Graduate Academy 2022 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.

Science Policy

This course is intended to introduce students to the process of regulating science through government action and self-regulation. The principles discussed will apply to life sciences and information technology and will include data privacy, cybersecurity, antitrust and monopolies, regulation of artificial intelligence, federalism, international trade and tech ethics. The faculty will be drawn from Science & Society, the Law School, the Sanford School of Public Policy and the Kenan Institute for Ethics.

Instructor: Michael “Buz” Waitzkin, deputy director, Science & Society
Summer Session I GS990 Section 15; offered May 16 – 20 (one-week course), daily 9:00 a.m. – 12:00 p.m. EDT

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 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, students will have the opportunity to sharpen skills in active listening, coaching and other competencies, which are highly transferable to sectors beyond the academy.

Instructor: Maria Wisdom, director of interdisciplinary coaching and mentoring programs, Office of Interdisciplinary Studies

Summer Session I GS990 Section 05; offered May 16 – 27 (two-week course), MWF 2:00 – 3:15pm EDT

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

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 lessen 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 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.

Instructors: Karl Bates, science journalist and director of research communications, and Robin A. Smith, senior science writer, University Communications

Summer Session I GS990 Section 08; offered May 16 – 27 (two-week course), MTWTH 1:00 – 4:05pm EDT

COMMUNITY-ENGAGED RESEARCH

Engaging and partnering with community members and entities in research, sometimes in the form of research practice partnership, can be a powerful mechanism for ensuring research is appropriately situated within the context and utilized for social change. These concepts and processes are highly complex, and often quite challenging, both in theory and in practice. This course will interrogate the meaning of “community-engaged research” and related terms, explore their relevance for both researchers and communities, 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.

Instructor: Jessica Sperling, Social Science Research Institute

Summer Session I GS990 Section 02; offered May 16 – 27 (two-week course), MTTH 2:00 – 4:05pm EDT

Interdisciplinary Project Management

Project management is a set of techniques that can be applied in any industry or setting to make projects more successful. It guides 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 be introduced to tools that help set achievable project goals, establish healthy group norms, organize project materials and processes, and troubleshoot common issues.

While this course will focus on strategies for managing interdisciplinary project teams within a university setting, the training 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, nonprofit, and corporate settings. This is a foundational course and will not cover highly technical forms of project management.

Instructors: Laura Howes, director, and Meghan O’Neil, assistant director, Bass Connections

Summer Session I GS990 Section 06; offered May 16 – 27 (two-week course), MWF 11:00am – 12:30pm EDT

Inclusive Online College Teaching

This course prepares graduate students and future academic innovators with an understanding of digital teaching and learning in higher education and the resources available to design and develop online and hybrid courses built upon principles of diversity, equity, inclusion and accessibility. Participants will examine a range of digital pedagogies and explore effective facilitation strategies to design a student-centered learning experience. Participants will also gain an understanding of inclusive principles for syllabus design, course materials, assessments and equitable teaching practices that engage all learners through active learning. Join us to explore innovative teaching approaches and to re-envision student engagement, projects and assessment design to support all learners.

Instructor: Sophia Stone, senior consultant, Learning Innovation

Summer Session I GS990 Section 01; offered June 6 – 10 (one-week course), daily 11:00am – 12:15pm EDT

Planning and Publishing Digital Projects

This course will introduce key aspects of modern academic publishing and its implications for planning and publishing digital projects. Topics we’ll cover include practical tips for authors such as assessing value and impact and ensuring discoverability, as well as broader considerations of the scholarly communication landscape, such as how dissemination and use of research intersects with publishing business models and copyright law. As a central activity and outcome of this course, students will apply what they’ve learned to developing an actionable, concrete plan for further development of a digital project they are already working on or would like to initiate.

Instructor: Liz Milewicz, digital scholarship & publishing services, and Dave Hansen, associate university librarian for research, collections, & scholarly communication, Duke Libraries

Summer Session II GS990 Section 16; offered July 18 – 22 (one-week course), daily 3:30 – 4:45pm EDT

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 canceled, students may want to pursue 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.

Instructors: Liz Milewicz, digital scholarship & publishing services, and Will Shaw, digital humanities consultant, Duke Libraries

Summer Session I GS990 Section 10; offered June 6 – 17 (two-week course), MWF 9:30 – 10:45 a.m. EDT

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.

Instructor: Will Shaw, digital humanities consultant, Duke Libraries

Summer Session I GS990 Section 12; offered May 16 – 20 (one-week course), daily 9:30 – 11 a.m. EDT

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. Next, 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.

Instructor: Erin Kramer, assistant vice president, media relations & public affairs, University Communications

Summer Session I GS990 Section 16; offered May 16 – 27 (two-week course), MTTH 2:00 – 4:05 p.m. EDT

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. 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.

Instructor: Trudi Abel, cultural historian and archivist, David M. Rubenstein Rare Book & Manuscript Library and Duke Libraries

Summer Session I GS990 Section 09; offered May 23 – June 3 (two-week course), TWTH 12:30 – 2:35 p.m. EDT

Leading Teams: Foundations of Teamwork & Leadership

The purpose of this 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, yet many people find teamwork difficult—it requires coordination, there’s always a weak link and one’s contribution may seem to be unrecognized. The difficulty in coordinating with others and maintaining motivation has only increased in recent times due to the pandemic. In addition to being useful for understanding interpersonal dynamics at work, the lessons from this course can help students cope with the stress and uncertainty.

