Minnesota’s teacher shortage in special education is serious and growing. That’s why local school districts reached out to the University of Minnesota’s College of Education and Human Development for help.
Read more in this Connect magazine story about how the college has responded by delivering the existing master’s degree curriculum in a combination of formats — off-site lecture, online, and clinical observations — to meet the needs of these districts.
“Where are you from?” “Where did you grow up?”
When Rashné Jehangir recalls questions she’s been asked throughout her adult life, her voice shifts. Her signature energetic cadence slows, and her passionate timbre softens to a reflective curiosity as she envisions the inquirer’s mindset.
Born and raised in Mumbai, India, Jehangir first encountered similar questions as a freshman in Wisconsin. Her early experiences in Lawrence University’s freshmen studies program shaped an interest in interdisciplinary learning, where student and faculty could be co-learners in the classroom.
Now an associate professor in the Department of Postsecondary Teaching and Learning (PsTL), Jehangir’s lived experience nurtures a deep appreciation for the students she teaches and also fuels her research focus.
“I have an understanding of what it means to be an outsider in different ways,” she says. “The idea of not quite fitting in, and having to figure that out—this is where I feel really connected with students.”
Jehangir is committed to cultivating classroom communities where students can grapple with and interrogate big questions and learn from the lived experiences of others. Students feel connected to her, as well.
“I credit Rashné for being my academic fairy godmother,” says former student Kafia Ahmed, “seeing something in me I couldn’t yet see in myself—a capable and dynamic young woman.”
“The class I took with Rashné was one of the most memorable because she focused on creating a community in the classroom, and fostered open discussions about difficult topics like race, colonialism, and structural oppression,” says former student Abigail Schanfield.
Creating moments of advocacy and agency is central to Jehangir’s teaching philosophy. Helping students—especially students who are first in their families to attend college—recognize the strengths they bring to the academy while reinforcing their aptitude for walking in multiple worlds is a driving force for her. This year, she became a recipient of the University’s highest teaching honor, the Morse-Alumni Teaching Award.
“Our job is to help them translate strengths—that’s where the deep, ‘heart work’ is involved,” says Jehangir. “There is head work, and there’s heart work—both intellectual and relational.”
From career counselor to the classroom
Teaching came to Jehangir through a chance opportunity. She began her career as a counselor advocate in the University’s TRIO program at a time when Bruce and Sharyn Schelske were creating learning communities for students in the program. Bruce invited her to teach a one-credit class, and the experience shifted the entire trajectory of her career and her life.
“Once I was in the classroom I thought, ‘This is what I’m supposed to do’,” Jehangir remembers.
Her class was linked to another taught by LeRoy Gardner, Jr., that explored multicultural relations and relationships, specifically race, class, and gender issues in the United States.
“The types of conversations, the types of reflections on identity of self and others we were able to have [in the classroom] was unbelievable,” she says. Realizing these were the conversations and questions she wanted to explore as a teacher and researcher, Jehangir began pursuing her Ph.D. while working full time in TRIO. Her dissertation work was built around creating learning communities with seasoned faculty members Patrick Bruch and Patricia James.
“We had different languages from a disciplinary perspective,” says Jehangir. But the three established powerful points of connection: Identity, community, and social agency were the three themes that bound their work. Through experimentation, their curriculum included capstones of theater performances and class-driven murals, some still on the walls of Burton Hall.
Those early learning communities served as a springboard to her leadership role in developing CEHD’s successful interdisciplinary First Year Experience Program.
“It was a really joyous, challenging, messy time,” she says, reflecting on the work in which she and her PsTL colleagues engaged to design the program. “I think that’s as it should be when there is space to be creative and innovative about pedagogy.”
The power of story
As a qualitative researcher, Jehangir’s well-known and highly regarded work examines the stories and experiences of first-generation students, many of whom are also immigrants and people of color. Their narratives unlock the potential for understanding and advocacy, and she is reverent in maintaining the authenticity of their voices.
