Academic

A Day at Bar-Ilan, and Reflections on Workshop Culture

By Kim Krawiec

Yesterday, thanks to the organizational energies of the amazing Yuval Feldman, I spent the day at Bar-Ilan giving a faculty workshop and meeting some of the faculty.  I had already met Yuval, Shahar Lifshitz, and Adi Ayal at a conference at Haifa earlier this month, and Tsilly Dagan, who I blogged about earlier, at a seminar at Tel Aviv.  And many U.S. readers already know Gideon Parchomovsky, who has joint appointments at Bar-Ilan and Penn.

I got great input on my paper.  The Bar-Ilan faculty is talented and welcoming, and the session was fairly informal, which I really enjoyed, because it allowed more time for questions and give and take among all the participants.

This prompted an extended post-workshop discussion about different workshop formats and what works and what doesn?t.  At Duke, our faculty workshops tend to be more formal and performative, with a question queue kept by the workshop chair, fairly limited follow-ups, and the like.  This is an inevitable result, probably, of a larger faculty and audience.  And, of course, I?ve always gotten good feedback on workshops at my home institution. 

But I did really appreciate the informal give-and-take of the Bar-Ilan workshop.  To hear, for example, Adi?s response to a question from Shahar or Tsilly, or an animated exchange between Jacob and Yitzhak or Gideon provided more insight into some of the issues I?m struggling with in this draft than might have been the case in a standard audience-question followed by speaker-answer format. 

It made me wonder what sort of experimentation, if any, Lounge readers and their faculties have attempted with their workshops, and with what levels of success.  Do most of you have a single, general workshop series, or specialized workshop series?  Do you keep question queues or does everyone just chime in when they feel like it?  If the latter, are there worries about one or two faculty monopolizing the event? Are there formal rules or any informal norms regarding follow-up questions?  Are there any methods that you've implemented with particular success or lack of success?  What are the norms about reading the paper in advance of the workshop?

After the workshop, there was time for coffee, conversation, and a lovely dinner with several Bar-Ilan faculty, including Yuval, Tsilly, Adi, Jacob Nussim, Yitzhak Benbaji, Oren Perez, and David Hahn. 

It was another great day meeting new Israeli colleagues.  My last ? I get on a plane in a few hours, thus ending my status as the only person in Israel who doesn?t speak a word of Hebrew.  Maybe by the time I return (which I hope is soon) I?ll have improved.  My senior colleague, Don Horowitz, who is also in Israel teaching a course and giving lectures, and with whom (along with his spouse ? also my colleague -- Judy Horowitz) I spent Christmas day sightseeing in Jerusalem, has been valiantly attempting to improve my pronunciation, but so far to little avail. 

Image above: sightseeing in Jerusalem

Full post as published by The Faculty Lounge on December 30, 2009 (boomark / email).