Higher Education and Teaching Commons^™

Finding Lost & Found: Designer’S Notes From The Process Of Creating A Jewish Game For Learning, Owen Gottlieb

Articles

This article provides context for and examines aspects of the design process of a game for learning. Lost & Found (2017a, 2017b) is a tabletop-to-mobile game series designed to teach medieval religious legal systems, beginning with Moses Maimonides’ Mishneh Torah (1180), a cornerstone work of Jewish legal rabbinic literature. Through design narratives, the article demonstrates the complex design decisions faced by the team as they balance the needs of player engagement with learning goals. In the process the designers confront challenges in developing winstates and in working with complex resource management. The article provides insight into the pathways the team …

Stalled At The Gate: Addressing Student Failure In A "Gateway" Course, Susan Rhoades Neel

Journal on Empowering Teaching Excellence

This article is a case study of how student data can guide instructors in course redesign. A significant percentage of students enrolled in an American Civilization course did not successfully complete the course. An examination of ACT scores, GPAs, grades in math and English composition, reading tests, and assignment completion rates indicated that two key obstacles to student success were a lack of student engagement and a disparity between student reading capabilities and the required instructional materials. Following a change in the topical focus of the course, the addition of active learning projects, and supplemental aids to the textbook, course …

Overcoming Public Speaking Anxiety: Practical Applications For Classroom Instruction, Joshua N. Westwick

Discourse: The Journal of the SCASD

During the 2013 Speech Communication Association of South Dakota annual conference, there was a lively discussion surrounding students’ Public Speaking Anxiety (PSA). During the dialogue, numerous strategies on how to help reduce students’ speaking anxiety were discussed. However, I was surprised at the number of suggestions that refuted tested and proven strategies for PSA reduction. Moreover, I was startled and dismayed to hear comments such as “I have just given up and allowed my students to read from a manuscript” or “the only way I can get [my students] to stay calm is when I allow them to write as …

Standing My Ground: Reflections Of A Queer Indian Immigrant Professor In The U.S. Classroom, Umeeta Sadarangani

Umeeta Sadarangani

No abstract provided.

The Apparition Of These Screens In The Crowd, Trey Conatser

Greater Faculties: A Review of Teaching and Learning

To unpack some of our assumptions about attention, learning, and technology in the classroom, CELT's Trey Conatser spoke with Dr. Yuha Jung and Dr. Rachel Shane of the Department of Arts Administration. Jung and Shane have worked with colleagues to integrate technologies into their teaching so that students are more likely to be on task. What follows is an informal exploration of what it means to pay attention and to learn in the context of the contested value of digital technologies.

The Building Blocks Of History, Nicole Martin

Greater Faculties: A Review of Teaching and Learning

Dr. Steve Davis is an Assistant Professor of History at the University of Kentucky, where he teaches precolonial and modern South African history using the popular video game Minecraft. CELT's Dr. Nicole Martin asked Dr. Davis about his goals for student learning, and how he encourages students to develop skills in historical analysis through virtual world-building.

On Cheating And Prosperity, Trey Conatser

Greater Faculties: A Review of Teaching and Learning

At the outset of a new academic year, we'd do well to reflect on how we pitch academic integrity—and the concept of cheating—to our students. Not only does it affect how they see us as teachers and scholars; it also affects in profound ways how we see (or don't see) students as complex human beings. And this asks us to go against our gut reactions to the apparent moral legibility of cheating. If we understand cheating as an evasive concept, and as a product of our institutions, we're much less likely to incentivize it.

Theological Foundations Of Pastoral Care In Catholic Universities, Thomas V. Gourlay

eJournal of Catholic Education in Australasia

One defining element of life in any Catholic educational institution, whether it be primary, secondary, or tertiary, is the focus on pastoral care for staff and students. This paper provides a distinctly Catholic definition of the term ‘pastoral care’ and briefly examines the theological foundations that underpin this concept, particularly, in relation to its application in the Catholic university. The paper traces the motif of pastoral care through the Scriptures and, building on insights from St. Pope John Paul II’s Apostolic Constitution on Catholic Universities, Ex Corde Ecclesiae (1990) and the broader theological anthropology of the Vatican II Council. The …

How Do Teachers Challenge Neoliberalism Through Critical Pedagogy Within And Outside Of The Classroom?, Rezvan Shahsavari-Googhari

