2022 FAS Faculty Academy Mini-Courses

Creativity is foundational to our work in the classroom, laboratory, office, and studio. As the bedrock of every discipline, creativity is the air we breathe and that which animates our whole being, mind and body.  However, like our bodies, our creative thinking responds to large and small traumas and is vulnerable to tension, anxiety, stiffness, and exhaustion; we get stuck – but we can also get unstuck. This course is a laboratory to study the art and science of creativity as a means of exploring how teachers, researchers, and artists can develop habits that get them “unstuck” and in the flow of generative, inventive thinking. Based at Yale’s Center for Creative Arts and Media (CCAM) and located at the confluence of psychology, neuroscience, and artistic practice, this mini-course puts into action the latest science on creative thinking.

Participants will be asked to read a few short articles between sessions to add to classroom discussions and exercises, and to conduct (and report back on) a brief interview with a family member, friend, or professional colleague on the topic of creative habits.

In sixteenth-century Italy, architects conceived buildings of newfound scale and artistic ambition—buildings that vied in grandeur with the monuments of classical antiquity. Before realizing such structures, however, architects first had to draw them. What graphic mediums and techniques allowed them to visualize such large, complex works? What imaginative processes fueled their creativity? What innovations did they borrow from other fields of art and inquiry, such as painting, sculpture, archaeology, and the geometrical sciences?

We will explore such questions in this course: an experiential, multimedia history of Renaissance draftsmanship. Led by an art historian and former architect, the course combines daily lectures with collections visits and hands-on practice. Lectures will survey important developments in early modern spatial representation. Visits to Yale’s Beinecke Library and Center for British Art will allow for close-up study of original drawings and prints by the period’s most influential designers, including Francesco di Giorgio and Andrea Palladio. Drawing workshops will give participants the chance to handle media like those used to design major structures such as New Saint Peter’s Basilica in Rome. No prior drawing or art experience is required to participate in this course.

This course will introduce participants to the fundamentals of adult second language acquisition (SLA). The course will begin with a comparison of child first language acquisition (FLA) and adult second language acquisition. We will explore how FLA and SLA are similar and different, and we will discuss and challenge the “critical period hypothesis” (Lenneberg, 1967), which claims that native-like proficiency in a second language can only be achieved within a critical period between early infancy and puberty. We will learn about prominent theories of SLA, including the input hypothesis (Krashen, 1977), the output hypothesis (Swain, 1985), the interaction hypothesis (Long, 1996), and sociocultural theory (Lantolf, 2000), and we will explore how these theories have shaped the teaching of second languages in classroom contexts. To that end, the course will provide participants with a historical overview of prominent second language teaching approaches since WW II, such as the Direct Method, the Grammar-Translation Method, the Audio-Lingual Method, Communicative Language Teaching, and current post-communicative approaches. To conclude, we will revisit popular ideas about language learning and explore effective strategies for second language learning in adulthood, including vocabulary and grammar learning methods as well as strategies for developing listening and speaking proficiency in a second language.

Participants will not be expected to complete work outside of class. Optional readings will be provided.

Natural Language Processing (NLP) is one of the most amazing accomplishments of Computer Science. Technologies such as search engines, dialogue assistants, and machine translation have become pervasive. This course will cover the fundamental ideas, algorithms, and applications of NLP, including state of the art neural network models.

This mini-course focuses on reading skills in Modern Hebrew and will operate as a hands-on workshop for reading strategies and translation process. The course does not require any knowledge of conversational Hebrew, as it will be conducted in English. Previous reading skills in either Modern Hebrew or Biblical Hebrew are required.

In this small-group seminar participants will gain a broad array of training in reading and translation strategies, linguistic reference resources and advanced Hebrew structures, as well as basic exposure to usage of Aramaic embedded in Modern Hebrew. Participants will have the opportunity to work on their reading strategies both in a group setting and individually, as I will provide detailed individual feedback on the comprehension and translation process.

Each day we will emphasize specific grammatical structures and syntactical elements, including: 1- the use of loan words in Hebrew, 2- roots and verb types, 3- conjugations, affixes, and linking words, 4- abbreviations, Gematria and idioms.

Digital literacy in Hebrew is enhanced by introducing the participants to the following online Hebrew tools and practicing their usage:  (1) Online Rav Milim dictionary, (2) Jewish Studies Journals: a Hebrew online scholarly search, (3) Analytical tools for searching the Hebrew Bible (4) Online Hebrew abbreviation dictionary, (5) Aramaic-Hebrew dictionary, (6) Hebrew Gematria convertor.

This mini-course is based on years of teaching my Yale course “From Biblical to Modern Hebrew for Reading Knowledge” for graduate students. While the full-term course focuses on reading contemporary scholarship in Modern Hebrew, in this mini-course participants could explore segments from a variety of texts, both research-based as well as popular or literary texts (for example: newspapers, short stories, plays), tailored to participants’ individual areas of interest. If you already have a text you would like to work on, please bring it to class.

The first two hours of each class will be used for instruction, hands-on exploration of tools and group work. The last half an hour will be devoted to an individual work in class with the instructor’s assistance and feedback. Out of class work is optional and individual.

Spanish Language and Culture through Art is an interdisciplinary course that will explore several important works of art from the Yale University Art Gallery through the frame of three main Spanish language objectives: description, narration and arguing.
Each class, participants will review language skills that will be immediately applied through the analysis of and reflection on works of art. The selection of works will include objects from the YUAG’s collection of Ancient American, European and Contemporary art. The course will introduce brief readings about major art themes, movements, styles and visual artists from Latin America as well as basic steps for curatorial work.  

Classes will be based on active participation, preparation and a group project to curate a digital mini exhibition. At the end of the course, students will reflect on their own progress and outcomes and the instructor will provide a constructive feedback report.

The course will be conducted in Spanish and requires Spanish proficiency at the intermediate level (L3) or above.

Participants are highly encouraged to meet in-person, but a hybrid format could be available.

At the end of the course students will be able to

• describe, narrate, and provide arguments and opinions in Spanish
• understand major art themes from the YUAG Latin American art collection
• utilize basic art curatorial skills