6th Annual Big 12 Teaching and Learning Conference
Individual Session Descriptions
The following schedule will be updated until the start of the conference. Unless otherwise indicated, all events will take place in the Texas Union.
Thursday, June 13, 9:00-10:00am: Session 1 (Eastwoods Room)
"Trauma-Informed Pedagogy in the Online Classroom: Opportunities and Risks"
Steve Lundy (University of Texas at Austin)
This paper explores the implementation of trauma-informed (TI) pedagogy in primarily digitally-mediated forms of instruction, through a case study, Introduction to Classical Mythology Online. As a topic with a high prevalence of violent content (including sexual violence), classical mythology is a strong candidate for incorporating trauma-informed practices in digitally-mediated instruction. In this course, designers therefore implemented a range of TI strategies, including: self-care syllabus statements and content warnings; opt-out policies; journaling; counseling referrals. The online format also allowed for increased visibility of campus counseling services and trauma experts in the curriculum, through, for example, interviews with counsellors on the representation of trauma in myths, and collaborations in assignment design. This succeeded not only in promoting an inclusive environment for students, but also effectively delineating roles and responsibilities among the instructional staff, design staff, and campus supporters involved in creating the course. In student surveys conducted in the 2017/18 and 2018/19 academic years, more than 90% of students felt that the TI practices in the course assisted in learning and discussing difficult subjects; students also expressed that they would like to see similar approaches employed in other courses. At the same time, a fully trauma-informed pedagogy for online education reveals the needs for a more comprehensively critical approach to digital media. Without this perspective, and as we witness the re-emergence of extremism on various online platforms, the uncritical proliferation of digitally-mediated instruction in higher education risks undermining the moves toward inclusion and access TI practices are designed to promote.
"UDL as a Resource for Decolonizing the Syllabus: An Experiment from Music History"
Andrew Dell'Antonio (University of Texas at Austin)
Music history as a field in US academia has long been grounded in the Euro-American canon of "art" repertories. Recently music historians have begun to include a greater diversity of traditions and styles in their undergraduate pedagogy, to reflect more accurately the student populations they are encountering as well as to mitigate the exclusion of the experiences of those populations. Among the approaches that can be taken to make the music history classroom more inclusive are those that draw from key concepts in Universal Design for Learning (UDL): providing multiple means of representation, action and expression, and engagement. Another approach that has been proposed has been to "decolonize" the music history curriculum, revealing its implicit foundations in the European colonial project and bringing in silenced voices to achieve a more nuanced set of historical and stylistic narratives. Complicating a decolonizing process is the longstanding primacy of European-style musical literacy in the conception of cultural and pedagogical prestige in the US: many traditions that the Europeans displaced had other standards of literacy that were less easily transmitted through writing, but can perhaps be approached through a broader set of communicative approaches. I will be providing a summary of some of the ways that incorporating UDL "multiple means" principles opened up pathways for greater potential cultural inclusion in a recent iteration of a sophomore-level music history course for majors, as well as some of the concerns and challenges that remain as I move to continue refining the approach.
"How Drawing Prompts Can Help Students Solve Technology-Enhanced Problems in Engineering Courses"
Sally Wu (University of Wisconsin - Madison)
Professional engineers often draw to solve problems, yet novice engineering students rarely do so. Prior work in cognitive sciences shows that students face difficulties in drawing and need instructional support to draw and reflect on them, for example, via drawing prompts. Such prompts simply ask or remind students to draw a diagram for specific problems or concepts. These prompts are easy to implement, especially in educational technologies. In engineering education, instructors often use educational technologies because they engage students in solving problems while providing immediate feedback. However, students can potentially identify correct answers in technologies, without engaging with the concepts. To address this issue, drawing prompts on paper can enhance technologies by helping students engage with concepts more effectively. However, it is unknown whether such prompts are effective and how they engage students with diagrams in the context of an engineering course. Hence, I investigate the effectiveness of prompts in RQ1 (Does prompting students to draw diagrams enhance learning outcomes in an undergraduate engineering course?) and student use of prompts in RQ2 (How do students engage with prompts and diagrams?). Results showed that students who were prompted to draw outperformed students who did not receive prompts on exam questions that target conceptual understanding of visual-spatial concepts. Further, students’ use of drawing increased after they received drawing prompts, and these effects persisted to the end of the semester. The findings provide insight into how students engage with drawing and how to address students' difficulties using drawing prompts in educational technology. This work contributes to the growing literature on how to help students engage in active learning and how instructional practices, such as drawing, in the engineering classroom can help students engage with and learn content.
