Giulia Ricco and Silvia Serrano, PhD candidates, join Learning Innovation as Bass Fellows this fall, gaining valuable experience with an apprenticeship in digital learning. This fellowship program is offered in partnership with the Graduate School and offers Duke faculty the opportunity to experiment in innovative approaches to teaching and learning by partnering and collaborating with trained graduate fellow apprentices.
Meet Giulia Ricco
Giulia Ricco is a PhD candidate in the Department of Romance Studies (Portuguese and Italian) and the recipient of the International Comparative Studies (ICS) Program in Global Teaching Fellowship. Ricco will work with Dr. Robin Kirk, co-director of the Human Rights Center at the Franklin Humanities Institute to create an undergraduate online course site for the Sowers and Reapers: Gardening in an Era of Change Bass Connections Project (Energy & the Environment). Under the direction of Dr. Kirk, Ricco will work with a team of 10-15 undergraduate students to document the relationship between gardening, human rights, and displacement in Durham, NC using digital pedagogies (GIS mapping, visualization, interactive video, and co-creating digital archives content).
My intention is to create an online platform that becomes a space for the students to share their findings and ideas as if we were meeting for a weekly discussion section. I will then be able to apply this model to my own teaching in the future.
I decided to pursue this fellowship because I wanted to gain firsthand knowledge how to implement online and digital tools in the classroom setting. Since I have worked at Duke as a language instructor and as a teaching fellow for the International Comparative Studies Program, I am already familiar with Sakai. However, I have not had the time to actually study and experiment with all the various online platforms I have encountered. The fellowship gives me the opportunity to figure out the best online platforms for a seminar setting and which digital tools, especially in the realm of social media, produce the best results when paired with specific learning objectives.
Meet Silvia Serrano
Silvia Serrano, a PhD candidate in Latin American Studies, has been an instructor of record of the Spanish Language Program for four years and a teaching assistant with the Cultures and Languages across the Curriculum program at Duke.
The Bass fellowship will give me the opportunity to acquire skills and experience in designing and teaching in online environments. I am especially interested in exploring hybrid and flipped courses and in learning to integrate technologies such as Twitter, WordPress, Sakai, and PebblePad in the classroom.
I’m impressed by the great resources that Duke offers in terms of emerging technologies in teaching and learning such as the Multimedia Project Studio, The Edge and Duke Learning Innovation, offering the support faculty need to develop new approaches to learning.
Learning Innovation is pleased to welcome these new Bass Fellows and to facilitate their engaging work in innovative teaching with Duke faculty. To learn more about the Fellows’ projects, reach out to Sophia Stone.