Individual Fellow Initiatives
Professional Development for Undergraduate Students Majoring in the Biological Sciences
Cohort: 2015
Fellow: Christopher Shank
I seek the opportunity to create a professional development curriculum that would provide students a structured vehicle for developing professional confidence and self-awareness, and facilitate early success in an increasingly competitive ‘real-world.’ My desire to work on this idea as a Provost Teaching Fellow stems from the overwhelmingly positive student response to professional development activities that I have incorporated in several of my courses.
Animals, Sustainability, and the Environment: A Service Learning Model for the Humanities
Cohort: 2015
Fellow: Janet Davis
This project has provided my students with an experience in hands-on service learning, thus fostering a synergistic understanding of historical analysis and community engagement. “Animals and American Culture: Select Historical Perspectives” is an interdisciplinary upper-division undergraduate seminar that attracts a diverse student body in the liberal arts and natural sciences. During the first week of class, students are required to contact one of two local organizations--or, with my permission, an organization of their own choosing.
Bevosourcing: Tools to Involve Students in Citizen Science and Online Data Publication
Cohort: 2015
Fellow: Adam Rabinowitz
Digital archives and the internet have made it possible for non-experts to make major contributions to research through crowdsourcing and citizen science. UT has fascinating and important collections of primary sources for the humanities, many of which have been digitized. But before my PTF project, there were no digital tools at UT to facilitate crowdsourcing as a pedagogical strategy, engaging students with historical documents while enriching the collections themselves. The project therefore proposed to develop two UT-based crowdsourcing platforms.