Thursday, June 13, 9:00-10:00am: Session 2 (Santa Rita Room)
"Supplemental Instruction in Early Engineering Classes: Creating Transferable Success"
Nina Telang and Nisha Abraham (University of Texas at Austin)
Our paper features a program called Supplemental Instruction (SI); SI sessions are offered in freshman engineering courses that engage the students in peer and collaborative learning techniques regularly outside of lecture. SI's mission is to help students develop transferable study skills that will improve their academic performance in all of their university coursework. The Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE) department partnered with the Sanger Learning Center to provide Supplemental Instruction programming to the freshman-level course Introduction to Electrical Engineering (EE 302) in fall 2015. This course is the first part of a two-course sequence, the second of which is Circuit Theory (EE 411). Of the students enrolled in EE 411 in the spring 2016 semester, students who attended SI sessions for the EE 302 course in fall 2015 had higher course grades in EE 411 than the non-attendees, though SI was not offered for the EE 411 course. We believe this is preliminary evidence that students who attended SI for EE 302 gained transferable study skills that benefited them in later courses. To investigate the long-term impact of SI attendance and gain a better understanding of what the SI program can offer students in the ECE program, we will conduct the same analysis on past data, from fall 2016 to spring 2017 and from fall 2017 to spring 2018. We will also detail what aspects of SI sessions may be mediators of this long term effect, such as incorporating transferable skills, collaborative group work and effective communication building.
"Rethinking First-Year Student Success: A Path to Deeper Learning"
Shelley Howell (University of Texas - San Antonio)
We often discuss the need to ensure first-year students have the resources and support they need to be successful during their college years. However, we don’t always talk about the need to ensure all students learn how to learn in order to be successful in life. Too often students are focused on grades and faculty are focused on testing facts, sometimes to the detriment of actual learning. In this session, the presenter will share lessons learned in the redesign of a first-year course that includes several opportunities for student autonomy. Participants will learn six strategies that encourage deeper learning, and the pros and cons of each. The presenter will provide successful (and not-so-successful) examples and results from an actual course taught the previous year.
"Undergraduate Students' Perceptions of the Instructor's Impact on their Learning"
Christina Ormsbee and J. Shane Robinson (Oklahoma State University)
Teacher quality is important for universities. It impacts student achievement, program and degree progress, and even retention (Billups, 2008; Lo, 2010). While course instructors are still the primary designers and deliverers of instruction in classrooms, students have become better and more vocal consumers of instruction. They are capable of identifying what instructors do that facilitates their learning, or conversely what instructor do that makes learning more difficult. Instructors can use students as resources as they design and implement their courses. Students have become more aware of their own learning preferences and processes and can articulate those (Bostrom, 2011; Bowles, 2004). While it is not necessarily possible or likely that an instructor can address the widely varying differences in learning preferences represented by a large class of students, they can employ general instructional supports that help students understand clearly the instructor's study expectations, identify critical content, efficiently commit content to memory, and develop new skills. When the teaching and learning support staff work with instructors to help them identify areas of their teaching to improve, a key part of that assistance includes talking to the instructor member's students. Not surprisingly, students are very specific in what they see as helpful learning supports for them. We use that information to help instructors implement more student-focused learning supports that facilitate student achievement. This process made us interested in what university students thought about the effectiveness of their university instructors. A qualitative survey was used to give undergraduate students the opportunity to identify instructor behaviors and/or practices that they thought helped students learn and be successful in their courses. In this session, data shared from the survey will focus on supportive instructor behaviors identified by undergraduate students and those behaviors that students perceive as creating unnecessary barriers to their academic success.
Thursday, June 13, 9:00-10:00am: Session 3 (Quadrangle Room)
"Co-Teaching in Higher Education: Collaborative Activities and Instructor Matching Guidelines"
Kylie Rogalla-Hafley (Indiana University South Bend)
"Co-Teaching in Higher Education: Collaborative Activities and Instructor Matching Guidelines" (.pdf) Handout for Session
This discussion will introduce an innovative faculty co-teaching experience. The presenter teamed up with a colleague to implement various collaborative activities outlined in related literature, and student work was reviewed using a flipped classroom model and platform technology. Assignments were offered in a three-tiered structure, allowing for student flexibility in choosing projects of professional interest. Attendees will gain insight into co-teaching activities, strategies for instructor matching, and the detailed construction of current project. Student feedback and course evaluation data are provided (Spring, 2019). The project represents the first co-teaching collaboration in the presenter's departmental history and holds several implications for faculty across many fields of expertise in academia. The equally ranked instructors (pre-tenure) set goals of providing comprehensive instruction to a group of students with diverse strengths, as well as adapting and developing new pedagogical and professional skills from one another. The process of learning was not only interactive between faculty and students, it was multidimensional between all participants involved. Co-teaching models involve two instructors working collaboratively to enhance learning opportunities, encouraging mutual insights into student work, and shared responsibility of preparing new professionals (Baltrinic, Jencius, & McGlothlin, 2016). These methods of instruction have been widely researched and applied in K-12 settings (Barger-Anderson, Isherwood, & Merhaut, 2013; Villa, Thousand, & Nevin, 2013) although few have applied these formats and examined effectiveness in higher education outside of teacher preparation programs (Bacharach, Heck, Dahlberg, 2008). Some doctoral programs in education foster a mentorship experience for students in the form of teaching assistantships and internships, although unit faculty hold a clear leadership role in the union and experiences are highly personalized according to lead faculty style. While classroom instruction encapsulates much of the faculty day-to-day experience, new professors may be entering into the field with very limited models of "good teaching."