PTF Impacts

The University Writing Center has greatly expanded its STEM Writing training program to include all new consultants.

Before deciding what your career goals are, it’s critical to know what you value most in a job. What gets you out of bed to go to start the day, go to work, and/or live your life? This exercise will help you define and prioritize what drives you. We provide definitions of 8 common "drivers". Once you understand these drivers, you can take the exercise and go through a ranking process to determine which are most important to you (i.e. you’re less likely to compromise on these) and which are less important (i.e. you’re more willing to compromise on these).

A campus-wide faculty learning community constructed a canvas sandbox website where we could share materials related to climate change, with annotations, with the broader UT community. We collected our groups materials, and tried to organize them in a useful way. This includes lectures, activities, quizzes, projects, pre/post tests, etc. We organize both by learning objective, and by course. Our website is now live. A publication on pre/post survey results is being prepared.

Two presentations about promoting the use of a local open data portal for data science projects.

The first presentation was made with the collaboration of a former student/current UGCA at an event organized by Open Austin, which addresses local social and civic challenges through creative uses of technology.

The second presentation was made at the weekly statistics seminar at Texas State University with mostly professors in attendance.

“Bridging Rhetoric and Engineering: Qualitative Results from a Writing Center Program to Improve Engineering Undergraduate Writing,” Proceedings from IEEE ProComm, 2024. Pittsburgh, PA (July 14-17, 2024). I delivered this co-authored conference paper at the IEEE ProComm conference. See the link for the paper.

View the presentation slides here

For more information, you can access the article with the DOI: 10.1109/ProComm61427.2024.00034.

The entries are conference articles of the American Society of Engineering Education annual conference.

For information on the implementation of a new student initiative aimed at promoting student success and well-being, check out this resource from ASEE: Implementation of a New Student Initiative Promoting Student Success and Well-being

3 different PTF projects presented:

Loescher project focuses on: Elevate excellence in the classroom through new strategies to understand, measure, and improve rigor in all courses 

•each class is designed and delivered with the expectation of students learning at high levels •each student demonstrates learning at high levels 

•each student is supported so they can learn at high levels

View the poster here

This is a video project designed to be shown in all Signature Courses at UT. Together with discussion prompt, the video aims to acquaint students with mental and physical health resources on campus, and to teach them strategies for success.

At the end of each semester, about 10 students volunteer to present their findings to the City of Austin employees during one of their regular data meetups.

"Write from the Start: Mixed-Methods Results of a Collaboration between a First-Year Biomedical Engineering Class and a University Writing Center.” American Society for Engineering Education, Baltimore, MD, June 26, 2023. I delivered this co-authored presentation at the ASEE conference. The paper may be accessed through the link.

For a detailed review published in ClioVis on the Journal of American History, you can access the PDF here: ClioVis Review JAH.

Each year, the PTF Chair-Elect has the opportunity to share recurring Teaching Tips with all faculty at UT. These messages cover a variety of topics, styles, and methodologies, from brief and practical classroom strategies to in-depth conversations with voices from across campus.

This year’s Teaching Tips  were written by Chair-Elect Nina Telang.

https://lifeandletters.la.utexas.edu/2023/11/the-art-of-mapping-history/

"Engineering Sentences through the Texas Snowpocalypse: Results of a Collaboration between a University Writing Center and an Engineering Writing Course" This conference presentation (co-authored with Hye Sun You) was delivered on Feb. 16, 2023, at the Conference on College Composition and Communication, Chicago, IL. The slides are available in Texas ScholarWorks, The University of Texas Libraries.

https://hdl.handle.net/2152/124986

Each year, the PTF Chair-Elect has the opportunity to share recurring Teaching Tips with all faculty at UT. These messages cover a variety of topics, styles, and methodologies, from brief and practical classroom strategies to in-depth conversations with voices from across campus.

This year’s Teaching Tips  were written by Chair-Elect Jessica Toste.

"Engineering Sentences at a Writing Center: A Cross-Disciplinary Collaboration" This virtual presentation about our pilot program was delivered at the College Composition and Communication Regional Conference, University of Southern California, Dec. 19, 2020