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

This thesis uses the qualitative case study approach to investigate current strategies and skills four Ontario public secondary school teachers apply both within and outside of the classroom to enhance students’ critical consciousness. The focus is on teachers’ pedagogical work in the era of neoliberal restructuring in order to provide a rich account of how neoliberalism challenges and affects their teaching. Existing literature shows a crisis of identity and political agency among youth in many Western societies, characterized by individuals’ inability to think critically about social, political and economic issues, which is rooted in neoliberal education reforms. Adopting a critical …

Knowledge And Practices Of Faculty At Nasm Accredited Institutions In The Southeast Region Regarding Standards-Based Instruction, Jonathan Leon Nelson

Dissertations

In 1993, Congress passed the mandate Goals 2000: Educate America Act, which established standards for K-12 education that outlined the core benchmarks of student achievement for individuals who have mastered the core curricula required to earn a high school diploma (Mark, 1995). Unfortunately, these curricular requirements did not include any criteria for music education, nor did they consider the curricular implications for higher education in providing NSME Standards based training for music educators.

The aim of this study was to determine if and to what extent music education faculty engage in NSME Standards-based instruction within the higher education classroom. Questionnaires …

Incorporating Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, And Transgender (Lgbt) Health Concepts Into Nursing Curricula: What Nursing Faculty Should Know, Paul Smith, Julie Fitzwater

Faculty Presentations

The objective of this presentation is to help faculty learn how to effectively teach students about lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) health, health promotion, and health care disparities. Learning outcomes for this session include how to utilize specific tools, strategies, and resources for incorporating essential LGBT content into undergraduate and graduate nursing programs.

• LEARNING OUTCOME 1: Describe ways to incorporate LGBT content into nursing curricula and discuss the importance of this inclusion;
• LEARNING OUTCOME 2: Identify resources appropriate for nursing students that may be integrated into nursing curricula;
• LEARNING OUTCOME 3: Identify specific health disparities that are applicable to …

Embodying Rhythm Nation: Multimodal Hip Hop Dance As A Site For Adolescent Social-Emotional And Political Development, Lauren M. Roygardner

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This exploratory study employed qualitative methodology, specifically values analysis, to learn more about how being involved within Hip hop dance communities positively relates to adolescent development. Adolescence was defined herein as ages 13-23. The study investigated Hip hop dance communities in terms of cultural expertise (i.e. novice, intermediate and advanced/expert) to look specifically at dance narratives (i.e. peak experience narratives and “I dance because” essays) and hip hop dance performances. The primary purpose of this dissertation was to (1) explore how adolescents use multimodal Hip hop dance discourse for social-emotional development and critical consciousness, and to (2) understand how values …

Fictive Kinship In The Aspirations, Agency, And (Im)Possible Selves Of The Black American Art Teacher, Gloria Wilson

Journal of Social Theory in Art Education

In this paper, I explore the pairing of the concepts of fictive kinship and agency in order to explore racial identity narratives of the Black American art teacher. Expanding on the anthropological concept of fictive kinship, where bonds of connectedness between people help to shape selfhood, I consider the powerful impact that visual culture has on shaping identity narratives and the professional aspirations of Black American art teachers. I identify fictive kinship connections as salient in creating spaces which affect agency in the conceptualization and achievement of the self as an artist. I further use the concept of fictive kinship …

Equity-Minded High-Impact Learning: A Short-Term Approach To Student-Faculty Collaborative Research, Valerie Chepp

Humboldt Journal of Social Relations

This article explores the potential for high-impact learning practices—and specifically student-faculty collaborative research—to address inequality in U.S. institutions of higher education. In theory, student-faculty research holds much promise for promoting diversity and social justice in higher education. This high-impact practice reflects ideals around collaboration and mentoring, and offers a more egalitarian approach to the traditional student-faculty power relationship. In practice, however, collaborative research runs the risk of reproducing inequality, thereby undermining its transformative potential. Drawing upon bell hooks’ (1994) notion of radical pedagogy, and in the spirit of being equity-minded, I propose a short-term version of student-faculty collaborative research. This …

In Conversation With Seth Pollack, Seth Pollack, Marshall Welch

Engaging Pedagogies in Catholic Higher Education (EPiCHE)

In November 2016, EPiCHE Editor Marshall J. Welch sat down with service-learning scholar and practitioner Seth Pollack. They explored how the spiritual and religious dimensions of Seth’s life have influenced his personal passions and academic career.