“They are in essence giving you the power to tell their story in a way that can influence agency, whether it’s changing how people see first-generation students, or changing how counselors work with first-generation students, or changing policies that might exist.”
This commitment to untold stories forms the basis of Jehangir’s own first-year curriculum, where students read diverse narratives examined from historical, sociological, and literary frames. In one early assignment, she invites students to explore personal narratives through a biographical object, asking students to reflect on and publically share an object that represents their experiences and identities. She participates in the assignment, too—“If they’re going to do it, I’m going to do it,” she says, referring to a practice embedded in her teaching since her work with James and Bruch.
Jehangir’s biographical object is handwritten letters from her father, scripted in fountain pen on white paper. Received during her undergraduate years in Wisconsin, the letters forged a connection and bridged the geographical divide.
“My father was a great storyteller and he was really unconventional and funny and irreverent,” she says. “I had the kind of dialogue with him in letters that I probably would never have had if I had gone to college at home.
“He wrote letters like stories, so I could picture things at home that I missed,” she continues. “They carried my history with me, and they were tactile in that I could smell a little bit of home in them.”
Jehangir keeps the treasured letters within reach of her office chair, knowing they contain the grace, humor, and strength of her father, who passed away shortly before she graduated from Lawrence.
“The capacity to laugh at yourself, but also honor who you are and where you came from, all of that is in those letters,” she says.
As a teacher and researcher, Jehangir helps students honor who they are and where they came from, while avidly paving support for where they hope to go.
Karl Smith gave an invited talk at the 2015 Summer Meeting of the American Association of Physics Teachers at their meeting in College Park, Maryland on July 28, 2015.
The Session was Research on Teamwork, and his talk with titled Teamwork: Insights from 40 Years of Research and Practice.
Systematic research on teamwork (or groupwork as it is referred to by many researchers) has been conducted for well over 40 years. I started experimenting with cooperative learning in my engineering classes in the early 70s. Cooperative learning is the instructional use of small groups so that students work together to maximize their own and each other’s learning. High performance teamwork is at the heart of effective use of cooperative learning. I’ll summarize key findings of the research that informed the implementation of cooperative learning as well as the development of Teamwork and project management, now in its 4th edition. As physics instruction shifts to an increasing use of challenge-based learning (e.g., problem based, SCALE-UP, inquiry based, etc.) understanding and implementing effective teamwork is essential.
Using open textbooks can save students hundreds of dollars per semester. Making faculty aware that they are an option, though, remains a challenge, which is why the University of Minnesota is hosting the first meeting of its Open Textbook Network (OTN), Aug. 5-7.
Leaders representing more than 75 colleges and universities across the country will convene on the Twin Cities campus to develop strategies for advancing open textbook programs on their campuses. Participants will also gain expertise in helping faculty understand the negative impact high textbook costs can have on students’ academic performance.
Published under a Creative Commons license, open textbooks are available to students for free. Faculty can custom edit the textbooks to meet their needs, too. According to the College Board, students can spend up to $1,300 annually on books and supplies. By using open textbooks, students could save hundreds of dollars per semester, which add up during their college years.
The OTN, created and run by leaders at the University of Minnesota, is an alliance of schools committed to improving access, affordability, and academic success through the use of open textbooks. Members include Minnesota State Colleges & Universities, North Dakota University System, University of Arizona, Virginia Tech, Macalester College, and more.
“As many institutions make a commitment to empower and engage their faculty in the potential of open textbooks, they’re also committing their organization’s talent to sustain open textbooks at their campuses or across their systems,” said David Ernst, director of the Center for Open Education at the U of M’s College of Education and Human Development, executive director of the Open Textbook Network, founder of the Open Textbook Library, and a nationally-known expert in the field. “That’s good for students, and the institutions.”
The Open Textbook Library is the first searchable online catalog of open textbooks, many of which are reviewed by faculty at OTN institutions. Currently, more than 185 titles are available for use.