Instructor: Jessica Paek, PhD candidate in the Fuqua School of Business

Summer Session I GS990 Section 13; offered May 16 – 20 (one-week course), daily 9:30am – 12:30pm EDT

Business & Organizational Fundamentals

Open to all students, this is a required course for Innovation & Entrepreneurship Graduate Certificate students and covers all aspects of entrepreneurship. Starting at the point of need identification, the course covers exploring the validity of proposed solutions; creating the needed finance 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 for creating a business/project plan to translate innovations out of the university. The course will be taught with a team focus and will introduce a range of viewpoints from both commercial and social entrepreneurship.

Instructor: Yvette Bonaparte, visiting assistant professor, Innovation & Entrepreneurship

Summer Session I GS990 Section 03; offered June 13 – 17 (one-week course), daily 12:30 – 3:30 p.m. EDT

Narrative Design Seminar

Open to all students, this is a required course for 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 sessions 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 epics to as recently as Instagram and TikTok. Students will spend time in small groups to practice communication and design by creating and workshopping a variety of narrative materials (e.g., essay, podcast, video, presentation) related to their primary work or scholarship in another discipline.

Instructor: Aaron Dinin, lecturing fellow, Innovation & Entrepreneurship

Summer Session I GS990 Section 14; offered June 6 – 10 (one-week course), daily 12:30 – 2:35 p.m. EDT

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.

Instructors: Megan Gray, Jessica Sperling and Noelle Wyman Roth, Social Science Research Institute

Summer Session I GS990 Section 07; offered May 30 – June 10 (two-week course), MTTH 12:30 – 3:00pm EDT

Evaluation: Understanding Impact & Improving Effectiveness

This course focuses on understanding program/initiative impact and informing initiative decision-making through evaluation, which represents an area of increasing relevance in academic careers and in public/non-profit sectors. Topics include: differences and similarities between evaluation and academic research; when and why to conduct evaluation; types of evaluations; foundational aspects of an evaluation process, including partnership and Theory of Change development; empirical processes, including study design considerations, data sources, data collection, and analysis; and real-world recommendations for feasibly and effectively implementing evaluation. Throughout the course, students will apply concepts to a real-world initiative. In addition, we will address the applications of academic training for evaluation. It will address alignment of evaluation research with doctoral training and the uses of evaluation in numerous career paths, including academic and other career trajectories.

Instructor: Jessica Sperling, Social Science Research Institute

Summer Session I GS990 Section 18; offered June 6 – 17 (two-week course), MTTH 2:00 – 4:05 p.m. EDT

Introduction to Interviewing

This is an intensive course in the theoretical and practical study of interview research methodologies in the humanities and social sciences. Students will gain practical experience in how to set up, conduct, transcribe, corroborate and archive interviews for social science and humanities research projects. Students will be immersed in the practical aspects of generating interview questions, establishing rapport and conducting background research in order to prepare for interviews. They will also learn how to generate archive-approved and Creative Commons release forms. Other topics include Institutional Review Board (IRB) considerations and technological options for recording, transcribing and archiving. Considerable space will be given throughout to the ethical issues generated by this research methodology, particularly when working with vulnerable populations and legally or morally fraught topics.

Instructor: Lou Brown, senior research scholar and director of programs, Forum for Scholars &  Publics

Summer Session I GS990 Section 17; offered May 16 – 27 (two-week course), daily 9:30 – 10:45 a.m. EDT

Exploring Race & History in Durham, North Carolina & the South

This course invites students to grapple with major themes and events related to race and U.S. history through a virtual exploration of museums, state and national parks, and historical sites in Durham, in North Carolina, and across the South. Over meetings and discussions, participants will “visit” sites that are presenting histories of American slavery, the Civil War, Reconstruction, segregation, lynching, Black education and entrepreneurship, and Black political and civil rights activism in compelling and challenging new ways. Students will meet public historians and interpreters working at several of the sites. At a fundamental level, the class will offer a focused opportunity to learn about Black experiences in the United States and legacies of slavery. Beyond that, it will introduce challenges that historical sites face in uncovering and confronting these complicated histories. Students will consider how encounters with place-based histories can expand understanding of our present, build empathy with multiple perspectives, and give us tools to confront the dilemmas of our own time and work towards social justice. As a foundational text, students will read Clint Smith’s How the Word Is Passed: A Reckoning with the History of Slavery Across America (2021). Since this course is built around engagement with sites and museums serving the visiting public, there is no expectation of any history background or prior knowledge. Imagine yourself a traveler; all you need bring is curiosity and an open mind.

Instructor: Anne Mitchell Whisnant, director, Graduate Liberal Studies and adjunct associate professor of history and Social Science Research Institute

Summer Session II GS990 Section 20; offered July 18 – 29 (two-week course), MTWTH 3:00 – 5:00 p.m. EDT