Graduate Academy 2021 Summer Session Courses

Innovation Co-Lab

The Innovation Co-Lab offers a variety of short courses designed to expose participants to the fundamental philosophies, tools, and technologies used in software development and responsive website development, among other topics. Courses can be selected a la carte or organized into tracks to facilitate deep dives.

Best Practices in Mentoring

 

Mentoring can be defined as both formal and informal practices that help emerging professionals learn and grow. This course offers a reflective space for doctoral students who are both mentors and mentees, working in a range of settings (PhD program, lab, teaching, collaborative research team), and in mentoring relationships with varying degrees of formality.

• What does it mean to be (or have) a “good” mentor?
• How has mentoring shaped my academic career thus far?
• What kind of mentor do I want to be, moving forward?

In addition to creating space for reflection, we will cover skills-based topics such as setting expectations and boundaries, framing goals, mentoring across differences (racial, cultural, etc.), using feedback constructively, and empowering others to learn and grow.

By focusing on and honing best practices in mentoring, you will be more effective – not just at mentoring others, but also in understanding what your own professional needs are, who best can meet them, and how to ask for what you need. Finally, mentoring is everywhere: by honing skills in active listening, coaching, and other competencies, you will sharpen skills that are highly transferable to sectors beyond the academy.

This course is led by Maria Wisdom, PhD, Director of Interdisciplinary Advising & Engagement, Office of Interdisciplinary Studies

GS990 Section 04; offered May 17 – 28 (two-week course), MWF 9:30am – 10:45am EST

Students taking this course may qualify for Responsible Conduct of Research (RCR) credit.

Communicating Your Research to Non-experts: Science & Research Communication

 

Scientists speak and think differently from non-scientists, often to their own great frustration when they try to communicate effectively with media, policymakers and the general public. Why do we struggle to communicate, and what can we do to ease the problem? If we want to be ambassadors for science, we’re going to have to brush up on the language and culture of the non-science community.

In this mini-course, we will present both the theory and practice of effective science communication in written, oral, visual and social media channels. Topics include the empirical benefits of communicating science; development of speaking, writing, and storytelling practices for diverse audiences; answering difficult, controversial, and critical questions; and tweeting, blogging, and presenting research to engage non-scientists, including potential funders and policy makers.

The course is led by Karl Bates and Jory Weintraub. Karl is a science journalist and Director of Research Communications at Duke’s University Communications Office. He also runs the Duke Research Blog. Jory is Science Communication Director for the Duke Initiative for Science & Society. Jory is also a biologist (PhD in Immunology from UNC Chapel Hill) who has focused his career on science communication, education and outreach.

GS990 Section 08; offered June 7 – 18 (two-week course), MWF 9:30am – 12pm EST

Students taking this course may qualify for Responsible Conduct of Research (RCR) credit.

Designing Digital Humanities Research: Formulation to Publication

 

The global pandemic has made it difficult to undertake traditional, on-site research in archives and libraries. With research trips postponed or cancelled, students may be glad to learn that there are other ways to obtain and work with the research data necessary for their dissertation or thesis. This course will help students learn about those ways of working with digital information. With an emphasis on the humanities and interpretive social sciences, it will provide strategies for locating and acquiring digital or digitized artifacts; organizing research data; and using digital scholarship tools to manage personal archives, analyze data, and share research outcomes. No previous experience with digital scholarship tools or methods is required.

The course is led by Liz Milewicz, Digital Scholarship & Publishing Services, and Will Shaw, Digital Humanities Consultant, Duke Libraries.

GS990 Section 10; offered May 17 – 28 (two-week course), MWF 11am – 12:30pm EST

Digital Humanities: Working with Text

 

The digital humanities are broad and diverse, but many of their foundational skills, technologies, and methods are centered on textual data. This course is about some of those methods for analyzing text. Topics will include preparing texts for research (acquisition, OCR, organization), corpus analytics, natural language processing, sentiment analysis and document classification, writing code for text analysis, and topic modeling with MALLET. No programming or digital scholarship experience is necessary.  

This course will be led by Will Shaw, Digital Humanities Consultant, Duke Libraries.

GS990 Section 12; offered June 7 – 11 (one-week course), DAILY 9:30am – 10:45am EST

CANCELLED: COMMUNITY-ENGAGED AND COMMUNITY-PARTNERED RESEARCH

 

Engaging and partnering with community members and entities in research, sometimes in the form of research practice partnership (RPP), can be a powerful mechanism for ensuring research is appropriately situated within context and for utilizing research for social change. However, these concepts and processes are highly complex, and often quite challenging, both in theory and in practice. This session will interrogate the meaning of “community-engaged research” and related terms, explore the ways in which they can be relevant and meaningful for both researchers and community entities, address the ethical considerations and logistical problems that often arise, and consider recommendations for enacting best practices. Throughout this session, we will apply our knowledge through active learning by developing a community-engaged research design.