The Summer Institute is being organized in cooperation with the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition (SPARC), and is supported in part by the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation.
Read more in this Big Ten Network story.
View this KARE 11 news story:
A positive school culture leads to greater student achievement, according to researcher Peter Demerath, associate professor in the Department of Organizational Leadership, Policy, and Development. A culture built on “the shared belief that students are capable of achievement is crucial to strong academics, closing the achievement gap, and creating educational equity,” according to Demerath, who has studied the school culture at Harding Senior High School in St. Paul for over five years.
Read more about this research in Demerath’s Vision 2020 blog post.
The Center for Applied Research and Educational Improvement (CAREI) has an expanded mission and vision. The new CAREI will build capacity for Research, Development and Engagement throughout the university, state and region. The new mission and vision will be led by Theodore Christ as Director along with Delia Kundin and Kim Gibbons as Associate Directors. In addition to the program evaluation services that CAREI is known for, it now also provides consultation services for research and assessment. CAREI encourages interested partners to reach out to build collaborations (e.g., school districts, researchers).
This expansion occurs at the same time that CAREI celebrates its 25-Year Anniversary. Over the years, CAREI has completed nearly 600 studies that have had an enormous impact on teaching and learning, not only in Minnesota but across the U.S. The May 4th celebration included current and former CAREI staff, CEHD and University faculty collaborators, and many community partners, such as leaders from school districts, the Minnesota Department of Education, and neighborhood outreach groups. Former University of Minnesota President Robert Bruininks and current President Eric Kaler, plus CEHD Dean Jean Quam, were on hand to speak about CAREI’s strong educational research tradition, as well as its future.
To help give parents the tools they need to communicate with their students about alcohol awareness, CEHD has created the “Alcohol Use on Campus” seminar. It’s an online program that serves as a guide for not only encouraging a healthy relationship with drinking, but also for helping the student deal with all the challenges of college and the transition into adulthood.
Through the seminar, according to Jodi Dworkin, associate professor in the Department of Family Social Science, parents get a broader perspective on the changes taking part in their child’s life during college and how that can affect their relationship with alcohol.
“We give them techniques for talking about alcohol and other challenging topics,” said Dworkin, “with an emphasis on how to guide and support students without ruling them with strict directives. We also offer them resources for dealing with crisis situations related to alcohol and other risk behaviors, in case a more serious event occurs in the future.”
The STEM Education Center would like to recommend a new resource for its STEM community members! www.mn-stem.com is a website designed by the Minnesota Department of Education to provide links to STEM resources and activities for families, teachers, advocates and businesses. Check it out now!
Congratulations to the EngrTEAMS project for their mention in the latest Start Engineering newsletter. Start Engineering is a learning resources company dedicated to inspiring and engaging children from elementary to high school about engineering. Their newsletter highlights engineering education activities from a variety of sources from business to universities. For more information about the EngrTEAMS project, read here.
Motion sickness affects millions worldwide—and our dependence on digital devices and screens is creating an epidemic, according to Tom Stoffregen, School of Kinesiology researcher.
Stoffregen, director of the Affordance Perception-Action Laboratory, says his latest research indicates the root of motion sickness lies not in the inner ear, but in “postural instability” in situations where unusual motion challenges people’s control of their bodies.
In addition to studying why people develop motion sickness in the lab’s “moving room,” Stoffregen and his team of students are among the first in the world to study the effects of video game consoles, iPads, smartphones, and 3D environments on motion sickness. They also are exploring why women are twice as likely as men to experience motion sickness in a 3D environment like Oculus Rift.
Read more about this research on the college’s Vision 2020 blog and in Connect magazine.
