What are you thinking about this week?

This semester, PRESS has an artist-in-residence. In January Dr Alke Gröppel-Wegener came over from Staffordshire University in the UK for two weeks to work with students on visual ways of integrating writing into a number of subjects. As part of her stay, she also ran a number of workshops for faculty, where we explored her techniques in order to develop our own professional development, particularly through the medium of postcards. We made ‘academic mantra’ cards, with short text that inspires us in our teaching or advice we ‘give’ to students regularly; and we thought about the goals we have for the rest of the semester. You can see how Melanie is doing this here. And you can go here and here to see what Alke is doing. At the end of the semester, Alke will be back for follow-up and an exhibit related to this process.

This dovetails nicely with some of the things we do at PRESS.

You might be familiar with PRESS’ ever popular mantra cards – portraying inspirational statements, slogans or quotes – so popular we even made our 2014 calendar on the theme. Now we want to fill our window with not just our, but also YOUR mantras – some of which might well make it onto cards…

So come in and pop your mantra on a post-it, ready to add to our collection! If you are not local, write your mantras in our comments and we will add them to our window.