{"id":28077,"date":"2013-12-06T13:26:11","date_gmt":"2013-12-06T20:26:11","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/stage.headlessnauedu-b6hgdzckfdgxgzhe.westus-01.azurewebsites.net\/?p=28077"},"modified":"2016-02-20T12:09:53","modified_gmt":"2016-02-20T19:09:53","slug":"inventive-make-real-connections","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/in.nau.edu\/news\/inventive-make-real-connections\/","title":{"rendered":"Being inventive to make real connections"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><em>\u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0by Laura Huenneke, Provost<\/em><\/p>\n<p>Just before Thanksgiving, rooms were packed with student audiences for the <a href=\"http:\/\/nau.edu\/SBS\/Hunger-Games\/\">Hunger Games Conference<\/a> in the College of Social and Behavioral Sciences\u2014a daylong series of talks, poster presentations and discussions centered on social science analyses of the fictional society of Panem from <i>The Hunger Games<\/i> trilogy. From criminal justice approaches to political science, from media influence to economic systems, the dystopic novels present fertile ground for exploring important themes. Inventive faculty gave students experience in how social scientists analyze, interpret and understand the world.<\/p>\n<p>This is just one example of building scholarly approaches on the interests and experience of today\u2019s students. We often see themes of body image and gender roles as portrayed in today\u2019s media; for example, in the research projects of the spring\u2019s Undergraduate Research Symposium. And a video game <a href=\"http:\/\/nau.edu\/CAL\/Interdisciplinary-Writing-Program\/Rhetoric-Symposium\/\">symposium<\/a>\u2014encouraging students to analyze the images and messages of these virtual worlds\u2014is being planned for late March by the Interdisciplinary Writing Program.<\/p>\n<p>Some wonder about using young adult novels or current culture as hooks to interest students; they argue that \u201creal\u201d world events and serious scholarly books might be more appropriate subjects for a college-wide conference. And I read some protests this past fall about contemporary fiction, rather than the classics or great books, being used in <a href=\"http:\/\/nau.edu\/University-College\/NAUreads\/\">first-year student reading programs such as NAU Reads<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p>But recent advances in cognitive science demonstrate that building links to a student\u2019s prior knowledge, understanding and even misconceptions can make or break the hoped-for learning. And given today\u2019s world (from economic inequality to the impact of social media), I found the application of social science approaches to the fictional Panem to be exciting and compelling. I\u2019m grateful that so many of our faculty are using creative, innovative approaches to connect to our students.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p><a class=\"search-results-excerpt-link\" href=\"https:\/\/in.nau.edu\/news\/inventive-make-real-connections\/\">\u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0by Laura Huenneke, Provost Just before Thanksgiving, rooms were packed with student audiences for the Hunger Games Conference in the College of Social and Behavioral Sciences\u2014a daylong series of talks, poster presentations and discussions centered on social science analyses of the fictional society of Panem from The Hunger Games trilogy. From&hellip;<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":46,"featured_media":25691,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[543,542,70,541,24],"class_list":["post-28077","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-views-from-nau","tag-cognitive-science","tag-curricular-innovation","tag-laura-huenneke","tag-nau-reads","tag-northern-arizona-university"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/in.nau.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/28077","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/in.nau.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/in.nau.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/in.nau.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/46"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/in.nau.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=28077"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/in.nau.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/28077\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/in.nau.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/25691"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/in.nau.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=28077"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/in.nau.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=28077"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/in.nau.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=28077"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}