Dear Friends,

Last June I shared an update on the remarkable success of the crowdfunding effort to support the Robyn Gittleman Graduate Teaching Fellowships at the ExCollege. These fellowships have had an incredible impact, honoring Robyn while also supporting a greater depth of course offerings and graduate-student teaching opportunities. This program was started in 2016 by a Tufts Innovates grant shortly after Robyn retired, and through your generosity, it will continue through this coming academic year.

That said, as we approach our fiscal year end, I’m writing today to ask for your support to keep the program going beyond 2019.

The Fellowships propagate Robyn’s teaching philosophy: interactive methods that excite new connections in students and how they see themselves in the world. Here are a few quick comments by undergrads about their Gittleman courses and instructors.

This course (Sonic Dimensions: The Culture, Theory, and Politics of Sound) opened up the field of sound studies to me.  My final paper was on the subject of sound-making practices that are associated with loss or death, something which I had not previously been exploring or considering. Taking on loss as a sonic experience…has the potential to inform how I deal with loss or hardship, and how I can reform my own sonic behavior to be more conducive to healing.

Wonderful instructor! She used the ExCollege course format very well to shift our perspectives in different ways throughout the class (Performing China on the American Stage and Screen). When presenting historical/cultural material, she challenged us to think about the reasoning or causes behind everything we learned. We were always encouraged to dig deeper and see plays/films in a new way.

Our past Fellows, now in academia or in the job market, are equally enthusiastic about their Gittleman opportunity.

My experiences in the ExCollege have helped me greatly in this job. My courses actually incorporate a lot of the activities and lessons I developed for my ExCollege courses.

The experience of solo-teaching a seminar course not only looks great on my CV - interviewers always ask about it - but provided me with so much hands-on classroom experience to reflect on in my cover letters, interviews, and as I continue to teach and develop coursework.

And looking ahead, here’s a preview of the five Robyn Gittleman courses we’ll be offering in the fall.

The View From Putin’s Window: Understanding Russia’s National Security Strategy

Let’s Talk About Sex: Consent in Literature, Culture, and Education

Scientific Illustration

SEALs, Snake Eaters, and Air Commandos: The Secret History of U.S. Special Operations Forces

The Technology of Space Exploration: From Voyager to Mars 2020

In sum, we would greatly appreciate your help in sustaining the Robyn Gittleman Graduate Teaching Fellowships. You can make outright gifts through this giving link. 

If you would consider a multi-year pledge in support of this program, or if you have questions about how to make a gift of stock or by some means other than credit card, please contact my colleague, Erica Lennon, our Associate Director of the Tufts Fund, at Erica.Lennon@tufts.edu or (617) 627-5386.

Thank you for continuing to support the ExCollege and for carrying forward Robyn’s legacy.

Sincerely,

Howard

We’ve wrapped up our first-ever crowdfunding campaign, and with over $28,000 raised, we’re thrilled to announce it’s been a smashing success! A heartfelt thank you to all the generous alumni and friends of the ExCollege and GSAS who supported this program.  

Without further ado, we’re excited to announce the 2018 Robyn Gittleman Graduate Teaching Fellows and the innovative courses they will teach in the ExCollege in the fall:

Harvesting Solar Energy

Ahmed Zayan is a fourth year MS/PhD Candidate in the Electrical and Computer Engineering Department at Tufts. His extensive and broad interests in modern day technology has carried him across multiple disciplines in the field of science and engineering starting with a Bachelor's degree in Mechanical Engineering and two Master's in Material Science and Engineering from the Masdar Institute in the UAE, as well as Electrical and Computer Engineering from Tufts. His interests include novel photovoltaic setups, device simulation and solar energy harvesting. His course addresses these questions and more: How exactly does solar power work? What considerations go into the successful use of this technology?

Performing China on the American Stage and Screen

Yizhou Huang is a PhD candidate in the Department of Drama and Dance at Tufts, and is currently working on her dissertation, “Staging Colonial Modernity: Performances for English-Speaking Audiences in Shanghai between the Two World Wars.” Her research interests include political theatre, Chinese theatre, and intercultural performance. As an international student from China who came to the United States for graduate studies, she is interested in people, history, and ideas that cross borders. At Tufts, she has worked extensively with underrepresented students about issues of race, gender, and sexuality. The course considers theatre, film, television shows, sport as performance, and more to answer the question, what do representations of China on the American stage and screen tell us about China and about the United States?

