Individual Fellow Initiatives

This project focuses on training Clinical Audiology Doctoral students (AuD) to be clinically certified supervisors upon entering the field post-graduation. According to the American Speech-Hearing Association (ASHA), Texas ranks 48 out of 50 states for the number of clinically certified audiologists who are needed to supervise doctoral students in order for those students to have ASHA-approved hours (https://www.asha.org/siteassets/surveys/audiologist-and-slp-to-populati…).

Educators need increased opportunities to participate in Texas Teach-Up in order to benefit from modeling teaching at UT Austin. This project will explore two specific elements of this problem. Currently you can only participate during officially scheduled time/dates, you cannot participate on-demand. This limits access to only those who can make it, or are a part of the university, during the on-schedule times and dates. Additionally, as an on-schedule event, seats have closing limits. Some people who want to participate may not be able to do so because the session is full.

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

(Project completed 2021) Geosciences are one of the least diverse STEM fields in terms of participation by people from underrepresented minority groups. The problem addressed by my project is that Hispanic students in both high school and college not only have relatively little exposure to geoscience knowledge, but also have little exposure to geoscience career paths/opportunities, relatively few role models from similar backgrounds, and may feel like outsiders in geoscience departments at the university level.

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.

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.

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.

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