The course will be taught by Jessica Sperling of the Social Science Research Institute.

GS990 Section 02; offered May 17 – 28 (two-week course), MTTh 9:30am – 12pm EST

Students taking this course may qualify for Responsible Conduct of Research (RCR) credit.

Interdisciplinary Project Management

 

Project management is a set of techniques that can be applied in any industry or setting to make projects more successful. Project management can be used to guide small, simple projects as well as complex, team-based projects that bring together individuals from different fields and involve multiple stakeholders.

In this course, you will learn the fundamentals of project management, from defining a project’s scope and creating a project plan to managing resources, roles, and workflow. Along the way, you will learn strategies for effective communication, organization, and team motivation, and you will be introduced to tools that can help you set achievable project goals, establish healthy group norms, organize your project’s materials and processes, and troubleshoot common issues.

While this course will focus specifically on strategies for managing interdisciplinary project teams within a university setting, the skills you learn can be broadly applied to individual and team projects across fields and environments, from completing a dissertation, to managing a research lab, to leading projects in academic, non-profit, and corporate settings. This is a foundational course and as such, will not cover highly technical forms of project management.

The course will be led by Meghan O’Neil and Laura Howes (Bass Connections), and co-taught by Liz Milewicz and Sophia Lafferty-Hess (Duke Libraries), and Jory Weintraub (Duke Science & Society).

GS990 Section 06; offered June 7 – 18 (two-week course), MWF 11am – 12:30pm EST

Students taking this course may qualify for Responsible Conduct of Research (RCR) credit.

Online College Teaching

Why not make the most of this time to enhance your digital proficiency to ensure your future?

This course prepares graduate students to enter new positions as TAs, Instructors of Record, and future academic innovators with an understanding of the state of digital teaching and learning in higher education and the resources available to design and develop a hybrid or online course. Students will examine a range of digital pedagogies and explore effective facilitation strategies to design an inclusive virtual classroom environment. Students will also learn how to launch a professional social media presence for their job application portfolios and for furthering their pedagogical experience. Join us to begin creating a dynamic virtual learning experience and brainstorm innovative solutions to re-envision student engagement, projects, and assessment design.

The course will be led by Sophia Stone, EdD, Senior Consultant with Learning Innovation.

GS990 Section 01; offered June 7 – 11 (one-week course), Daily 11am – 12:15pm EST

Teaching with Digital Archives

Faculty from across the humanistic and interpretive social science disciplines will demonstrate why, and how, they have incorporated archival materials into undergraduate teaching, providing students with the chance to hone research and critical thinking skills through close engagement with rich primary sources. Seminar participants will discuss the challenges and opportunities presented by these new pedagogical approaches, including best practices in using new digital storytelling technologies to present archivally-based research.

The course will be led by Trudi Abel, cultural historian and archivist at the David M. Rubenstein Rare Book & Manuscript Library and Duke Libraries.

GS990 Section 09; offered May 17 – 28 (two-week course), MTWTh 12:30pm – 2:35pm EST

Students taking this course may qualify for Responsible Conduct of Research (RCR) credit.

Leading Teams: Foundations of Teamwork & Leadership

The purpose of this short course is to explore research-based insights about how to make diverse teams perform well and how to lead with self-awareness. A great deal of research and professional life involves working in teams, and yet, many people find teamwork difficult–it requires coordination, there’s always a weak link, and one’s contribution doesn’t always seem to be recognized. The difficulty in coordinating with others and even maintaining motivation has only increased in recent times with the threat of COVID-19. In addition to being generally useful for understanding interpersonal dynamics at work, we hope the lessons from this course will help students cope with the stress and uncertainty of this unprecedented time.

This short course is led by Jessica Paek, a PhD candidate in the Fuqua School of Business.

GS990 Section 13; offered May 17 – 21 (one-week course), DAILY 12:30pm-3:15pm EST

Students taking this course may qualify for Responsible Conduct of Research (RCR) credit.

Business & Organizational Fundamentals

This is a required course for all Innovation & Entrepreneurship Graduate Certificate students, with students from all disciplines and schools coming together in an interdisciplinary cohort. The course covers all aspects of entrepreneurship. Starting at the point of need identification, the course covers exploring the validity of proposed solutions; creating the needed financing and resource structures; effectively marketing/communicating the innovation and its associated benefits; leading, managing, and working effectively within teams; creating a positive and ethical work culture; and evaluating success.

By the end of this course, students will have learned the fundamental skills which will enable them to create a business/project plan to translate an innovation out of the university. The course will be taught with a team focus that will allow for the introduction of a range of viewpoints from across both commercial and social entrepreneurship.

The course will be taught by Yvette Bonaparte, visiting Assistant Professor in Innovation & Entrepreneurship.