Seth Pollack is Professor of Service Learning, and the founding faculty director of the Service Learning Institute at California State University, Monterey Bay (CSUMB). For the past 17 years, Seth has provided overall leadership for the Service Learning Institute at CSUMB. In 2005, he received the Thomas Ehrlich Faculty Award for Service Learning, recognized as the nation’s outstanding faculty in the field of community …

In Our Time: Advancing Interfaith Studies Curricula At Catholic Colleges And Universities, Eboo Patel, Noah Silverman, Kristi Del Vecchio

Engaging Pedagogies in Catholic Higher Education (EPiCHE)

People who orient around religion differently are interacting with greater frequency than ever before. These interactions, especially in the context of college and university campuses, require young people to grapple with their own identities in ways that previous generations could more easily avoid. Conversations about religious diversity have become elevated at colleges and universities, which has led Drs. Douglas Jacobsen and Rhonda Hustedt Jacobsen to claim that religion is “no longer invisible” in the context of American higher education.

As an organization that works with hundreds of American colleges and universities every year, Interfaith Youth Core (IFYC) believes that Catholic …

Stories At Work : Restorying Narratives Of New Teachers' Identity Learning In Writing Studies., Rachel Gramer

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Rhetoric and composition has a long, robust history of studying how we train new writing teachers in our graduate/writing programs; yet we lack in-depth inquiries that foreground how new writing teachers learn. This dissertation traces five graduate students learning how to be and become writing teachers, using narrative as an object and means of analysis to study the tacitly internalized process of newcomer professional identity learning. In this project, I enact narrative as a feminist, interdisciplinary methodology to restory new writing teacher research narratives away from implicit deficit or explicit resistance and toward a more generative focus on newcomers’ motivated …

Blue The Bee Learns To Be Happy, Connie Reimers-Hild, Deborah J. Weitzenkamp, Connie Reimers-Hild, Kim Wellsandt

Kimmel Education and Research Center: Faculty and Staff Publications

Do you sometimes feel sad or blue and don't know what to do? If so, this book was written just for you!

Join Blue the Bee as she travels through Happy Orchard meeting her friends (Flutter, Buzz, Bonita and Ernie) to learn the 7 Happiness Habits. When happiness is a habit, it comes without thinking. You can choose how to spend your day and use your time. You choose how to live your life and what is on your mind.

Each page was designed to enjoy at any age. People can become pollinators of happiness in any life stage!

This …

As If By Magic: Unleashing Critical And Expressive Voices Through A Rhetoric Of "This/And" In First-Year Composition, Nolan Chessman

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation engages academic, creative, and student genres in conversation in order to challenge the strict discursive and stylistic boundaries placed around college writing, particularly in first-year composition. Because this project aims to thrust first-year writing pedagogy beyond the confines of fixed genre forms, its inquiry is multimodal, intermingling writing styles and research modes so that, in scholar-teacher Wendy Bishop’s words, “I can think in and through them all” (“Places to Stand” 17). The particulars—or “data”—informing this study are primarily archival, textual (often a combination of the two), experimental, and experiential. Broadly speaking, this inquiry consists of seven chapters, which …

Empirical Reflections On Women Students In Usa Nonprofit Academic Programs And Realizations About Ideological Influence, Norman A. Dolch

Journal of Ideology

This research reports on the beliefs of a select sample of women and men faculty across the USA regarding women in nonprofit organization academic programs. The main differences were on professional orientation among graduate students, difficulty with quantitative oriented courses, and portrayal of women in coursework. To eliminate these differences, beliefs (ideologies) among faculty and students need to be altered. Sanberg’s book Lean In is especially informative about changing beliefs about career orientation for both men and women to what she calls a belief in sustainable and fulfilling positions. Another valuable resource for faculty concerned about these issues is Creating …

Learning Through Intradepartmental Scholarship In The History 251 Milestone, Mary D. Wammack

UNLV Best Teaching Practices Expo

The History Department established HIST 251 in 1996 to supply students with the opportunity to acquire and develop the methodological skills and habits of critical thinking and analysis considered essential for student success.

Engl 487: English Capstone Experience—A Peer Review Of Teaching Benchmark Portfolio, Kelly Stage

UNL Faculty Course Portfolios

This portfolio documents the teaching objectives, strategies, and assessments for a capstone course in the English major at UNL. As the English Studies Capstone and as an ACE (Achievement-Centered Education) 10 course at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, English 487 must help students meet key outcomes for the department and the University, but it also allows flexibility and creativity in the methods chosen to meet these requirements and structure the course. This portfolio thereby reflects on the intellectual labor of designing a particular version of these requirements and on guiding students through the design. The assessments included here are measuring traditional …

