Course

Designing for Care: A Faculty Book Club

Ended Dec 31, 2024

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Full course description

Workshop Learning Objectives

  1. Increase student motivation and engagement through strategies that allow students autonomy and choice in learning experiences.
  2. Build information literacy, digital literacy, and/or metacognitive skills in any course.
  3. Meet the needs of students with disabilities, both seen and unseen, in our courses.

This book club will explore human-centric pedagogies that will increase student engagement and connection in classes with an online component at FSW (asynchronous online, blended, live online and live flex). Each month the book club will read a chapter from the text Designing for Care by Jerod Quinn, Martha Burtis, Surita Jhangiani, and Catherine J. Denial. Microsoft Teams will be the primary means for book club communications to be shared. Participants can respond to each month’s discussion question in Teams, although there will also be a live discussion the last Monday of the month in September, October, and November at 1:30 pm via Zoom.

 The book we will be studying, Designing for Care, is available free of charge from Pressbooks:  https://pressbooks.pub/designingforcare/

Facilitators

Dr. April Ring and Dr. Scott Ortolano

Dr. Scott Ortolano’s scholarship focuses on the cognitive and existential repercussions of consumerism—both during the modernist period and in the contemporary world. He has recently published work related to this topic in The F. Scott Fitzgerald Review, South Atlantic Review, The Explicator, Women’s Studies, and Terror in Global Narrative: The Aesthetics and Representation of 9/11 in the Age of Late-Late Capitalism (Palgrave Macmillan, 2016). He is also interested in developing effective twenty-first century pedagogical strategies and the future of English and writing in the academy. He has recently published on this topic in Teaching Hemingway and the Natural World (Kent State UP, 2018) and the South Atlantic Review, co-edited Perspectives on the Short Story, an anthology of short fiction published by Pearson, and curated a host of open pedagogical resources. His most recent work includes Popular Modernism and Its Legacies: From Pop Literature to Video Game (Bloomsbury, 2018) and a co-authored OER textbook, Starting the Journey: An Intro to College Writing (PressBooks, 2023).

Dr. April Ring started her career as a high school reading and English teacher for the Lee County School District in 2002. For 15 years, she taught at-risk high school students, preparing them to meet graduation requirements and for college and careers. Her job titles included department chair, teacher leader, and reading coach and she spent most summers contributing to curriculum, assessment, and/or professional development committees benefitting high schools across the district.

She accepted a position as a full-time professor teaching Cornerstone Experience at Florida SouthWestern State College in 2018 after teaching as an adjunct for several years. In 2021, she was elected to serve as Chair of the Academic Success Department. As department chair, she has developed an online certification course for teaching Cornerstone, contributed to the creation of an OER textbook for Cornerstone Experience, and redesigned the Cornerstone Experience Canvas Shell. She has presented numerous professional development trainings, frequently encouraging faculty to engage students through innovative technologies.

She graduated summa cum laude from the University of Southern Mississippi with a B.A. in English Education. She earned a Master's in Reading Education from FGCU in 2013 and completed her Ed.D. in Higher Education Administration at the University of Florida in May 2018.