2024 Graduate Teaching Showcase
On March 29th, UT graduate students seized an opportunity to showcase their insights and innovations as teachers at the 8th annual Graduate Teaching Showcase, hosted by the Center for Teaching and Learning in collaboration with UT Libraries. This year’s presenters shared their approaches to meaningful and impactful teaching with the UT community. Their styles varied widely; they told stories about process-centered teaching, accessibility and adaptability, creativity, and empathy. The six presenters at this year’s Graduate Teaching Showcase demonstrated the importance and impact of graduate student instruction in every corner of the UT campus.
Each year, the Center for Teaching and Learning invites applications from all graduate students to share their stories, experiences, and advances as teachers on the UT Austin campus. From a large number of submissions, six were selected for presentation at the Showcase. During the two-hour event, attended by about 50 people in person (and a handful of invited guests participating on Zoom), each presenter offered insight into their unique and impactful pedagogies by sharing their stories and re-creating lessons that shape their teaching practice. The finalists represented departments from all across UT— from Fine Arts to Biomedical Engineering to Anthropology to Geosciences—demonstrating that pedagogical innovation is not relegated to any one field, but that it is everywhere thoughtful teachers reside.
As the Showcase began, the event’s emcee, Alexander Holt, and the six presenters led a grounding activity for everyone in the room, asking all participants to write a “thank you” note for their most memorable learning experience. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the Showcase audience shared their appreciation for all of their teachers—inside and outside the classroom. Many participants, for example, have one or both parents who work as teachers, and they thanked them for creating in them a posture of curiosity and intrigue toward the world. And when participants thanked their formal teachers, they did so precisely because their teachers changed their lives and fundamentally transformed how they move in the world.
The event then transitioned into the Showcase presentations, clustered into two groups of three presentations. After each cluster’s demonstrations, the audience had fifteen minutes in discussion groups to grapple with the open-ended questions each presenter posed, allowing audience members time to reflect on their own teaching practices and share their experiences in the classroom pertinent to the presentations themselves. To close the event, participants were asked to reflect on one thing that would stick with them from the talks that they heard or the discussions that they had. Some themes were embracing failure; creating safe and comfortable classroom environments; and the harnessing the power of play and space for active learning.
Congratulations to all of the 2024 Graduate Teaching Showcase presenters. For the full abstracts of the presentations, please visit the GTS website.
Michael DeWhatley, Department of Theater and Dance
“The Present-ation of Theatre History”
Leah Hummel, Department of Theater and Dance
"Beauty, But First- Joy": Creating Accessible Textile Education Spaces
Hannah Neuhauser, Department of Musicology
"Finding Fun in Failure”
Sinjini Sinha, Department of Geological Sciences
"Learning About Extinction and Evolution by Playing Educational Board Games”
Saket Sripada, Department of Biomedical Engineering
“Student Inclusive Teaching”
Erin Wheeler Streusand, Department of Anthropology
“From Caseworker to UT Instructor: Creating Safe Classroom Environments for All”