Fall 2024 TIP Workshops

Exchange, Conflict and Coexistence: A Long History of the Middle East
Harun Küçük, History and Sociology of Science, Penn; Joshua Teplitsky, History, Penn

In this course, two scholars of the early modern era come together to co-teach a workshop on the long history of the Middle East in the wider world. The birthplace of the world’s three great monotheistic religions and a site of contemporary contest, the Middle East is more than simply conflict: it is a place of rich exchanges, of conquests and coexistence, and of intense creativity. The workshops will proceed historically, from ancient foundations preceding the emergence of the monotheistic religions until the beginnings of the modern era, where nationalisms shaped the Middle East anew, bequeathing to us the world we know today.

Meets 4 times at Penn: Wednesday Sept. 11; Wednesday Sept. 18; Wednesday Sept. 25; Wednesday Oct 9

Cancer and our Community
Yehoda Martei & Abramson Cancer Staff
Penn Medicine

Cancer describes a large spectrum of diseases that originate from uncontrolled cellular growth. This workshop will provide teacher fellows with an overview of cancer biology and clinical treatment, with a focus on career pathways in cancer research and oncology care. Faculty experts will guide teacher fellows to take a close look at cancer-related health care disparities specific to the Philadelphia community and how community outreach efforts can address inequities. Fellows will engage in discussion, a hands-on activity, and collaborative lesson planning with each other and with cancer center staff. Teachers of any grade level will leave the workshop with activity-based lessons ready for immediate classroom implementation.

Meets 3 times at Penn: Wednesday Oct. 16; Wednesday Oct. 23; Wednesday Nov. 6

Animation and Learning
Joshua Mosley, Penn Design

This hands-on workshop is for high school STEAM teachers interested in integrating accessible and effective methods of stop-motion animation in their teaching. Through discussion and hands-on demonstrations of 2D collage animation, participants will develop strategies for classroom projects that immerse students in learning material by representing cause-effect relationships and visual storytelling.

Meets 3 times at Penn: Thursday Nov. 14; Wednesday Nov. 20; Thursday Dec.11

Personal Music Listening as Social Emotional Learning
Carol Muller, Music, Penn

Many students are coping with high levels of toxic stress by listening to music on their devices, sometimes for several hours a day. In this workshop we will ask how personal music listening might be an effective way to manage the emotional dysregulation that comes with such stress. In the first two sessions we will cover literature on the relationship between music and emotional regulation. Based on this, participants will create a module, to be integrated into the larger social emotional learning curriculum, that uses personal music listening as a means for emotional regulation. As an aid to the program, teachers will be introduced to MuPsych, a mobile phone app that records student responses to questions about their emotional state. During a three-week hiatus, participants will implement their module and review data collected through the app. Teachers will then reconvene to discuss the results, analyze the data, and make changes to their modules as appropriate.

Meets 3 times at Penn: Thursday Sept. 19; Thursday Sept. 26; Thursday Oct. 31

Using Walk Audits and Storytelling to Understand Neighborhood Environmental Problems
Tina Rosan, Geography and Urban Studies, Temple; Megan Heckert, Geography and Planning, West Chester; Randall Cream, English, West Chester

This series of 3 workshop sessions will introduce teachers to two powerful tools for connecting students to their lived environment and advocating for environmental change. Walk audits enable neighborhood residents to document their direct experience of the built and natural surroundings. Participating teachers will learn to use a walk audit app with their students to gather and analyze data on what they see. Storytelling gives voice to members of historically marginalized communities around issues of environmental justice and sustainability. The workshop will show teachers ways of using storytelling to bring to life the abstract issues that affect these communities. Appropriate to teachers of students of all ages walk audits and storytelling provide powerful frameworks for humanities and STEAM education. During the workshop, teachers will build curricula that adapt one or both of these frameworks to their classes.

Meets 3 times at Penn: Thursday Oct. 10; Thursday Oct. 17; Thursday Nov. 7

The Iliad and the Odyssey
Emily Wilson, Classical Studies, Penn

This series of 3 sessions on the Homeric epics, the Iliad and the Odyssey, will explore numerous approaches to teaching these great poems in translation. In the first session, we will focus on the Odyssey – the text more commonly taught in schools – while in the second, we will focus on the Iliad, and the final session will pull together the threads of the discussion and turn to the participants’ projects. Themes and topics to be covered will include: community, strangers, migration and homecoming; violence, war and heroism; time and change; the body and technology; humans and the natural world; gods, goddesses, fate and human agency; stories, memory, tradition and rhetoric; grief, rage, love; poetics, imagery and narrative structure; and how to teach literature in translation, and discuss translation issues productively in the classroom.

Meets 3 times at Penn: Wednesday Oct. 16, Wednesday Oct. 23, Wednesday Nov. 13