By Melanie Banks

A. This semester I am teaching a graduate seminar on Professional Development in Anthropology and Anthropology 1500, a large introductory general education course on Great Discoveries in Archaeology. The introductory course satisfies two general education requirements, so it is typically popular with freshmen looking to check off two requirements at once and explore a topic that they may not have been exposed to before. This semester 150 students are taking the class, and a class of this size can often feel impersonal, even when the class is held in person. At the beginning of the semester, I felt that it was important to welcome each student individually, so that everyone felt that they had at least one faculty member they could reach out to and realize that, despite physical distancing, we are all still part of a bigger class and college community here at UConn. I feel really lucky to be teaching this course—I have been teaching it for more than 15 years and love it! Last year, well before anyone had heard of COVID-19, I worked closely with Betsy Guala, a course designer here at UConn within the Center for Excellence in Teaching and Learning to develop a fully-online version of the course. While the online course was developed with a much smaller group of students in mind, having the online course shell available made it easier to pivot to online instruction this fall. As an aside, for any interested instructors out there, this course has been approved as a UConn ECE course and the online shell is available for you to use!

This semester, I am assisted by two Teaching Assistants, who help oversee weekly online discussions. About four weeks into the fall semester, I conducted a class survey to check how everyone was doing and I asked the students to share top tips on surviving the unusual circumstances we are all facing. Many students shared strategies they had developed for managing their struggling with time management and the many and varying demands placed upon them by their different courses. Some students reminded their classmates of the importance of eating, breathing, and sleeping and I have to agree—eat well, breathe deeply, and get good sleep! Students are juggling many sets of deadlines and technology-related learning curves on top of the course content. This has been overwhelming for some. I try to make the technology and time management pieces for Anthropology 1500 as easy and straightforward as possible, by sending out regular updates and reminders, and checking in with students who appear to be falling behind. Given that so many freshmen take the class, I firmly believe in the need to provide instruction on strategies that help students succeed in college. Alongside discussions of archaeology, I provide links to resources on campus, strategies for approaching readings and taking useful notes, and exercises that help deepen critical thinking. It can be easy to focus on the challenges that many of us have faced as instructors in light of COVID. There are some silver linings too! As part of the online version of Anthropology 1500, students get to explore archaeology and engage with cultural heritage in a very different way—after watching a lecture on early art, for example, they can now dive straight into a virtual tour of Chauvet Cave in France (archeologie.culture.fr/chauvet/en/virtual-visit). Or they can virtually explore the galleries within the British Museum in London (blog.britishmuseum.org/how-to-explore-the-british-museum-from-home/) as part of our ongoing discussions of cultural heritage—or they can admire the view from the top of a the Pyramid of the Sun at Teotihuacán in Mexico (www.360cities.net/image/pyramid-of-the-sun-teotihuacan) as part of our consideration of state-level societies in Central America. By diversifying the range of instructional materials, and allowing students to progress as their own pace, the course is, in some ways, better suited to a wide range of learning styles than the in-person version!

Q. Professors in the humanities and social sciences are uniquely positioned to read the news and put it in a larger context. How do you engage with the news in your classes and give structure to the moment we are living in?

Anthropologists are very well placed to provide instruction on cultural diversity, race, and racism, and I feel that we have an ethical responsibility to do all that we can to share this knowledge and enhance the cultural-literacy and sensitivity of our students. As part of Anthropology 1500,* students explore how colonial histories have shaped diverse views of the past. In addition to gaining a deeper understanding of the diverse ways of life of people across the globe and through time, students also gain a deeper appreciation of the complex relationships between the past and the present, and learn to discuss and debate multifaceted issues relating to cultural heritage from multiple perspectives. Issues relating to cultural heritage rarely have one simple correct answer. I believe that providing a safe space for discussion to allow students to explore new ideas and change their minds, possibly multiple times, is particularly important right now in light of the divisions we sometimes see in the media.

New archaeological discoveries often appear in the news—these are included as part of a “New Discoveries” forum within the class. Students are also provided the skills that they need to read a news article and evaluate it for thoroughness and potential accuracy. In additional to obtaining cultural sensitivity and emphasizing critical thinking, underscoring the need to evaluate readings for accuracy is essential for today’s students.

* The Anthropology Department is now offering two courses through the UConn ECE program: ANTH 1000: Peoples and Cultures of the World and ANTH 1500: Great Discoveries in Archaeology, both of which explore issues of race and cultural diversity throughout the world. Fully-developed online course content shells are available to certified UConn ECE Instructors to use as resources. If interested in learning more about ANTH 1000 or ANTH 1500, please reach out to Alexia Smith (alexia.smith@uconn.edu).

