Individual Fellow Initiatives

My project is designed to support engineering students primarily in their freshman and sophomore years, when they struggle the most, resulting in high failing rates. Students do not always implement the best study strategies as they transition from high school to college, and do not prioritize their self-care and well-being. College level coursework is significantly more difficult compared to high school level courses and require more critical and abstract thinking.

Students in pre-modern disciplines face greater challenges in finding productive and engaging avenues for Experiential Learning than students in fields whose connections to current events are more self-evident. Podcasting offers students of ancient Greece and Rome a way to connect with people outside their classrooms, both other students and interested members of the general public. It also requires them to hone their oral presentation skills and to think about how to present the same idea to different audiences, both of which are fundamental to critical thinking.

Although Cockrell School of Engineering (CSE) undergraduates take a required engineering writing class, which I teach for Chemical Engineering, they typically struggle with writing laboratory and long-form research reports. Helping CSE students to overcome this obstacle matters because writing technical reports prepares engineering students for the writing-intensive work of a professional engineer. Faculty teaching these classes would also benefit from higher quality student work.

(Project completed 2021) Since its inception at UT in 2006, the Difficult Dialogues (DD) program has worked with over 40 faculty in 8 colleges or schools to develop Difficult Dialogue signature courses, i.e., introductory UGS courses that promote respectful and productive dialogue about difficult and controversial social issues, including race and ethnicity, gender and sexuality, religion, human rights, immigration, evolution, climate change and sustainability, and illness and mortality.

(Project completed 2021) In my lectures, I rely on supplementary videos to break up the pace of the lecture and introduce new concepts. However, when I search for videos online, I have trouble finding a diverse representation. As a result, I end up with an oversampling of white male scholars in my course.

(Project completed 2021) Reading in community broadens our understanding of how we belong and how we connect to one another. I propose to develop and execute a community-wide collective reading program including related events programming around one book that addresses topics related to diversity, equity, and inclusion issues featuring a topic around the design, use, and implementation of data-driven technologies at UT’s iSchool. Typical diversity and inclusion initiatives in iSchools focus on curriculum development.

(Project completed 2021) Systems of oppression gain their power from silence. Faculty in the School of Nursing and across the country are not always comfortable engaging in conversations about race and racism, but these discussions are necessary in order to address the disproportionately poor health outcomes experienced by BIPOC. In response to student and faculty concerns, this project seeks to move our school towards an antiracist climate by targeting multiple layers.

We teach in challenging times. As the world, and our campuses, become more connected our students grapple with the impact of challenging events both on and off campus. Faculty have asked for support and guidance for how to proceed within the framework of semesters and syllabi in order to cope or respond. Our faculty needs resources to help recognize critical moments and support for our pedagogical resiliency.

The goal of this project is to train the next generation of environmental engineers in computing and statistical techniques to solve big data problems. Current undergraduate students in the Department of Civil, Architectural and Environmental Engineering have little to no exposure to computational and statistical methods for data analysis (e.g., big data collected from sensor networks). I proposed to integrate computational techniques in several courses throughout the Environmental Engineering Degree.

Cross-cultural connections can deepen student engagement in the world around them and encourage their creativity about the course material.  Such connections can happen in a UT classroom if the student body is particularly diverse, or if students participate in study abroad programs. Global connections are also being created through the Global Classrooms Initiative that connect UT students with students at universities from other countries through classroom activities, conversations and projects intentionally designed to encourage collaboration.

The idea for this pilot course grows directly out of departmental and university goals to increase opportunities for Experiential Learning and for new technology exposure in the Humanities; and to involve more undergraduate students in original faculty research.

Educational research has provided compelling evidence that science students learn most effectively when they are engaged in Experiential Learning, broadly defined as hands-on learning where students are doing meaningful work in their discipline under the guidance of experts. Ideally, students would be exposed to Experiential Learning at multiple stages. While programs have been successful in providing experiential approaches to underclassmen, no large-scale effort exists for upper division students at UT Austin.

Success in a doctoral program can be captured by students’ adjustment to the academic community and their achievement. In recent years, growing concerns have been raised by media, policy makers, and academics about reported mental health issues amongst PhD students. Research suggests that the mental health of PhD students can be improved when there are available supports related to management of work-life balance, workload, decision-making, and leadership styles that lead to satisfactory and constructive work relations (Levecque et al., 2017).

My belief is that many faculty want to create a welcoming environment for all students, but they just don’t know how, don’t realize that they are not already, or don’t understand the student interactions in their classes that are problematic. I believe the first step to remedying the problem is education, so that the faculty may first correct any of their own behaviors and then provide leadership to the students and help guide them away from inappropriate behavior.

Creating a culture of patient safety in teaching hospitals results in safer care delivery. The many demands of the current clinical learning environment make it challenging to routinely and effectively include bedside teaching and role-modeling of patient safety. We used a “positive deviance” model, which has been applied in various settings to help change cultural practices, to identify clinical faculty who model and teach patient safety principles during direct patient care.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

(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 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.”