(Project completed 2018) Course structures are often not as fully inclusive as they could be for students with diverse learning needs. More specifically, students with disabilities and those who have English as a second language may benefit from practices that make content more accessible (without changing the rigor or learning goals for the course). This is particularly true for courses at the undergraduate level that may include face-to-face, lecture, interactive activities, and online components.

This project started out with a simple idea: From my original proposal, we noted that “Current historical timelines are not interactive, nor do they enable students to understand connections between different events. They are good at showing chronology, but are not good at illustrating how specific events are influenced by a whole host of different historical factors.”

In 2012, the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology documented the need to prepare an additional one million STEM professionals over the next ten years. To achieve this increase in STEM degree production, attention must be directed towards improving pathways for all students, specifically minority students who have been historically underserved. Research has indicated a need to focus on these underrepresented groups in STEM settings as enrollment patterns and access to higher education differs between groups of students.

My project is intended to address a lack of understanding among most undergraduate students of the university both as an institution and as a space in which intellectual life is pursued.  This lack of understanding among undergraduates is intertwined, I believe, with a broader lack of appreciation for higher education/academia in our cultural and civic life.

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there were no digital tools at UT to facilitate crowdsourcing as a pedagogical strategy, engaging students with historical documents while enriching the collections themselves.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.

Compounding the challenge of consuming a healthy diet is the fact that many students have little or no familiarity with preparing their own food.  The result is inadequate diets that do not support optimal health and academic performance.

The goal of this initiative is to establish a freshman research program for mechanical engineering students that can serve as a template for an engineering-wide freshman research program.  Many first-year students express an interest in participating in engineering research early in their college careers, but the perceived barriers can be high.  It can be difficult for first-year students to navigate the research enterprise, and many professors are hesitant to hire first-year students.  The potential advantages of freshman research, however, are much greater than the barriers

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.

The project is a longitudinal partnership with the Vick Center for Strategic Advising, College of Education faculty, Project 2021 staff, and other Longhorns to measure existing attempts to teach useful skills such as emotional intelligence so that students can make constructive decisions while at UT and then be prepared for the significant life transition that is one’s first career post-graduation. The key activities include semesterly surveys and interviews with students using Vick Center services such as in-person visits and online modules.

The McCombs Business Journal was an effort to give students an opportunity to read and write about research. We recruited students, worked with the students to establish an organizational structure, set expectations for members, and selected student leaders. Students read a significant amount of research and wrote summaries, focusing on how that research impacts the real world.