Nancy Ingabire Abayo and Xu Ma to Receive Information Literacy Grants

Professors Nancy Ingabire Abayo and Xu Ma will each receive a grant for what they have proposed to do in their respective courses, CE 203 Envisioning a Sustainable World and REL 233 Female Divinities and Demons in East Asia. The grants are funded by the Office of the Provost.

Professor Ingabire Abayo plans to use in-class discussions, debates, reflections, and semester-long projects to challenge students to think critically about information and consider the thought process behind arguments. For example, students will explore questions such as: What is the main argument? Who stands to benefit from the research? What forms of expertise and lived experience are considered? What assumptions are the authors making, and what is their positionality? For the multi-step individual project, they will draw on various forms of expertise, including local knowledge, and present their findings using their preferred mode of Sci-Art (i.e., Communicate Science through Art), such as songs, audio, sketches, drawings, animated presentation or films, or even knitting. In addition, students will discuss sustainability issues and successes in their own hometowns / the Lehigh Valley and in Africa.  The local and global emphasis will students challenge current international efforts to address global concerns and also further the importance of approaching sustainability from the community perspective. Research and instruction librarians Rebecca McCall and Courtney Dalton will collaborate with Professor Ingabire Abayo on this course.

Students in Professor Ma’s class will examine supernatural female figures, as represented in diverse textual and non-textual sources. They will address questions such as: How did these female figures come about? Do they perpetuate gender stereotypes and norms, or serve as anti-patriarchal models celebrating femininity and female power? What does knowledge creation look like in a male-dominated context, and how can alternative forms of knowledge represent women’s voices? Students will start with the Making History Herstory storytelling project to explore how the image of a heroine and her roles have evolved over time. They will then draw from secondary sources and additional primary sources to further analyze the creation and evolution of the supernatural women and develop their research question and arguments. As part of their final project, students will use a creative format—a song, a drama script, a mock dating app, a board game, a children’s book, a video, a design portfolio, or an interactive storytelling map—to juxtapose the two heroines they have researched and presented. They will also maintain a research journal throughout the semester. Director of Research and Instructional Services, Lijuan Xu, will be working with Professor Ma on this course.