Royalty from the Awing region of Cameroon visited the College of Education and Human Development in June. His Royal Majesty Fon Fozoh II traveled to visit with Cameroonians living in the United States and included a trip to Minnesota. His delegation met with Dean Quam and other representatives of the college as well as donor Mary Tjosvold, whose support has allowed nine CEHD students to conduct research and field learning in Cameroon over the past two years. Fon Fozoh II also impressed on the college his support for teacher workshops conducted in the Awing region this year. The visit was hosted by CEHD’s Global Initiatives.
Through the design, assessment and refinement of CEHD’s highly regarded first-year-experience program, professor and chair of the Department of Postsecondary Teaching and Learning, Amy Lee, and research associate, Rhiannon Williams, began a collaboration that’s evolved into a dynamic partnership: one deeply committed to enhancing holistic student development by supporting academic professionals who are directly and indirectly serving undergraduate students.
Lee and Williams bring complementary strengths to their work. Williams values Lee’s innovation, leadership and feministic critical background, and Lee credits Williams’ assessment skills, intercultural perspective and openness as vital. “I don’t feel I could do what I’ve done without Rhiannon,” says Lee. “Especially considering how rooted our work has been in the first-year program, and the diversity of the students we serve. That’s what brought us into thinking about holistic curriculum and co-curriculum to propel student development.” Williams adds, “Amy’s really gotten me to think with a critical lens and how that looks in terms writing.”
Together, they’ve authored numerous articles and three books motivated by the data collected from assessment of the FYE program, applying different perspectives to intercultural collaborations and how these can be supported, developed, thought about across multiple disciplines and bodies of literature. “We’re really trying to be interlocutors, bridging discourse communities,” says Lee.
Their first book, Engaging Diversity In Undergraduate Classrooms: A Pedagogy For Developing Intercultural Competence (2012) co-authored with Robert Poch and Marta Shaw, moves past the FYE program, incorporating scholars and scholarship from across different fields, to present a macro lens on lessons learned from engaging diversity broadly in the classroom.
In their recently published, edited volume, Internationalizing Higher Education: Critical Collaborations Across The Curriculum (2015), Lee and Williams push beyond theoretical frameworks to offer faculty, administrators and advisors an exploration of intercultural learning through applications in a variety of contexts. “We felt there were few publications with examples of how internationalizing the curriculum was being enacted,” says Williams. “We wanted to show how institutions are supporting this work and how it looks in an actual classroom.” Contributing chapters from practioners across a wide spectrum of disciplines, geographies and institutions candidly examine different ways intercultural perspectives have been integrated into their programs, including the tensions and opportunities of internationalizing the curriculum in a holistic manner. “The higher education academy has such a premium on scholarly identity, but teaching is still under the radar,” says Lee. “We wanted to give our book a more useful, purposeful form.”
According to Lee, their third book is even bolder. Set for publication in 2016, Intercultural Pedagogy: Equity And Global Citizenship In Contemporary Classrooms, co-authored with Catherine Solheim and Adam Jagiello-Rusilowksi, continues to support practioners and get faculty thinking: How can we come together in this larger intercultural work? “We are trying to pull people together to collaborate and support the structures and spaces that are going to develop students’ intercultural skills so students are able to use them in the workplace and society,” says Williams.
In addition to blending theory with application, Lee and Williams are also interested in disseminating the voices of colleagues and students. “Students are a source of great expertise on their own experience and needs and they are not consulted in real ways in a lot of research, and the same is true with teachers,” remarks Lee. “We’re trying to value and enfranchise the wisdom of the people we’re trying to reach or support.”
Based in themes of inclusion and equity, their work refuses the common dichotomy of writing for teachers or scholars, writing for domestic or international audiences. For Lee and Williams, the student is at the center of a higher ed. institution for everyone, and their work reinforces this position. “Our work is always about the students,” says Lee. “But in order to support the students, you need to further the knowledge, understanding and capacity of the people to support their students’ development.”
Williams adds, “Whether you’re an administrator, faculty, advisor or whatever role you have, there are ways to collaborate and engage in intercultural work within your smaller space. It doesn’t need to come from the top down and it doesn’t have to look one way, it’s an ongoing process.”
