Individual Fellow Initiatives

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.

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

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

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.

(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.

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).

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.

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.

(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.

Active, embodied learning and creative teaching is needed in higher education, yet many faculty struggle with how to take up the approach. My PTF project engaged six faculty members from across UT - American Studies, Biology, Art/Design, Classics, Education, and Theatre- in a 15 week faculty learning community focused on active and creative teaching strategies. Through the project, faculty members explored active and creative teaching methods in monthly meetings, and re-designed at least two lectures to use active/creative teaching approaches.

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.

Mastery of the use and interpretation of statistical techniques requires a lot of practice. Similarly, statistics is only mastered with a lot of practice. However, instructors unfortunately only have a finite amount of time available to create an endless supply of new problems and associated answers. They also do not have an endless amount of time to provide hints to help students find their own way past their misconceptions. In addition, it is very difficult for students to receive immediate feedback to understand what they are doing and what they need to do.