Q. While you give structure and context for your students, how do you advise students who come to you confused, disaffected, and/or angry and not knowing how to make positive change?

A. Sometimes students new to archaeology or the social sciences struggle with the way that information is structured. If a student is confused, I review the structure and scaffolding that archaeologists use to gather and interpret data. My background spans the sciences and the social sciences so I can often emphasize with the difficulties that students may be going through as they approach the topic, having experienced them myself!

I haven’t experienced too many students who are angry this semester, but I have interacted with a few. I know that technology struggles can sometimes push people over the edge, myself included! In those instances, I ask what the main issue is and brainstorm potential solutions. In one instance, I connected a student with a resource that could help provide them with access to a laptop. For students who are disaffected, it is a little more challenging this semester—I often send emails checking in to ask whether everything is ok and whether there is anything I can do to help. Oftentimes, this makes the student realize that they are not “unseen” or anonymous in a large online class and they re-engage. Sometimes they don’t engage, however, and that is the hardest part—given that email, or communication tools within the online course, are the only ways I have to communicate with students, I feel somewhat limited in those instances. I can only interact with them if they choose to reciprocate.

In some cases, it is clear that a student is experiencing difficulties well outside my area of expertise. I make sure that students are aware of the range of social supports or mental health resources we have in place on campus and ensure that they understand how accessible these resources are. More rarely, when I have sensed a deeper problem, I have reached out to the Dean of Students’ office to ask them to call a student to see if they are ok. The help is always there—sometimes the students just need a little guidance finding it!

By Melanie Banks

I think that COVID-19 has really focused public attention on the collective health and mental well-being of those around us. It has also laid bare the racial and economic inequities in our society. As faculty, it is incumbent on us to help students understand the origins of these disparities in institutional racism and racist ideologies that have produced such gross inequities.

A. I think we’ve had two different moments in the crisis. The first came with the abrupt lockdown when the campus community was told on Friday, March 13th that we would not to return to campus following spring break and that we were to transition our classes online. We were all scared as no one knew much about how the disease was transmitted, such as whether we could catch it from our mail or our groceries. We all know so much more now and as educators, we know that informative, concrete, empirical data is power. Science should not be political.

So, in Spring 2020, I moved my Sociology of Law class online to an asynchronous format. Since I believe that students learn best when they are engaged in thoughtful discussion, I thought that it would be harder to accomplish that goal on WebEx, so I made online-based discussion a graded requirement of the class. What I found really surprised me. First, the shyer students participated equally, and this allowed more people to engage fully in the discussion. Second, I made the discussion questions which were posted on HuskyCt very targeted, requiring close engagement with the readings. I found that in responding to my discussion prompts, students referred more closely to the readings and because everyone had to participate, they engaged more fully with the text.

I heard from many students who did not have easy access to the internet or who, because they were now living at home, had to take on more responsibility such as caring for younger siblings who were struggling to attend school online. As students reached out, I was able to make accommodations as needed. I found out that one of my advisees was living in a homeless shelter, going to the public library to take her online classes and do her homework. Together with UConn staff, we were able to find her housing and to improve her situation.

In my graduate class, we continued to meet online synchronously. We generally started each class with a check in where we learned that some of us were introverts and adapting well to the isolation, others were single parents struggling to balance work, school, and home as they took care of small children who no longer had daycare or playdates. In short, the lockdown provided more of an opportunity for us to know each other as people and to understand how the constant struggle for work-life balance affected each of us differently, and how that struggle was accentuated because of the pandemic. I think that the pandemic has provided for many of us an opportunity to practice compassion and understanding.

This fall 2020 semester, things feel a bit easier. We understand the disease better and know what we should do to keep ourselves as safe as we can be. But the struggles for students with younger siblings or family obligations or for those who have to work with the public that increases their exposure to COVID-19 continue. As a teacher and advisor, my go to question for students who are struggling, is, “What is keeping you from being able to complete assignments or keep up with your classes? Can we come up with a plan to make things easier?” This opens the dialog to greater empathy and to think through ways to support our students.

Q. Professors in the humanities and social sciences are uniquely positioned to read the news and put it in a larger context. How do you engage with the news in your classes and give structure to the moment we are living in?

A. Sociologists are uniquely positioned to place the disparate effects of the pandemic in a broader context. We can raise and discuss important questions such as why are Black, Brown, and indigenous people disproportionately affected by the pandemic and why are they dying at higher rates than their European American counterparts? Who has access to healthcare and who does not? What explains these differences? What has the pandemic taught us about how society is organized, what we would call the division of labor? After all, we depend on the people who continued to work at the grocery stores and of course all of the healthcare workers which, without them, we quite literally would not survive. Who keeps them safe? What are they paid? Why do some people react with compassion and others with fear?