GS990 Section 03; offered June 14 – 18 (one-week course), DAILY 12pm-3pm EST

Narrative Design Seminar

This is a required course for all Innovation & Entrepreneurship Graduate Certificate students. Students will learn to communicate why others should value their ideas and innovations, using both verbal and non-verbal elements. The first days of the seminar series will focus on common principles of storytelling and the ways in which stories have, historically, been the cornerstone of disseminating new ideas and information as far back as Homeric epic to as recently as Instagram and TikTok. Students will spend the remainder of the time in small groups to practice communication and design by creating and workshopping a variety of narrative materials (e.g., essay, podcast, video, presentation, etc.) related to their primary work or scholarship in another discipline.

The course will be led by Aaron Dinin, Lecturing Fellow in Innovation & Entrepreneurship.

GS990 Section 14; offered May 24 – 28 (one-week course), DAILY 1:45pm-4:45pm EST

Public Speaking for Everyone

This is a hands-on workshop for anyone who wants to become a more confident public speaker. In the first session, we will talk about how to organize information and hone your message to inform and engage your audience. After that we’ll look at those skills in practice, with guest speakers who use public speaking skills in a variety of industries and settings. Finally, students will have a chance to make a presentation and receive feedback from peers and professionals. No previous public speaking experience is necessary.

The course will be led by Kristin Brown, Associate Vice President of News & Communications.

GS990 Section 16; offered May 17 – 28 (two-week course), MTTh 12:30pm-2:35pm EST

INTRODUCTION TO QUALITATIVE RESEARCH METHODS

This course will introduce qualitative research methods, examining their uses – when they are appropriate, what unique strengths they offer, what challenges they can introduce, and what ethical considerations factor into crafting a qualitative protocol. It will cover gathering qualitative data using both primary (interviews, focus groups, participant observation), and secondary sources, and managing such data during and after their collection. The course will also examine what is involved in coding qualitative data, including how coding schema are developed and applied, how coding can be done in ways that are consistent and replicable, and how to use NVivo software in coding. Finally, we will consider reporting findings, including how a qualitative researcher assesses what their materials teach them and how they can compile and present those findings to make their case, as well as how to respond to criticisms of both the qualitative approach in general and the particular findings of a given project.

The course will be led by Alexandra Cooper, Megan Gray, Jessica Sperling, and Whitney Welsh of the Social Science Research Institute .

GS990 Section 07; offered May 17 – 28 (two-week course), MWF 2:00pm – 4:15pm EST

Students taking this course may qualify for Responsible Conduct of Research (RCR) credit.

CANCELLED: Landscape of Higher Education: Innovation, Tradition and the Future

Duke has built a powerful reputation as a research university with a strong commitment to graduate and professional training as well as a liberal arts and residential undergraduate experience. Duke now faces a set of changes which present both challenges and opportunities. These include the growth of global, modular and flexible forms of education (hybrid educational offerings by peers, for-profit and online universities/training schools; dramatic expansion of community college populations), the changing nature of the job market for PhD students, the focus on improving access and equity, the increased need among 18-24 year old students for holistic educational experiences, and the demand among all age groups for perpetual learning.

Will the future of higher education resemble a set of bundled goods – research, teaching, cultural memory, coming of age experience, market signal – or a differentiated set of unbundled offerings? Are there desirable and plausible options for trans-disciplinary graduate programs that equip students to identify and address multiple problems? Can we re-imagine academic structures in ways that better support the forms of learning and knowledge production that will be needed in 2030 and beyond?

This course reviews the landscape of higher education in the US, highlights experiments in new forms of education and training, and analyzes broader strategies for redesigning higher education institutions. Participants will review brief written materials, online talks and podcasts, engage with individuals who have different roles in higher education, analyze and debate key issues during synchronous sessions, and consider how Duke or other institutions might imagine new futures for higher education. These deliberations will inform the ongoing work of Duke’s 2030 Committee and help prepare graduate students for leadership roles in the emerging ecology of higher education in the 21st century.

This course will be led by Noah Pickus, Associate Provost, and Ed Balleisen, Vice Provost.

GS990 Section 11; offered June 7 – 18 (two-week course), MTTh 2pm – 4:05pm EST

Science Policy

Our goal is to help students understand the process of science policy making. Topics include government regulation of science; technology, expression and power within the context of Section 230, antitrust, and the US-China Tech Cold War; the mis- and dis-information crisis; cybersecurity and data privacy; and the science publication industry.

This course is taught by Michael “Buz” Waitzkin, Deputy Director of Science & Society; Matt Perault, Director of the Center on Science & Technology Policy; David Hoffman, Steed Family Professor of the Practice of Cybersecurity Policy; and Scott Brennan and Misha Angrist of Science & Society.

GS990 Section 15; offered May 24 – 28 (one-week course), DAILY 9:30am – 12:15pm EST