Individual Fellow Initiatives

The BA program in Theatre and Dance lacks adequate faculty mentorship and an identity as a program. A recent poll of BA students in Theatre and Dance on strengths and weaknesses of the program revealed that many BA students see themselves as “second-class citizens” in a department that offers three highly structured and mentored BFA programs in dance, teacher certification, and acting.

While the U.S. is more racially open and culturally diverse than at any other time in its history, intolerance and marginalization—often around issues of race, culture and difference—continue to exist. This is punctuated in university settings where students of color find more access to opportunity, yet encounter socially and intellectually non-inclusive environments. UT-Austin stands at the forefront of concerns around race and equity, most recently with the Fisher decision and the current state lawsuit against UT-Austin regarding race discrimination in admissions.

Since my first semester at UT (Fall 2011) I’ve taught about 10,000 students across all colleges. From this immense amount of student interaction, I’ve come to believe that many of our students lack the tools and techniques to define their own personal path to success and are not confident in how to best make decisions about their future.  As a result of this, I believe many students are seeking what they see as a “safe path” (e.g.

In many curricula students find it difficult to understand the common thread and themes between their courses until near graduation (or ever). Thus, students are unable to benefit from the synergistic nature of a fully integrated program. Courses are taught by different instructors with different teaching styles and nomenclature (a potentially good thing), but all too often even the instructors are unaware of the material or educational objectives taught in complementary courses.

I am working on a unique partnership between Austin Community College (ACC) and UT Austin to develop collaborative peer learning communities (PLCs) in the Geosciences with mixed cohorts of two-year college (2YC) and four-year college (4YC) students.

UT holds sustainability to be a core part of its mission and the Office of Sustainability is a central engine in incorporating issues of sustainability across “university policies, practices and curricula.” The university has taken important steps toward meeting these goals, yet these efforts are often isolated with little cross-campus conversation or exposure. My goal is to establish a network that serves as both an incubator and clearinghouse for sustainability-related teaching and research.

I have been teaching general physics for non-Physics majors since 2008. I have implemented interactive learning elements into my lecture and “real life” questions, which allows the students to have short (3-4 minutes) discussion in small groups to find solutions for the given questions. I have seen improvement in student engagement and finally in test scores, especially within the semester as the students embrace this style of teaching. However, in order to really affect improvement, I communicate with other physics faculty to reflect on the evaluation of successful teaching.

This project is directed at students with no prior knowledge of computer programming languages. When introducing complex and new skills such as computer programming in a classroom, teachers are often confronted with a lot of worried students and great numbers of very different questions, especially in humanities departments. The lecture setting is not well suited to address the needs of individual students.

Despite ample evidence that implementing active learning methods in the classroom leads to better outcomes, most courses in Biology continue the use of traditional lecturing. Anecdotal conversations with many of my colleagues who teach upper division biology courses indicate a widespread perception that the traditional lecture is the most effective way to transmit information to students.

As a Provost’s Teaching Fellow, Vicki Packheiser is transforming Experiential Learning in Social Work’s foundational courses. This two-course sequence has long required 45 hours of service learning per course with a community agency. Social Work pre-majors contribute 10,000+ hours of service to the Austin community, serving as UT ambassadors while they gain experience that grounds their academics in future years. But the implementation has not lived up to the potential.

Hands-on research experiences for undergraduates offer unique active-learning experiences with real-world questions. These experiences create communities and improve 4-year graduation rates. They may also help create a student body and alumni population that recognize the importance of the research mission of large R1 universities.

This project entailed the creation of a curricular context and physical space for collaborative interdisciplinary teaching and research for faculty and students interested in Russian, East European and Eurasian studies. This was achieved in two ways. First, I transformed the required gateway course to our major, “Introduction to Russian, East European and Eurasian Studies,” which had been a disjointed “parade of faculty” course with disconnected guest speakers.

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.”

Austin is a hotbed for innovation and entrepreneurship, and yet, until recently The University of Texas at Austin provided few structured undergraduate programs focused intentionally on entrepreneurship. That realization propelled PTF Luis Martins to propose the creation of a minor in entrepreneurship as his PTF project. The Entrepreneurship Minor, offered by the McCombs School of Business and open to all undergraduate students at UT Austin, is now a reality, and began accepting applications in February.

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.

One of the top concerns from many employers is that college graduates lack the “soft skills” (collaboration, team-based skills)and professionalism they require. Collaboratory students will have the opportunity to master the latest skills in their field and develop “soft skills” like creative problem-solving problem solving and communication to help them thrive over the course of their careers.

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.

Each semester in CMS 330:Interpersonal Health Communication, students ask excellent questions that have not been answered yet in the academic literature. My project proposal is to give students the opportunity to collect high-quality survey data that would help students answer their questions. Students would create interpersonal health communication survey that would be administered by a research company to gather nationally representative data on important health communication topics that have currently been unexamined.

Freshmen, often overwhelmed by perceived barriers of time, motivation, and knowledge don’t remain active, leading to weight gain and associated physical and emotional issues. Regular physical activity directly and positively impacts physical and emotional well-being and transfers to better scholastic outcomes. KHE majors need practical experiences to develop skills to develop programs that match personal goals and fitness levels. This project was unique in that it meets an identified need for freshmen and KHE majors.

The Peer Learning Assistant Program within the Department of Chemistry is a program developed with resources from the Provost Teaching Fellows program to enhance the educational experience of students taking general chemistry by training and employing Peer Learning Assistants (PLAs) to service large blended general chemistry courses.  The large (300 –500 students) blended courses have replaced the straight lecture model with active, student centered, learning.  Active learning requires coaching and in a large class it is impossible to implement with only one instructor and one tea

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.

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.

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

Among the communication disorders considered to be fundamental to the scope of practice for speech-language pathologists, stuttering or what is also commonly referred to as a fluency disorder has historically been and continues to be the disorder for which most speech-language pathologists report minimal to no clinical or academic exposure and/or competency.

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.