Q. While you give structure and context for your students, how do you advise students who come to you confused, disaffected, and/or angry and not knowing how to make positive change?

The unequal racial impact of the pandemic has brought the racial inequities of our society into stark relief. For many European-American people, the murder of George Floyd by police officers in Minnesota laid bare the racism embedded in the criminal justice system and sparked uprisings across the country. For Black and Brown people, the police murder of Floyd was one more example of a criminal justice system where Black and Latinx people who constitute approximately 25% of the population make up 59% of the prison population. Compared to similar nations, the U.S. incarceration rate is five to ten times higher. Understanding structural racism is a critical part of what sociologists study. With the increased organizing for racial justice, there are myriad ways for students to get involved and they can start by looking online. For those who do not feel safe protesting in person, many social movement organizations now meet online which I believe for many makes participation easier, though of course, we all miss the in person contact. Whatever issue you care about, whether it is climate change or voting rights or something else, you can find a group that is working for positive social change.

By Glenn Mitoma

This past November marked the 75th anniversary of the opening of the International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg, which sought to bring to justice two dozen high ranking German leaders. Over 11 months, prosecution teams from the United States, France, Great Britain, and the Soviet Union, led by US Supreme Court Justice Robert J. Jackson, conducted a systematic autopsy of the Nazi’s war crimes, crimes against humanity, and crimes against peace. Alongside Jackson worked a young Connecticut lawyer named Thomas J. Dodd, for whom the University of Connecticut’s Thomas J. Dodd Research Center is named. Jackson, Dodd and the other prosecutors at Nuremberg were attempting not only to convict the individual Nazi leaders like Reichsmarschall Hermann Göring, industrialist Gustav Krupp von Bohlen und Halbach, and propagandist Julius Streicher, but also to present before the world the architecture of death and destruction we now know of as the Holocaust. The trial was an exercise in education as much as law, and many of the participants hoped that the lessons learned would help put the world on a path to peace and justice.

Seventy-five years later, the lessons of Nuremberg are as important as ever. In Connecticut, the General Assembly recently adopted a statute requiring education about the Holocaust and other genocides to be part of the social studies curriculum in every school district. Today, reflecting on the legacy of Nuremberg, we have a responsibility and an opportunity to teach about the Holocaust and genocide in a way that supports human rights.

Teaching and learning about the Holocaust and genocide, while important, can be fraught. By definition, these topics are traumatic and include episodes of extreme dehumanization, violence, and brutality. At best, students can find genocide difficult to comprehend; at worst, students can become traumatized (or retraumatized) in the face such material. Teachers, too, will grapple with the challenges of understanding and presenting age-appropriate learning materials about something so fundamentally inappropriate. Clear guiding principles and learning objectives, such as those provided by the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance, are essential.

Despite these challenges, the importance of learning about genocide and the Holocaust has never been greater. In recent years, rising authoritarianism, racism, and anti-Semitism have demonstrated that the building blocks of genocide exist in every society. At the same time, the spread of disinformation, propaganda, and conspiracy theories—often, like those targeting billionaire philanthropist George Soros, reviving anti-Semitic tropes—have found an all-too-eager audience online and in the real world. Effective genocide education can be on one important way of confronting these troubling trends and building a broader culture of human rights and democracy.

This semester, I piloted a new course for our Human Rights program, introduction to Genocide Studies. Designed as a critical, interdisciplinary, and practically engaged course, the learning objectives encompass areas of knowledge, values, and skills. These include:

• Students will demonstrate knowledge and understanding of how and why particular genocides have occurred, with reference to the key historical, political, and social contexts.

• Students will analyze social and psychological factors that enable or constrain genocide.

• Students will apply their knowledge to the world outside the classroom to identify contemporary impacts or risks of genocide.

• Students will apply their knowledge to the world outside the classroom to commemorate, advocate against, or prevent the perpetration of genocide.

• Students will develop empathy for victims or targets of genocide.

• Students will foster the respect for diversity, common humanity, and justice.

