Individual Fellow Initiatives

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

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

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

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.

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.

In CNS we teach ~6500 non-science majors in our introductory classes each year (>2000 in Astronomy alone). These are the last science courses these students take, which presents us with an opportunity to make a lasting impression. I propose to lead a Faculty Learning Community (FLC) to design module focused on scientific literacy and the science behind climate change. This module will be based on active learning, making use of the abundance of research that shows students retain information better by doing rather than listening.

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.

(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.

(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.

For some time now the humanities have been “in crisis,” but the crisis is becoming acute: majors in nearly all humanities fields have been sharply declining, enrollments are down, hiring of tenure-track faculty is down, and, at some colleges and universities across the United States, whole departments are being eliminated. Here at the University of Texas, majors that are growing seem to be ones that promise a literal return on investment (invest money in a degree and get that money back, in the form of a well-paying job upon graduation) or at least suggest an obvious and practical use.

(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.

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.

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.

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.

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).

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 shift the focus of a set of introductory courses, that are heavy in disciplinary content, in order to make space for greater emphasis on professional skills, such as information literacy, quantitative reasoning, communication, and others. The main challenge in accomplishing the goal is that the particular courses involved have high-enrollment—2300 undergraduates enroll in each course each year and they are taught by a team of 13 faculty. Because many faculty teach the courses, it is difficult to standardize the curriculum and the expectations across sections.

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.