Individual Fellow Initiatives

This initiative addresses the challenge of balancing student accomplishment with the necessary accommodations for student success, particularly in the post-COVID era. The project will collect empirical data from students, faculty, and advisors at the Moody College of Communication to explore how to maintain high academic standards while incorporating essential accommodations for students facing challenges such as mental health issues, food insecurity, and housing instability.

This project is aimed at improving learning outcomes in programming courses at UT Austin, specifically targeting ECE312 (Software Design and Implementation I) and ECE360C (Algorithms), but that can potentially be expanded to other programming courses and beyond. The project is designed to enhance students' understanding of fundamental concepts by characterizing the complexity and frequency of feedback provided during completion of assignments.

The development of increasingly powerful computational resources has made computational competencies new core forms of literacy that should be formed as part of basic education across all STEM fields.

The primary goal of this project is to enhance student engagement and participation in the learning environment, especially those who have may have been marginalized by conventional approaches to teaching. This project aims to support, encourage, and train faculty to incorporate compassionate pedagogy (CP) and experiential learning (EL) into their teaching, with the goal of promoting student connection and faculty creativity.

Each year I attend Teaching Discovery Days and Texas Teach-Up and leave motivated to try new teaching practices. The majority of the practices I observe during Texas Teach-Up, hear about at conferences, or read about in the literature need substantial adaptations to work in my large classes. Figuring out how to make new practices work well and remain manageable sometimes seems insurmountable. Discussions with others who teach large courses often provide insights and ideas, but in any given department at UT there may be just one or just a few professors who teach these large class sizes.

Biology continues to be seen as a field for science-interested, but math-disinterested students. However, due to the surge in data use in all biology careers, and the focus in research on sequence data, there is a strong need for data skill development in biology degree programs. Math anxiety poses a specific challenge for biology education. A suggestion to overcome this, is an early introduction to data skills in the two-course sequence of Introductory Biology.
 

The primary goal of this community-based service project is to provide experiential learning opportunities for undergraduates interested in statistics and data sciences while supporting the broader Austin-area community. Coordinating with local organizations, students enrolled in some of our SDS courses are gaining hands-on experience in data analysis while exploring authentic contexts. This innovative and collaborative effort provides a community-based model that allows students and local organizations to co-develop and answer real-world research questions.

Student evaluations of teaching (SETs) are one of the official means to gauge the performance and effectiveness of an instructor at higher-education institutions. They are often used for promotion/tenure decisions as well as to guide faculty into becoming effective instructors. But the question is whether, as currently implemented at UT Austin, SETs are reliable indicators of (a) effective teaching, and (b) long-lasting, impactful learning?

There exists a gap between instruction and assessment in large introductory physics courses. Recent
projects supported by the PTFs and the Texas Mindset Initiative have focused on classroom instruction and

There are two main issues that this project hopes to address. The first is the student and instructor malaise that
has been noticed by educators and administrators across our whole campus since the return to face-to-face

This project focuses on mental health on campus.  Specifically, the mental health and self-regulation challenges that mindfulness practices have been empirically shown to address: anxiety, depression, focus, and procrastination. There is strong empirical support for these benefits emerging around the 8-week mark of regular practice (10-15 minutes per day), which is feasible in the confines of the semester calendar.

Resources related to accessibility at UT-Austin are not centralized in a single location that makes them easy for
students, staff and faculty to find them. As a result, UT community members cannot efficiently access the
resources they need because numerous different departments and units are responsible for them. Thus,

Internships have increasingly become a critical step in the college-to-career transition in the media industries and beyond.

My project, “Developing Experiential Experiences in Organizations,” assessed HDO students’ access to experiential learning
in organizations, particularly in the form of internships; additionally, our program aimed to provide more built-in
opportunities HDO students to engage in experiential learning. To gauge need, I surveyed HDO students. Results
demonstrated that many of our students were graduating without any organizational experience, especially first-generation

The challenge this project addressed was the enhancement of curriculum at the Steve Hicks School of Social
Work (SHSSW). Social Work is centered in principles from the National Association of Social Workers (NASW)
Code of Ethics which includes a strong and clear commitment to working toward social justice and to dismantle
systemic barriers that keep all people from liberation and wellness. It was hoped that Critical Race theory (CRT)
would enhance our curriculum and provide an additional tool to meet our equity and inclusion mandates to

Traditional science degree programs concentrate primarily on content and are not known for preparing their graduates with other skills needed for scientific careers.

Mentored research defies the traditional higher education approach, which separates research and teaching into distinct activities. Instead, mentored research fully integrates faculty research activities and student learning. In this approach, researchers do not simply carry out their research in isolation with a paid set of PhD-level research assistants. Further, students do not simply learn from in-class lectures or more traditional out-of-classroom experiences, such as study abroad.

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.

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.

When I first became faculty at UT Austin, I inherited an existing course; for a variety of reasons, I felt the need to overhaul all of the lectures. This process, however, proved time-consuming and I found myself unable to complete all of the lectures as originally planned prior to the start of the semester. Moreover, even the lectures that I did overhaul continued to have flaws and I was growing increasingly frustrated with the continued inadequacy of my lessons, despite devoting considerable time and energy to them. This was disheartening and my other responsibilities (e.g.

My initiative will achieve better learning outcomes in undergraduate and graduate students in History and the LBJ School by examining the intersection of history and contemporary policy, specifically its disparate impact on communities of color. Currently, departments, centers, faculty and students work independently of one another and lack valuable opportunities to collaborate. Genuine collaboration has evolved into a rare and difficult concept.

(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) 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.

(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.