ACT Grants Meetup Reception
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Description
With its 2nd-year sponsorship from JMU Libraries, the ACT Grants support creative teaching and Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (SoTL). These grants provide opportunities to encourage innovations in teaching and share instructors’ creativity in engaging student learning through the use of technology. Projects like Drs. Emily York and Shannon Conley (see below) have evidenced the development of deep, meaningful, and reflective learning. This ACT Grants Meetup Reception will provide a networking environment to communicate about ACT Grants, the recipients’ experience, and starting an application for your creative teaching project.
Responsible Innovation and Ethical Reasoning with Design Fiction
Dr. Emily York, Assistant Professor, School of Integrated Sciences
Dr. Shannon Conley, Assistant Professor, School of Integrated Sciences
As faculty charged with engaging STEM students in ethical reasoning, we are always looking for hands-on and relevant ways to provoke critical thinking about plausible socio-technical futures. This is a critical skillset for participating in the anticipatory governance of emerging technologies—that is, policies and practices that identify and mitigate the risks and unintended consequences of new technologies. We wanted to expand our ongoing study of responsible innovation pedagogies to experiment with a tool called design fiction, a blend of new and traditional media that incorporates science, science fiction, and design, to start conversations about the relationships between humans and technology. Our ACT Grant supported this innovation, allowing us to pilot design fiction as an ethical reasoning tool in five sections of our introductory Technology, Science and Society class (ISAT 131). Asking students to evoke a mid- to long-term future in which an emerging technology of today is ordinary and ubiquitous, the activity shifted students’ gazes from the technological object and its promises to the social contexts within which such an object might be a normal part of our everyday lives. This illuminated a range of social, ethical, and political dimensions of the technology not originally anticipated. It challenged students to consider how this plausible future might complicate their initial assumptions about the technology's promise to solve a problem or create progress. Through this activity, students were able to practice a form of anticipatory ethical reasoning in a grounded way, applying different ethical frameworks to meaningfully consider potential technological trajectories. We received excellent feedback from our students, and we are analyzing the data we collected on the activity as we explore how to develop, expand, and disseminate this practice.
Objectives
- Discuss the procedure of an ACT grant life cycle from application to dissemination;
- Formulate a networked community to share creative teaching practice and ideas.