The Tucker Center’s affiliated scholar Dr. Chelsey Thul and associate director Dr. Nicole M. LaVoi, both faculty in the School of Kinesiology, hosted a fashion show June 10 featuring culturally appropriate active wear designed in collaboration with researchers in the College of Design and 25 East-African middle school girls from the Cedar-Riverside community, who modeled the sport clothing.
The project represents a unique, interdisciplinary community-University team, including Dr. Elizabeth Bye, professor and department head of the Apparel Design Program, Fatimah Hussein, participants in Girls’ Initiative in Recreation and Leisurely Sports (G.I.R.L.S.) (a female-only culturally appropriate physical activity program), coaches Jennifer Weber and Muna Mohamed, community partners and the Tucker Center. Full information about the project is available at z.umn.edu/girlsresearch. Also read Thul’s Vision 2020 blog post.
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PsTL’s Molly Rojas Collins, Rhiannon Williams, Jill Trites and graduate student Sumitra Ramachandran have received funding from the International Student Academic Services Fee to develop and facilitate a professional development cohort experience to support University faculty who are teaching international students in blended classrooms of international students and domestic students. From research conducted by PsTL faculty and a graduate student in the fall of 2014, faculty expressed a need for having the resources and training to support international students in their classrooms.
Through Intercultural Pedagogy Development Workshops and sustained engagement, faculty from across the University will be encouraged to look for changes they can make based on best practice research and principles of universal design for international students, share their struggles with each other, and receive support and practical strategic advice from experts. Faculty will be given pedagogical resources they can begin to integrate, test, and modify within their own classrooms. In addition, they will gain a greater awareness about various institutional supports for both international undergraduate students and faculty seeking to support international students’ learning and development.
The Intercultural Pedagogy Development cohort program will be open to all University faculty. The program will launch in Fall 2015. For more information, or if you are interested in participating, please contact Molly Rojas Collins at colli038@umn.edu.
University of Minnesota alumni John and Nancy Lindahl have made public their commitment of $17 million to the U of M. The gift will help fund the new Athletics Village, including support for facilities and programming in basketball and football ($12 million), the College of Education and Human Development ($2 million), the Carlson School of Management ($2 million), and pediatric cardiology research ($1 million).
As both active volunteers and donors for the University, the Lindahls have previously impacted significant projects on campus, including the renovation of Northrop, return of football to campus, faculty endowments, and funding medical research.
“There is nowhere that we would rather give our time and treasure than to the University of Minnesota,” said the Lindahls.
“When I walk across campus, I see the influence of John and Nancy all around me,” said U of M President Eric Kaler. “From Northrop to children’s health research to endowed professorships to TCF Bank Stadium, their unwavering enthusiasm, hard work, and generosity are immeasurable. The University will long benefit from these gifts as well as the advocacy and energy they bring to all they do on behalf of this University.”
The Lindahls serve on the Department of Athletics Leadership Council, currently working to raise $190 million to fund a new home for Gopher sports. The couple’s $12 million gift to the athletics facilities campaign is included as part of the previously announced total of committed funds.
John, a graduate of the Carlson School (’68), and Nancy, a graduate of CEHD (’68), have provided $2 million to each of their colleges to advance strategic priorities of the academic leadership.
“This generous gift from Nancy and John Lindahl is one that will allow us to recruit and retain a field-shaping faculty and support graduate students,” said CEHD deanJean Quam.
Nancy has served as National Volunteer President of the University of Minnesota Alumni Association and is a life trustee of the University of Minnesota Foundation. John is a current Foundation trustee and a former trustee for the University’s Medical Foundation where he and Nancy became very involved in raising dollars for children and cardiology.
“The University is the economic and cultural centerpiece of our state,” said the Lindahls. “We have been blessed with opportunities to reconnect to the University and engage with great leaders over the last few decades. We are proud of our degrees and thrilled to see the direction this University is going.”
