Workshops and Seminars
SAI hosts and co-hosts a number of teacher training workshops on the UT campus during the year. We design our professional development opportunities to address the TEKS and TAKS objectives for social studies. At our training events, teachers gain knowledge from Institute guests and faculty experts, teaching materials and strategies to use them in the classroom, and CPE hours. Below is a listing of our current and recent professional development opportunities for K-12 teachers.
UPCOMING Workshop contact Outreach to register or for more information:
AIM: South Asia Workshop (Fall 2009): Global Flows and Local Impacts: Stories from South Asia
This workshop, designed for middle and high school teachers, explores the global nature of contemporary social change in South Asia. It takes globalization as major force that reshapes social life in the region, while recognizing that social outcomes are shaped through interaction with other processes as well. The workshop brings together UT faculty expertise and perspectives from geography, cultural studies, anthropology, political science, and economics to explore the meanings of globalization and its local impacts within South Asia today. Through presentations and discussion, we will examine the relationship between globalization; inequality and poverty; the fate of cultural diversity; and issues of identity, the environment, and human rights.
The workshop is designed to address the Texas Essential Knowledge and Skills (TEKS) and national social studies standards that cover the ways in which cultures change and maintain continuity due to the impact of general processes such as migration, global trade, political conflict and the diffusion of ideas.
The workshop is limited to 25 participants who will be chosen on a first come first serve basis. The workshop is free of charge to all teachers, but pre-registration is required.
- Date: Saturday, November 14, 2009
- Time: 9:30 am 2:30 pm
- Place: Meyerson Conference room, Will C. Hogg Building room 4.118, The University of Texas at Austin
Attendees will receive:
- Professional Development Hours (CPE)
- Teacher materials (books and articles)
- Boxed lunch and other refreshments
Past Workshops
Hemispheres' Summer Teachers' Institute 2009: Sense of Place: Intersecting geography, History, and Culture
"A cultural landscape is a geographic area that includes cultural and natural resources associated with an historic event, activity, person, or group of people. Cultural landscapes are works of art, texts and narratives of cultures, and expressions of regional identity."
-Institute for Cultural Landscape Studies, Arnold Arboretum of Harvard University
How have our changing perceptions of our geographic surroundings led to changes in human society? How do cities and urban spaces reflect the societies that build them? How do those spaces in turn serve as vehicles for creativity, production, and social change? How is the character of a place related to its political, economic, social, and cultural characteristics?
The fields we farm, the cities we build, the spaces we preserve, the borders we protect‹within each set of choices we make, we reveal our perceptions of and relationship with the land that surrounds us. By studying the connections between natural geographic features, human settlement, and cultural identity, we can begin to see landscape not as background scenery but as an expression of ourselves and of our historic development. Between the core disciplines of World Geography, World History, and World Cultures, few fields of study are beginning to emerge that explores ways that these fields (once studied in isolation) influence each other.
AIM: South Asia Workshop (Spring 2009): Beauty in the Worlds of Islam
"Beauty in the Worlds of Islam" is a two-day K-12 and post-secondary workshop designed to explore the manner in which beauty is created, judged, negotiated, and relayed in Muslim societies from Asia to the Americas. The conference will emphasize the range of ways in which the diverse imaginative spirit of Muslim peoples is manifested in architecture, music, poetry, rhetoric, and calligraphy. It also hopes to draw attention to issues of gender, sexuality, disenfranchisement, and modernity as they shape the ideas of "beauty." The conference takes on the twofold task of enriching American high school and college pedagogies pertaining to social studies and of enhancing interdisciplinary conversation among scholars of history, culture, language, literature, and religion.
download the abstracts(pdf 132 kb)
AIM: South Asia Workshop (Fall 2008): Land and Landscape in South Asia
Land is the base - a product of geology, soil, climate - usually assessed in parcels through its economic functioning (whether a society actually thinks via these abstractions or not). It is composed of the physical world and affected by actions of the living.
Landscape forms the conceptions we have of place or places, propped upon, yet largely independent of, what is meant by "land." It is how we imagine a place, how we picture it to ourselves. "Landscape" thus covers a mental idea - the image of land, something conceived of and therefore made operable or controllable as a concept. "Nature knows nothing of what we call landscape." Landscape is largely an aesthetic, mental concept with great implications for how we structure our lives.
