Individual Fellow Initiatives

Displaying 1 - 25 of 87
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Internship in the Media Industries

Cohort: 2021
Fellow: Wenhong Chen

Internships have increasingly become a critical step in the college-to-career transition in the media industries and beyond.

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Digital Research Lab (DRL): Projects For Intersectional Justice

Cohort: 2021
Fellow: Tanya Clement

Research and scholarship in Digital Humanities applies technology to humanities questions and subjects technology to humanistic interrogation. DH pedagogy is difficult to develop because DH is inherently collaborative and interdisciplinary, crossing the humanities, archaeology, arts and architecture, computer science, film and media studies, information studies, geography, and the social sciences. DH project-based work can also provide opportunities for professional development in humanities-oriented technology.

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The Compassion Project

Cohort: 2021
Fellow: Natalie Czimskey

In a Gallup poll of UT alumni (2014), only 15-17% of UT alumni strongly believed that faculty cared about them as a person. The Gallup report (2014) relayed information on various measures of alumni well-being. Gallup found that college experience was more likely to correlate to alumni well-being than the type of university attended. Having a professor who they believed cared about them as a person was the number one driving factor in alumni well-being. This means there is long-term impact to the short-term care of our students.

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CNS Career Cohorts

Cohort: 2021
Fellow: Shelly Rodriguez

To provide the best student experience, we must have strong, diverse, and empowered faculty educating them. Non-Tenure Track Faculty (NTTF) make up over half of the university faculty, teach many of the biggest courses, and serve large numbers of undergraduates. Since these large courses tend to be introductory offerings NTTF are most likely to give undergraduates their first impressions of the university. However, despite their significant contributions, the needs of NTTF often remain incidental to mainstream discourse.

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Sync-Up - Teach-Up - Texas Teach-Up on Demand

Cohort: 2021
Fellow: Julie Schell

Educators need increased opportunities to participate in Texas Teach-Up in order to benefit from modeling teaching at UT Austin. This project will explore two specific elements of this problem. Currently you can only participate during officially scheduled time/dates, you cannot participate on-demand. This limits access to only those who can make it, or are a part of the university, during the on-schedule times and dates. Additionally, as an on-schedule event, seats have closing limits. Some people who want to participate may not be able to do so because the session is full.

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Making New Scientists: Supporting the Training of Incoming Science Majors

Cohort: 2021
Fellow: Ruth Shear

Traditional science degree programs concentrate primarily on content and are not known for preparing their graduates with other skills needed for scientific careers.

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Critical Race Theory in The Steve Hicks School of Social Work

Cohort: 2021
Fellow: Sarah Sloan

The challenge this project addresses is to enhance our current curriculum at the Steve Hicks School of Social Work (SHSSW) and provide some of the tools necessary to meet our mandates as a profession. To give some context, the discipline of Social Work is centered in principles from the National Association of Social Workers (NASW) Code of Ethics which includes a strong and clear commitment to working toward social justice and to dismantle systemic barriers that keep all people from liberation and wellness.

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Peer Mentor Leadership Project

Cohort: 2021
Fellow: Gwendolyn Stovall

UT CNS Freshman Research Initiative (FRI) peer mentors are a critical component of FRI success! FRI peer mentors, many serving as student teachers, guide undergraduate students in scientific research activities. For many, that includes leading meetings, providing student feedback, creatively solving problems and helping students connect the dots, honing interpersonal social skills, effectively communicating, and more – all 21st Century skills (Trilling and Fadel, 2009).

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Empathetic Pedagogy: Affirmation-Centered Teaching, Course Materials, And Evaluation Strategies

Cohort: 2021
Fellow: Louis Waldman

This project is divided into two principal phases, one for each of the two fellowship years. In the first semester, I am developing a comprehensive set of resources (documents, bibliographies, discussion outlines, and presentations) that in the second, third, and fourth semesters will formthe basis of a faculty learning community based in the College of Fine Arts.

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Developing Experiential Learning in Organizations

Cohort: 2021
Fellow: Amy Nathan Wright

While there are a few internship courses offered by the College of Liberal Arts, and a handful of internship classes offered in individual programs and departments, most of these are web-based courses, and none seem to offer other organizational experiences, such as service or leadership experiences.

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Podcasting as Experiential Learning in Classics

Cohort: 2020
Fellow: Deborah Beck

Students in pre-modern disciplines face greater challenges in finding productive and engaging avenues for Experiential Learning than students in fields whose connections to current events are more self-evident. Podcasting offers students of ancient Greece and Rome a way to connect with people outside their classrooms, both other students and interested members of the general public. It also requires them to hone their oral presentation skills and to think about how to present the same idea to different audiences, both of which are fundamental to critical thinking.

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Pharmacy Practice Lab Redesign

Cohort: 2020
Fellow: Ashley Castleberry

The College of Pharmacy is embarking on one of the biggest curricular revisions in the past decade by creating a Pharmacy Practice Lab sequence spanning all six semesters of our didactic program. The course series will combine content from seven existing courses in order to decrease redundancy and duplication to create increased alignment and reinforcement. Rather than students learning content within “the silo” of a single course, students will be required to retain and apply their knowledge and skills throughout the entire curriculum.

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Mentored Research Learning: An Evaluation

Cohort: 2020
Fellow: Michael Findley

Mentored research defies the traditional higher education approach, which separates research and teaching into distinct activities. Instead, mentored research fully integrates faculty research activities and student learning. In this approach, researchers do not simply carry out their research in isolation with a paid set of PhD-level research assistants. Further, students do not simply learn from in-class lectures or more traditional out-of-classroom experiences, such as study abroad.