The course materials, such first-person testimonials, primary source documents, documentary films, monuments and memorial, as well as scholarship, are selected to allow students to explore the ways historians, psychologist, lawyers, political scientists, and others have tried to understand genocide, and on what and how we can know about genocide as a human experience. Reflective journals, structured classroom dialogues, and an emphasis on supportive relationships are all used to try to avoid easy moralizing and distancing of genocide and to help students think about power and responsibility in relation to genocide perpetration and prevention. In the end, my hope is that the course is fundamentally anti-genocidal in that it pushes back against the frames of mind that makes genocide possible, and equips students with the ability to take action and contribute to or develop practical efforts commemorate, advocate against, or prevent the perpetration of genocide.

The design of this course follows not only recommendations for responsible teaching and learning about genocide, but also the basic tenets of human rights education (HRE). Rooted in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (1948), the HRE framework emphasizes not only teaching about human rights as subject, but also teaching through human rights (i.e., pedagogical approaches that honor and uphold students’ dignity and humanity) and teaching for human rights (i.e., learning outcomes that make students better equipped to claim their own rights and respect the rights of others). For genocide education to avoid leaving students feeling depressed and disempowered, it needs to embrace the opposite of genocide: a vision of justice and humanity that teachers and students together can work toward.

Like the Nuremberg Tribunal, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights was the result of a post-World War 2 effort to come to terms with the legacy of violence, dictatorship, and atrocity that had characterized the preceding years. The UN Human Rights Commission, chaired by Eleanor Roosevelt, drafted the Declaration mindful, as the Preamble states, that “disregard and contempt for human rights have resulted in barbarous acts which have outraged the conscience of mankind.” But while Nuremberg provided the first autopsy of the horrific crimes of Nazi regime, the Universal Declaration provided a vision for how the world might build a more just, free, and equal world by centering “the inherent dignity and of the equal and inalienable rights of all members of the human family.” Toward that end, the Commission not only recognized that the right to education was among those “equal and inalienable rights,” but that teaching and learning were at the core of how we would build that better future.

Now, Therefore THE GENERAL ASSEMBLY proclaims THIS UNIVERSAL DECLARATION OF HUMAN RIGHTS as a common standard of achievement for all peoples and all nations, to the end that every individual and every organ of society, keeping this Declaration constantly in mind, shall strive by teaching and education to promote respect for these rights and freedoms and by progressive measures, national and international, to secure their universal and effective recognition and observance, both among the peoples of Member States themselves and among the peoples of territories under their jurisdiction. (emphasis added)

As we emerge from the forced isolation of the COVID-19 pandemic, there will be much work to be done to address the devasting impacts it has had on our individual and collective lives. Among the things we can take from both the Nuremberg Tribunal and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights is that the path to a better future often begins with learning the lessons of the past. This includes confronting difficult truths and acknowledging accountability for violations of human rights. But it also includes articulating a vision of the future, rooted in shared values and fundamental principles, toward which we can work together. Holocaust, genocide, and human rights education are an important part of that work.

Welcome to the Winter edition of the UConn Early College Experience (UConn ECE) Magazine. I am happy to introduce this edition of the UConn ECE Magazine to you, because it also introduces a new approach to how the editorial board plans that the Magazine will continue for the future. This edition kicks off our vision of looking at our UConn ECE Community as a source of inspiration, positive change, and good work. We want the Magazine to engage with the issues of our time and show how our community is handling these issues. We want the Magazine to be a source of information, wisdom, and positive energy. The Magazine will continue to update our community on program changes, enhancements, and report important data. That part will not change. We are adding to the Magazine so that administrators, instructors, and students find useful examples of leadership and motivation. We want to tap into the richness of our community and reflect the best of what is going on as a guide to others. That said, we are not attempting to show inherent attribution – because they are UConn ECE, they are wonderful. Rather, the approach is, let’s all look at the successes of our UConn ECE community and let’s be inspired by their words and actions.

There is a great deal of research that suggests that the news we read influences our cognitive biases and mental health. Bad news reinforces the search for more bad news and confirms that all is going down the chute. We don’t want to stick our heads in the sand and pretend that there is no negative news; we want to be a positive source of information and discussion on what we can do about it. To that end, this edition of the Magazine will address issues of teaching and learning during COVID-19. Chris Malinoski, Ph.D., writes about moving biology labs to an online platform and Professors Glenn Mitoma and Alexia Smith write separately about teaching in the social sciences during a period when group inequality is evident in society. Four high school principals will lend us their voices and share how they are caring for their communities. We have also reached out to our community and are highlighting three “agents of positive change”. In addition, we have program statistics, the largest programs, the News Brief, and other interviews to keep you interested. Let us know your thoughts – we improve by listening, reading, and considering your words seriously. That is good advice for us all.

Thank you for being part of our UConn ECE community, and we hope you enjoy reading.

Brian A. Boecherer, Ph.D.
Executive Director