This K-12 workshop addresses topics concerning land and landscape that are often studied separately. Participants will be exposed to ways of thinking about their importance in order to understand the significance of culture (including religion, literature and art) and geography in South Asia.
Hemispheres' Summer Teachers' Institute 2008: Recognizing Rights and Responsibilities in the 21st Century
“All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights. They are endowed with reason and conscience and should act towards one another in a spirit of brotherhood.” - Article 1 of the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights
In what ways are governments and other powerful institutions responsible to act toward individuals and each other “in a spirit of brotherhood”? How do we define human rights, in the most expansive sense of the term? And how are rights and resources being claimed and fought for around the world? Hemispheres Summer Teachers’ Institute 2008 will explore the international context for the rights-related challenges we face today. We will look at specific cases that illustrate how people conceive of and struggle for crucial rights in civil, political, cultural, and economic realms. The workshop program is designed to address the TEKS and TAKS objectives for social studies that deal with topics related to history, government, citizenship, and culture.
AIM: South Asia Workshop (Fall 2007): East Asian Buddhists Pilgrims in South Asia and the Significance of Xuanzang
Pilgrimage is an important practice in many religions, and Buddhism is no exception. Indeed, it is a significant factor in this religion’s phenomenal spread throughout the world. Xuanzang, who lived in the seventh century, was only one of many such Chinese travelers to India in search of “sacred traces” of the Buddha, but his written account of an amazing journey helped to ensure his long-lived fame. His record provides many details of Buddhist practices as well as the appearance of Buddhist sites and images that would otherwise be unknown. Xuanzang’s particular views of Buddhism and Buddhist India have had a profound impact on practioners and scholars alike, and today he is widely invoked as the paradigmatic figure of a Buddhist pilgrim. This one-day symposium considers the significance of the sacred land of the Buddha through a focus on Xuanzang.
Hemispheres' Summer Teachers’ Institute 2007: Restoring Women to World Studies
In much of the social studies—especially courses focused on world history, geography, and culture—there is a growing awareness that the experience of women has been left out of the narrative. As a primary organizing category in our world, gender is a crucial concept in understanding other nations, cultures, and people. Women and gender often appear in the standards and as a theme in courses, but textbooks and other traditional resources do not adequately cover women around the world. This workshop addressed the need to increase global awareness in an increasingly interdependent world, while also responding to the need to consider women and gender in a global cross-cultural perspective. Hemispheres 2007 Summer Teachers’ Institute explored the situation of women—historical and contemporary—in Latin America, the Middle East, Russia, East Europe and Eurasia, and South Asia. We discussed the contributions of notable women to historical and artistic movements, talked about concepts of gender roles and gendered spaces, looked at issues that are driving women’s movements today, and examined the greater context in which all of these take place. The workshop program was designed to address the TEKS and TAKS objectives for social studies that deal with topics related to women in citizenship, culture, and history.
AIM: South Asia Workshop (Spring 2007): The Significance of Ashoka, first Emperor of India
Emperor Ashoka (273-232 BCE) is held to be one of India’s greatest rulers. UT professors from the Department of Asian Studies guided participants in an examination of what we know about Ashoka and the time in which he lived, in order to gain a better understanding of his significance in ancient Indian history. The workshop introduced participants to the political and religious developments that appear to have occurred under Ashoka’s rule, the problems scholars face in assessing the exact features and impact of Ashoka’s reign, and the nature and significance of surviving texts and visual evidence used to define the importance of Ashoka. The workshop concluded with a comparison of Ashoka’s reign to the much later Mughal emperor Akbar (1556-1605), through an analysis of recent Indian films and comics, to consider how popular media shapes views of India’s past rulers. Workshop participants enhanced their teaching of comparative systems of empire, the role of religion in state formation, and the use of primary source materials in the study of the past. The workshop was designed for middle and high school teachers.
AIM: South Asia Workshop (Fall 2006): Photography as Evidence: Interpreting South Asian Photographs
This workshop, specifically designed for high school teachers, provided strategies for teaching about and using photographs as primary source documents. Members of UT faculty guided participants in an analysis of the use of photographs as historical evidence, focusing on a collection of 19th-century photographs and albums of India held at the Ransom Research Center on the UT campus. The workshop also introduced the uses of historical photographs to reveal insights into imperial-colonial relationships on the Indian subcontinent and the impact of historical photographs in continuing to shape understandings of India, Pakistan and Bangladesh.