Sonic Dimensions: The Culture, Theory, and Politics of Sound

Alexander Ruggeri is a fifth year PhD candidate in the English Department at Tufts, where he focuses on Modernist literature, sound studies, and critical theory. He has taught writing and composition courses, as well as a course at Emerson College on Modernism and Sound. He earned an MA in English and American Literature from NYU. This interdisciplinary course delves into sound studies by engaging philosophy, literature, critical theory, history, musicology, and linguistics as part of its approaches to thinking seriously about sound.

Programming for Everyone: MATLAB and Its Possibilities

Junyuan Lin is a PhD student in the Math department at Tufts where she has taught math and programming courses, including MATLAB. Her research is in Graph Theory, and her interests include developing preconditioners to solve ill-conditioned Graph Laplacians derived from protein networks, social networks and natural language processing word embeddings. She wrote in her application, “As programming skills seem to be a necessity nowadays, more students of different majors, including arts and social sciences, desire to learn to program…By the end of the course, no one will be afraid of programming languages.”

We’ll be keeping you updated as the Fellows begin their courses and participate in the teaching roundtable with ExCollege Director Howard Woolf in the fall. And, because our campaign was so successful, we’re halfway to our goal of funding the 2019 cohort of Fellows as well. Thank you!

We're just past the halfway mark of our first ever crowdfunding campaign to ensure that the Robyn Gittleman Graduate Teaching Fellowships are fully funded in 2018 and beyond. Thank you, our "Friends of the ExCollege," for stepping up quickly and generously to enable us to fund not just two, but four Fellows next semester.

But even more exciting, our video star and "Bees to Beetles" Fellow, Rachael Bonoan, successfully defended her dissertation yesterday! Congratulations Dr. Bonoan! 

We were especially moved by some of the comments posted on social media (@RachaelEBee) that show Rachael's influence, in particular with regard to women in STEM. Her defense had colleagues skyping in from across the globe, and audience members - including friends from industry jobs, fellow beekeepers, and former students - contended with Tuesday's blizzard to attend and share in the celebratory cake. 

We'd like to think that the experience of teaching her own course and the skills gained through the Robyn Gittleman Fellowship contributed to Rachael's hard-earned success.

We're so close to funding four Fellows in the fall!  Help us clinch it and fund the program into 2019.

What a week it’s been! We are amazed at the generosity of our friends and alumni who have been quick to ensure that the Gittleman roundtable will have a full cohort of teaching fellows. We’re now aiming to fund the program into 2019. Please help us get there! Gifts of any size are genuinely appreciated.

Everyone here at the ExCollege and the Graduate School is so excited, but this former Fellow says it best:

Participating in the Gittleman Teaching Fellowship has been the most rewarding and inspiring experience. I had the chance to design and teach my dream class, and most importantly, I shared my favorite subject with the most dedicated and curious students I'd ever encountered. The meetings with the other graduate fellows were extremely helpful and often eye-opening - during our discussion and brainstorming sessions I discovered multiple approaches to teaching, problem-solving, and pedagogy. I am eternally thankful to the ExCollege and Robyn Gittleman for this opportunity. I hope that other graduate students will have a chance to participate in this unique program.

Irina Yakubovskaya

PhD Candidate, Department of Drama 

Robyn Gittleman Graduate Teaching Fellow, Fall 2016

“The Little Prince: The Book and Beyond”

We’re thrilled that friends of the ExCollege and the Graduate School stepped up so quickly and generously to fund the Robyn Gittleman Fellowships.  In just five days, you helped us fully fund not just two Fellows, but three! We are deeply grateful for the outpouring of support. It’s clear that Robyn’s legacy and the mission of the Fellowships is resonating with so many in the Tufts community.

Our aim now is to have a cohort of at least five Fellows next semester, so please keep up the momentum and let’s aim for another $10,000 to fund two more fellows.