CITL Faculty Fellow (2017–18)
Raoul Birnbaum is Professor of Buddhist Studies in the Department of History of Art & Visual Culture, and the Gary D. Licker Memorial Chair in Cowell College (2015–18). He was awarded the UC Santa Cruz Academic Senate (CoT) Excellence in Teaching Award in 2013. In an emerging student culture that especially values “certainty,” security in quantitative results, and rapid multi-tasking, he inquired into innovative teaching methods and strategies that encourage students to feel more comfortable with methods of inquiry that place a premium on slow and attentive reading and patient visual analysis. The larger aim of the project is to find strategies for students to gain greater confidence when entering a world of questions that may not have fixed answers.