Best Paper: Monica H. Green, “An Omni-Crisis at the Intersection of Disciplines: Teaching the Black Death to STEM and Humanities Students”
For a generation of students who already understand that pandemics are indeed “omni-crises,” courses focused on the Second Plague Pandemic can be a portal onto a new perspective of their own changing world. Dr. Green’s critically astute paper on the Black Death focused on two key challenges of teaching plague studies – zeroing in on the scientific principles necessary to appreciate the way pandemics are understood and investigated now – and two key pedagogical perspectives that instructors may wish to anticipate and incorporate when teaching this kind of material: instructing students how to think of the microbial world before there were microscopes, and engaging with the ethical questions raised by newly developing technologies and channels of communication.
Best Presentation: Kevin Moberly and Brent Moberly, “Fail Backwards: Bridging STEM and Medieval Studies through Critical Game Design”
Few fields appear as unmarketable, irrelevant, and unprofitable in the high-tech, market-driven discourse that surrounds STEM education than Medieval Studies. The irony, however, is that the same period which has seen the emergence of STEM as an educational priority has also witnessed a resurgence of popular interest in the medieval, and amongst the most popular and profitable of these are Medieval-themed video games, which have long been a staple of the gaming industry. Dr. Kevin Moberly and Dr. Brent Moberly’s highly engaging presentation discusses how Medieval Studies as a field can leverage popular interest in the medieval to teach students the skills that are essential to STEM success – and inspiring them to achieve a more nuanced appreciation of the Middle Ages – through game-based learning.