PsTL’s 2015 Graduate Student Showcase

PsTL's Shane Lueck, Amy Barton, Wuyi Zhang, Anne Loyle-Langholz, Saida Hassan
PsTL’s Shane Lueck, Amy Barton, Wuyi Zhang, Anne Loyle-Langholz, Saida Hassan

The Department of Postsecondary Teaching and Learning hosted a Graduate Student Showcase featuring the scholarship of soon-to-be graduates and alumni of the Multicultural College Teaching and Learning program. Following are highlights from the presentations.

Multicultural Career Development: Identifying Values to Foster Major/Career Planning of Exploratory Students

Amy Barton’s research area is the career development of underrepresented students in higher education. Her research project examined a values-based approach for supporting students in their exploration of majors and careers, along with the utilization of a constructivist framework. Her research identified the strengths and limitations of a narrative approach while recognizing its applicability with other student populations. Barton’s experiences throughout her graduate career have informed her research. She has worked as a Graduate Research Assistant for three faculty members and completed a practicum with the Medical School Office of Admissions. This year, Barton is a Career Counselor Graduate Intern for CEHD Career Services and a Graduate Teaching Assistant for CLA President’s Emerging Scholars. Barton enjoys engaging with college students during the unique transition period of academic and career development and is energized by the complexity and challenge of this exciting work.

Somali National University: Reviving Public Higher Education in a Post-Conflict Society

Saida Hassan is passionate about the landscape of higher education and how to better serve students, specifically in relation to International Education from a learning and teaching perspective. In the summer of 2014, she did her three-credit internship with the Heritage Institute for Policy Studies in Mogadishu, Somalia, collecting the stories of former students of Somali National University (SNU), the only university in Somalia prior to the civil war. Her research focused on the students’ undergraduate experiences using interviews and oral histories to identify the value placed on education by Somalis as well as the organized, authoritarian system of study during that time. After two decades of civil war, Somali National University has reopened. Hassan traveled back to Somalia to assist SNU’s College of Education with preparation of the college, providing recommendations based on her research and education to help the university establish collaborative learning environments. “In the landscape of higher education, it is critical to implement inclusive learning environments that integrate engaging pedagogy,” says Hassan.

Revised Course Design of Online Chinese Language Class for Better Peer Cross-cultural Communication

Wuyi Zhang is from Hunan Province, China. His undergraduate study was in Teaching Chinese as a Second Language from Beijing Normal University Zhuhai Campus, China. After graduation, he was a Chinese teacher in a language training school and mostly taught small classes or individual students. “I taught students from all over the world, and they also taught me a lot about their own cultures and traditions,” say Zhang. Two years later, he came to America to better prepare himself as a teacher and experience different cultures in America. The purpose of his project was to build awareness and consciousness of the importance of cross-cultural communication, and create the possibilities of cross-cultural conversations by supporting them in his course redesign. Zhang added culturally emphasized activities and content to aid students in connecting more deeply with the course and one another. He promoted the students’ sense of participation and value through culturally distinguishable assignments. In one assignment he asked students to record the phrase, “When Greenwich meantime is 12:00, the time in my hometown is ________.” Then he digitally altered the audio and asked students to identify which student was speaking based on the recorded information. Zhang also included images with more cultural diversity in the courseware and encouraged students to use culturally recognized pictures to create their own flash cards. He sees his work benefiting other online course instructors who face similar challenges as well as designers and programmers of online education platforms.

Does Space Matter?

Anne Loyle-Langholz started her educational journey at a small community college in New Jersey. She later attended Rutgers University where she completed an MA in Organic Chemistry in 2007. As a graduate student at the University of Minnesota, she has worked on several curriculum projects in science education including the implementation of culturally relevant lessons for Native students and process-oriented guided inquiry (POGIL) activities for introductory anatomy and physiology courses. During the showcase, Loyle-Langholz presented research that addressed student attitudes towards chemistry and perceptions of the learning environment in a traditional lecture hall (LH) and an active learning classroom (ALC). For her study, she complied extensive video and audio documentation of a chemistry course at the University of Wisconsin-River Falls and administered two surveys. The first, an 8-item semantic differential, measured students’ attitudes toward the subject of chemistry and measured the constructs of emotional satisfaction and intellectual accessibility. The results showed students’ attitudes remained unchanged. The second, a 32-item instrument developed at the UMN, was designed to measure student perceptions of the learning environment. Results reflected positive, significant gains in the constructs of engagement, confidence, and enrichment, along with use of the room and course fit in the ALC. In 2012, Loyle-Langholz received a Certificate in Multicultural College Teaching and Learning. She is currently working for a local publishing company as a Database Librarian to catalogue and develop curricula in several science disciplines.

Facilitating Conversations of Equity and Diversity

Shane Lueck’s Capstone project involved writing and designing a booklet on how to facilitate conversations of equity and diversity, specifically for facilitators who have no formal training in diversity and equity topics. Lueck’s goal was to provide support for people wishing to address equity and diversity as it comes up in the workplace or at family gatherings. Instead of a booklet full of activities and sample conversations, the content focused on interventions to be had before these conversations take place. Lueck’s booklet encourages facilitators to reflect on why they want to have these conversations, the identities and biases they are bringing into the room, the identities and biases of the other participants, and how to encourage willingness on the part of the participants in having these conversations. These reflections guide the facilitator through understanding how all of these components impact the conversation and how to have the most productive conversation possible. Lueck’s reflective process is supplemented with resource lists of activities and additional materials to further support facilitators.