I'm Dr. Julie Newell.
I teach in the Department of
Social and International Studies,
which is in the School of Arts and Sciences.
It's the newest department on campus
and one of the smallest departments,
but we cover a lot of disciplines.
We have political science,
history, geography, languages, psychology.
We also have the Science, Technology, and Society program
and every student who comes here
here has to take a core course in Science, Technology, and Society,
and I coordinate that program.
The rest of my teaching load outside
STS is pretty much American history,
which is also a core course here.
A core course here isn't like it would be at,
at UGA or a big school where you have,
you sit in a room with 250 or 500 students.
I have a maximum of
40 students in my US history core course.
Which means that even in a history core course,
we can do hands-on,
we can do activities,
we can work in small groups.
We can deal with the material in a lot of
different ways because it's a small class.
It's really nice to do
that because what I want students to
really focus on is not just memorizing,
being able to regurgitate historical data,
but I want them to be able to use
historical material to understand
what's going on in the news.
And in fact, my end of unit assignments aren't exams.
They are take-home essays where you pick
a current events topic
that you're interested in and write
a brief essay on how that's related
to the material in the unit that we just finished.
So in my history class,
I use applications-based learning all the time.
The Science, Technology, and Society Program
is designed to make sure
that every student has an opportunity to
think about the ways in which science and technology,
because our majors are all
related to science and technology,
have affected and are affected by society and culture.
That core course we've managed to keep small
so that we can do it reading and discussion.
And students really get a chance to
play with ideas and think about
impacts and outcomes and unintended consequences.
One of the things we really
want to do here is make sure that
we don't just offer science and technology education,
but that we offer science and technology education
that has a real kind of social responsibility to it.
That students not only have
very practical hands-on application,
but they understand the consequences of
the choices they make and the things
they do as professionals.
And that's part of my job as the STS coordinator is
to make sure there's a place for that
to happen in the curriculum.
One of the things we've been trying very hard to do in
the Department of Social and International Studies,
is to create more opportunities for
students to have study abroad experience,
to do internships with
companies that work internationally.
Make sure students have access
to language education because
so much of science and
technology now is internationalized.
And we want to make sure that our students have
an opportunity to get
that experience so that they've got that,
to take that into the workplace as part of their,
their toolkit, if you will.
In our department, we have a
major in international studies,
global technology, where students do,
I kind of think of it as a, as a doorway.
They do a pillar in International Studies.
They do a pill or in any one of
about 14 different technical fields,
including a general technology option.
And then we tie those together with
some upper division STS, Science, Technology,
and Society courses so that students have
a really integrated program of study
that includes both the international
and the technological.
But as a department, we work
hard also to make sure that students who
are concentrating in a technological or scientific field,
an opportunity for international experience,
study abroad,
an opportunity to take classes that let them learn
about the international context
in which there'll be working.
We have an international honor society for
students who've taken advantage of those opportunities.
And those students wear beautiful,
multi-colored stoles when they go through
graduation so that they're very visible.
We're very excited about being able to
open some of those doorways for students.
We've had for a number of years now a, um, a,
an exchange program in Germany with some of
their technical institutes that let
our students actually see
some of what's going on in Germany,
not just in their educational institutions,
but in their, their industries as well.
So wherever we can make those connections for students,
that really helps because there's no business or industry
in this century that's really going to be able to work
as if it didn't work in an international context.
And our students need to be ready for that.
And that's part of what we try to do throughout there.
I think the thing that's really exciting
for me about teaching at Southern Polytechnic,
I went to a state university in
Idaho with about 40 thousand students.
I was a graduate student at
a state university in
Wisconsin that was much bigger than that.
And where the real, the real emphasis
was educating graduate students.
Undergraduates were just the fodder that
kinda kept that the place going.
And you could tell that it was,
the real priority was graduate study.
And to be able to teach
core courses here where I get to know all my students.
I have 40 students in a class.
Every class is taught by a professor.
I have real contact and get to
work with students on an ongoing basis.
That's the kind of teaching I've always wanted to do.
It's a wonderful place to be a teacher.
And I think it's a great place to be a student.
And it's the kind of place I've
always wanted to be. I've been
bigger places but I haven't been
better places.