination’ in schools (Raleigh News & Observer)
- How a Simple Nature Journal Practice Can Nurture Student Engagement in Any Subject (Better Lesson Blog)
- Blog for social justice and community engagement (Adobe Education Exchange)
- Private Schools Are Indefensible (The Atlantic)
- The Key to Creativity? Movement (Nasdaq)
- Learn critical thinking, with Bill Nye, Derren Brown, & more (Big Think)
- From the archive – Why thinking too much can be bad for you (The Economist)
- The Uncomfortable – a collection of deliberately inconvenient objects (The Uncomfortable)
- A smarter way of thinking about intelligence (The Boston Globe)
- A Comics Collection Of The ‘Absurdities & Realities of Special Education’ (Vermont Public Radio)
- 18 Inclusive Anthologies That Highlight Underrepresented Voices (Electric Literature)
- Want Students to Be More Creative? Try Adding More Play (John Spencer)
- Who needs a teacher? Artificial intelligence designs lesson plans for itself (Science Magazine)
- The gift of being unsure of what to do – The Boston Globe (The Boston Globe)
- The Creativity Post | How the “Cafeteria of Experience” Impacts Our Development (The Creativity Post)
- Creative Imagination: Inside and Outside the Head (Psychology Today)
- The new era of innovation – Why a dawn of technological optimism is breaking (The Economist)
- Creative economy to have its year in the sun in 2021 (UNCTAD)
Humor
- Ways Non-Woke People from History Tried to Be Woke (The New Yorker)
