We found 6 results that contain "religious observance"

Religious Observance at MSU

All members of the MSU community, including educators and students, are eligible to observe their religious beliefs. Designing your course schedule to avoid conflicts with major days of religious observance will reduce the need to resolve individual conflicts and will better reflect and serve MSU's diverse and multicultural community.

The Office of the Provost website maintains a religious observance calendar and FAQ page (https://provost.msu.edu/academic-resources/religious-observance-calendar with dates through 2026) for educators and students. Educators are encouraged to consult this calendar before scheduling exams, tests, and major assignments.

The full policy on religious observance, including instructors' responsibilities to accommodate students' religious observance as well as students' responsibility to inform instructors about potential conflicts, can be found https://reg.msu.edu/roinfo/notices/religiouspolicy.aspx here.

A Peer-Educator Dialogue Guide is now available for MSU Educators who want to collaborate in bettering their educator practice through observation and dialogue with other educators (https://iteach.msu.edu/iteachmsu/groups/iteachmsu/stories/2393?param=post). If you'd like to print a copy of the Guide to complete, you can download a copy by clicking the attachment (.docx, 6.32MB) below.

Note: this resource was adapted 1/2006 from Chism, N.V.N. (1999) Chapter 6: Classroom Observation, Peer Review of Teaching: A Sourcebook. Bolton, MA: Anker Publishing, by Angela R. Linse, Executive Director, Schreyer Institute for Teaching Excellence, Penn State.

Chapter 5: Notes and questions
1. Erasure: “We must engage in critical self-reflection about the conscious and unconscious ways higher education continues to participate in Native people’s erasure and develop decolonial engagement practices that foreground Native movements for cultural/political sovereignty and self-determination.”
2. Assimilation: “…the problematic goal of assimilation…”
3. Social Justice: “…scholars must work toward social change.”
4. Storying: “Stories are not separate from theory.”
5. Strategies offered:
a. Develop and Maintain Relationships with Indigenous Communities
i. Can a faculty member do this within their pedagogy? How?
ii. Can we encourage our students to do this in our classes/programs? How?
b. Honor Connections to Place
c. Build Community with Indigenous Students
d. Support and Protect Indigenous Student Cultural Practices
e. Foster Student Connections to Home Communities
f. Reframe Concepts of Student Engagement (WE, meaning the university community writ large, are the uninvited guests)

Chapter 6: Notes and Questions
1. “Whiteness is not a culture but a social concept”
2. “Critical White Studies”: ideas for how to use/introduce this to students? Will you? Why or why not? (“critically analyzing Whiteness and racial oppression from the habits and structures of the privileged group”)
3. In your current class design/structure, what ways could your own whiteness influence your students in invisible ways? Does it?
4. In your current class design/structure, what ways could your white students’ whiteness influence your POC, international students, etc… in invisible ways? Does it?
5. What aspects of “humanizing pedagogy” happen in your classes?
6. Have you ever shared your course design with a POC peer?
7. Thoughts of where “Nontraditional” white students (older students, part-time students, transfer students, commuter students, student-parents, veteran students (and I would argue other cross-sectional/intersectional identities of queerness, transgender students, religious minorities, disability, etc…)) and traditional white students INTERSECT or DIVERGE in terms of student success initiatives?

There are important engagements between peer-educator and instructor-educator before and after the actual learning session observation. Check out the attachment (.docx, 86KB) to review this process and the considerations of each "step".

AI Commons Bulletin 1/29/2025
Human-curated news about generative AI for Teaching and Learning in Higher Education.

✨ Model Course Framework for Teaching Ethical and Effective Use of AI
Educators from LUT University, Finland, lay out a course with 4 modules;
- Introduction to Generative AI
- Ethics in Generative AI Usage
- Core Principles of Efficiency and Prompt Engineering
- Project Work for Practicing Efficient AI Usage

Learn More: https://scholarspace.manoa.hawaii.edu/server/api/core/bitstreams/7d863060-bedf-446e-9862-154add2711fc/content

💯 ChatGPT4 Enrolled in an Online Masters Course and Earned Top Grades
In an online Master of Health Administration course, neither the instructor nor students knew the top-performing student was AI. ChatGPT excelled in quizzes, tests, attendance, and discussions.

Learn More: https://www.ingentaconnect.com/contentone/aupha/jhae/2024/00000040/00000004/art00005

👣 Step-By-Step Instructions for Building an AI Skills Trainer
Law professor Alexandria Serra shares how they created “MootMentor AI” to provide students practical legal advocacy experience. Key insights include pre-building decisions. See page 91 for details.

Learn More: https://scholarlycommons.law.case.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1168&context=jolti

💬 Communication Teacher: Special Issue on AI
A special issue of Communication Teacher explores four AI adaptation stances: observation, replication, enhancement, and transformation. Articles cover how educators integrate generative AI, with assignments, student reflections, and practical applications for communication courses.

Learn More: https://doi.org/10.1080/17404622.2024.2419012

Bulletin items compiled by MJ Jackson and Sarah Freye with production assistance from Lisa Batchelder. Get the AI-Commons Bulletin on our Microsoft Teams channel, at aicommons.commons.msu.edu, or by email (send an email to aicommons@msu.edu with the word “subscribe”).

It is important to note that the peer-educator dialogue should be an iterative process of lifelong learning and practice improvement. These are tools aimed at helping educators learn with and from one another. How an instructor-educator utilizes or shares the feedback provided in through this dialogue process is completely up to them.

Click the attachment below to download a copy of the Peer-Educator Dialogue Protocol (.docx, 41KB).