Arab 202: A Peer Review Of Teaching Project Inquiry Portfolio, Abla Hasan

UNL Faculty Course Portfolios

This project examines the impact of adopting a text book of teaching Arabic for nonnative speakers that doesn’t use any English. The project targets “ARAB 202”, second year Arabic, since this course has already used a text book that uses English for instructions and grammar for 3 semesters, ARAB 101 , ARAB102, ARAB 201 and before the new curriculum was available in the market. Students of ARAB 202 will be the first to experience the switch to the new curriculum and therefore can be the best to evaluate the experience. For the project, students were asked to complete a pre-course …

Raising The Curtain: Investigating The Practicum Experiences Of Pre-Service Drama Teachers, Christina C. Gray, Peter R. Wright, Robin Pascoe

Australian Journal of Teacher Education

The practicum is internationally recognised as a valuable component of teacher education. It is an opportunity for pre-service teachers to develop teaching skills in authentic ways and pursue professional inquiry into practice. While extensive research has been conducted into the practicum generally, little research focuses on the practicum experience for pre-service drama teachers. This article, investigates the preparation of drama teachers for the profession with a particular focus on the practicum component of pre-service education. Drawing on the experiences of 19 pre-service drama teachers from a Western Australian university, focus-groups were conducted in order to scope the key components of …

Engl 254: Writing And Communities—A Peer Review Of Teaching Project Benchmark Portfolio, Rachael Wendler Shah

UNL Faculty Course Portfolios

This course portfolio analyzes a section of English 254: Writing and Communities, exploring how well the course met individual teaching goals and the departmental course goals for English 254, with a particular focus on how the new English Department mission statement priorities are actualized in the class and how well the class supported learning to communicate across difference. The portfolio includes an outline of institutional context, course outcomes, and student background, as well as a backwards planning chart that demonstrates alignment between outcomes, activities, and assessment strategy. Then, the portfolio examines student data from each of the three major assignments, …

Engl 352: Intermediate Fiction Writing—A Peer Review Of Teaching Project Benchmark Portfolio, Chigozie Obioma

UNL Faculty Course Portfolios

Absent the elements of effective writing, there has been a strong debate on whether or not other aspects of creative writing can be taught. Many practicing writers like myself who teach have concluded that a student writer can be guided towards fully actualizing their talent, and this “guidance” is what mostly constitutes teaching. How then do we evaluate the effectiveness of this teaching, and to what extent do students’ individual talent help or stand in the way of effective instruction? How do we plan various learning outcomes and test the success of such strategies over the duration of the ENGL …

Addressing Laterality To Prevent Injury In Dance Education: Teaching Methods To Compensate For The Right Bias And Asymmetry, Olivia M. Alsamadi

Undergraduate Research Posters

Despite the vast knowledge available about proper alignment and safe dance training, the growing demands for university dancers have plagued them with increasing rates of overuse injuries stemming from an imbalance in their practice often influenced by their professors. The purpose of this review is to study teaching methods in dance education and the right bias in university dance classes to learn how unbalanced teaching methods and dancers’ asymmetric physicalities cause injuries. This research will help professors understand how to effectively communicate with their students to promote safe, injury preventing practice. The research explores the various roles present in the …

Cultivating Social Capital In Undergraduate Research: Key Sources And Distinctions By Gender, Heather Ann Daniels

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

Women are outpacing men in overall educational attainment, however this is not the case in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) fields when women fall behind men. Establishing strong social connections is important to retention in STEM fields and persistence in the STEM pipeline. This study qualitatively examines what serves as social capital in STEM-focused undergraduate research and how social capital is accrued and deployed differently by men and women in ways that could be contributing to the gender gap in STEM. 17 students participating in external summer research programs at 12 different universities were interviewed at 3 points in …

Breaking The Binary: Negotiating Space And Power In Course-Embedded Consulting, Courtnie Jude Morin

Online Theses and Dissertations

Course-Embedded (writing) Consultants (CECs) disrupt the common classroom power binary between the teacher and the student. Therefore, CECs must constantly negotiate authority and power in relation to their workspaces. Based on a Foucaultian analysis of power ideologies and spatial rhetoric, I propose a training series for instructors, CECs, and their students. This series allows participants on all three sides (teacher, CEC, and student) to recognize, analyze, and work within these dynamics of institutional structures of authority, pedagogy, and space.

Epistemology Shock: English Professors Confront Science, Ian Barnard, Jan Osborn

English Faculty Articles and Research

This article raises questions and concerns regarding students from the sciences working with faculty in the humanities in interdisciplinary settings. It explores the experience of two English professors facing the privileging of "facts" and a science-based understanding of the world in their own classrooms. It poses both questions and pedagogical possibilities for addressing conflicts around epistemologies, scholarship, and teaching and learning.