Rethinking the Capstone Seminar: HAA 1010, Constellations and "Collaborative Teaching"
Gretchen Bender, Assistant Chair and Director of Undergraduate Program, History of Art and Architecture, University of Pittsburgh
Making Space: Identity, Agency and Representing Representation" is a new HAA 1010 section that Gretchen Bender is teaching for the first time this fall. HAA 1010 is the capstone writing and research seminar that is required of all undergraduate art history majors. Efforts to rethink this seminar were guided by several factors: the desire to consider how the department's new research constellations might be extended to the undergraduate curriculum, to strengthen the role of collaborative learning and teaching in the course, and to improve strategies for the teaching of effective writing in the discipline. Prof. Bender will discuss how the course and its evaluative methods were re-conceptualized with these goals in mind, particularly the design of the "collaborative teaching" component of the course which employs undergraduate majors as teaching assistant mentors.