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Improving Scientific Literacy and Climate Change Understanding for all UT Students

Cohort: 2020
Fellow: Steven Finkelstein

In CNS we teach ~6500 non-science majors in our introductory classes each year (>2000 in Astronomy alone). These are the last science courses these students take, which presents us with an opportunity to make a lasting impression. I propose to lead a Faculty Learning Community (FLC) to design module focused on scientific literacy and the science behind climate change. This module will be based on active learning, making use of the abundance of research that shows students retain information better by doing rather than listening.

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Being Human in Physics

Cohort: 2020
Fellow: Vernita Gordon

At UT Austin, undergraduate women are about twice as likely to leave the physics major then are undergraduate men. This does not arise primarily from academic difficulties–women physics majors and men physics majors are dismissed (for academic reasons) or drop out at roughly the same rates. Rather, women are more likely to switch out of the physics major into other majors than are men.

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Race, Democracy, and Global Social Justice: How Studying Inequality and Vulnerability can Transform the World

Cohort: 2020
Fellow: Peniel Joseph

My initiative will achieve better learning outcomes in undergraduate and graduate students in History and the LBJ School by examining the intersection of history and contemporary policy, specifically its disparate impact on communities of color. Currently, departments, centers, faculty and students work independently of one another and lack valuable opportunities to collaborate. Genuine collaboration has evolved into a rare and difficult concept.

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Watering Two Plants With One Hose: Protocolization of Progress to Promote Practical Resource Sharing

Cohort: 2020
Fellow: Nico Osier

When I first became faculty at UT Austin, I inherited an existing course; for a variety of reasons, I felt the need to overhaul all of the lectures. This process, however, proved time-consuming and I found myself unable to complete all of the lectures as originally planned prior to the start of the semester. Moreover, even the lectures that I did overhaul continued to have flaws and I was growing increasingly frustrated with the continued inadequacy of my lessons, despite devoting considerable time and energy to them. This was disheartening and my other responsibilities (e.g.

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Teamwork Makes the Dreamwork

Cohort: 2020
Fellow: Madeleine Holland

While instructors across disciplines frequently rely on group or team projects in their courses, and the ability to work effectively in a team is a highly valued workplace skill, many courses currently lack explicit content or instruction focused on building skills related to teamwork. Students will be provided with a series of short (10-15 minute) pre-recorded videos, in which various aspects of working effectively in a team are taught. Students may be asked to complete short comprehension check or reflection questions related to these videos.

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Engineering Sentences: A Cross-Disciplinary Training Program

Cohort: 2020
Fellow: D'Arcy Randall

Although Cockrell School of Engineering (CSE) undergraduates take a required engineering writing class, which I teach for Chemical Engineering, they typically struggle with writing laboratory and long-form research reports. Helping CSE students to overcome this obstacle matters because writing technical reports prepares engineering students for the writing-intensive work of a professional engineer. Faculty teaching these classes would also benefit from higher quality student work.

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Student Success and Well-being

Cohort: 2020
Fellow: Nina Telang

My project is designed to support engineering students primarily in their freshman and sophomore years, when they struggle the most, resulting in high failing rates. Students do not always implement the best study strategies as they transition from high school to college, and do not prioritize their self-care and well-being. College level coursework is significantly more difficult compared to high school level courses and require more critical and abstract thinking.

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Personal Financial Literacy Among UT Undergraduates

Cohort: 2020
Fellow: Heidi Toprac

Everyone needs to understand personal finance. Sadly, a large body of research indicates that most American adults fail basic tests of personal financial literacy. This project aims to determine whether there is sufficient personal financial literacy education on campus, and, if not, how that problem can be corrected. 

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One Book One School Community-Wide Reading Program

Cohort: 2019
Fellow: Amelia Acker

Reading in community broadens our understanding of how we belong and how we connect to one another. I propose to develop and execute a community-wide collective reading program including related events programming around one book that addresses topics related to diversity, equity, and inclusion issues featuring a topic around the design, use, and implementation of data-driven technologies at UT’s iSchool. Typical diversity and inclusion initiatives in iSchools focus on curriculum development.

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Increasing Geoscience Diversity Through Undergraduate Mentoring in Dual-Enrollment High School Introductory Earth Science Courses

Cohort: 2019
Fellow: Joel Johnson

Geosciences are one of the least diverse STEM fields in terms of participation by people from underrepresented minority groups. The problem addressed by my project is that Hispanic students in both high school and college not only have relatively little exposure to geoscience knowledge, but also have little exposure to geoscience career paths/opportunities, relatively few role models from similar backgrounds, and may feel like outsiders in geoscience departments at the university level.

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Diversifying Our Course Materials

Cohort: 2019
Fellow: Lee Ann Kahlor

In my lectures, I rely on supplementary videos to break up the pace of the lecture and introduce new concepts. However, when I search for videos online, I have trouble finding a diverse representation. As a result, I end up with an oversampling of white male scholars in my course. Over time, I have realized that, in order to truly diversify my course materials, I need to create my own library of videos that can showcase the work and perspectives of diverse faculty, students and professionals whose expertise or experiences can supplement my course content in important ways.

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Building Information Modeling (BIM) as a Proxy for Project-Based Learning Integration across the Architectural Engineering Undergraduate Curriculum

Cohort: 2019
Fellow: Fernanda Leite

The University of Texas at Austin’s Civil, Architectural and Environmental Engineering (CAEE) department has taken several steps towards improving the preparation of Architectural Engineering students with respect to modern engineering tools, including the computing tools commonly used in engineering practice.