With just a few weeks left in the school year, area teachers have not stopped looking for ways to improve their practice. On May 13 in St. Paul, 150 educators and community members attended a workshop led by Dr. Gloria Ladson-Billings, professor and Kellner Family Chair in Urban Education at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
Ladson-Billings is renowned for her research and work in critical race theory and culturally relevant pedagogy, a term which she coined in 1995. Her workshop, “Culturally Relevant Pedagogy is Still Relevant,” focused on establishing effective teaching relationships with students from diverse backgrounds.
During one activity, Ladson-Billings read various statements about education and asked participants line up across the room based on how much they agreed or disagreed with the statement. When she asked if culturally relevant teaching could be applied to all kinds of students, agreement was nearly unanimous. However, Ladson-Billings said, not everyone sees it that way.
“Culturally relevant pedagogy is a strategy for teaching all learners,” she said. “And yet, as soon as people hear that, their minds go directly to kids of color.”
Ladson-Billings emphasized that it is incorrect to consider culturally relevant pedagogy as a method or system. It’s not about following a strict recipe, she said, but about understanding how to cook.
“What we’re talking about is less about technique than beliefs,” she remarked.
Ladson-Billings outlined several beliefs she thinks all culturally relevant educators must hold. First, she said, teachers must believe that all students have the capability to learn.
“I do professional development a lot, and I show teachers examples of stuff they can do,” said Ladson-Billings. “Invariably, I hear people who’ll say, ‘My kids can’t do that.’ My question is, ‘How do you know?’”
Culture, context, and connecting
Teachers must also recognize how permeating culture is, Ladson-Billings said. Culture is a vital part of the human experience that cannot be ignored in school.
“We are all cultural beings,” she said, “and culture influences every aspect of our being, including our learning.”
Ladson-Billings also reminded the participants that it is the teacher’s responsibility to learn about students’ cultures and communities. Culture can be used as a lever for learning, she said, and it can help students connect their classroom experience to large-scale social issues, politics, and their lives outside of school.
“Kids have to have the opportunity to participate in learning experiences that connect them with these larger contexts,” she said.
Connection in the classroom depends on honest interactions between teachers and students, according to Ladson-Billings. She warned the audience against presenting themselves to students in a false manner–a practice Ladson-Billings says she sees too frequently.
“Often our kids are in classrooms with what I’d call a cardboard cutout,” she said, meaning a teacher who doesn’t portray him or herself honestly to students. Effective teachers, she said, will allow students to get to know them as a human being.
Answering questions at the end of the workshop, Ladson-Billings said more should be done at the higher education level to create culturally relevant teachers. Stricter admissions processes and more focus on the transition between coursework and student teaching would ensure higher-quality teacher candidates, she added.
“In the end, our kids are suffering because we’re not being more discerning,” she said. “Fundamentally, I think the profession has to make some huge changes.”
More information
Gloria Ladson-Billings is on Twitter as @gjladson, where she participates in a weekly discussion of hip-hop and education every Tuesday at 8 p.m. under the hashtag #HipHopEd.
Ladson-Billings’ visit to the University of Minnesota was presented by the CEHD Office of Professional Development and the Urban Leadership Academy as its final workshop of the 2014-2015 season.
Story by Ellen Fee | Photos by Greg Helgeson
Bobby Bell finished what he started 56 years ago by earning a degree from the University of Minnesota in recreation, park, and leisure studies (RPLS) on May 14.
Bell starred on the 1960 national champion and 1962 Rose Bowl champion Gopher football teams, was a two-time All-American, Outland Trophy winner, and NFL Super Bowl winner. In 1983, he was inducted to the NFL Hall of Fame.
However, Bell, at age 74, has now earned something even more important to him: his University of Minnesota degree.
When Bell left the U to join the Kansas City Chiefs in 1963 he was just 13 credits short of his degree. With help from staff and faculty at the U, Bell achieved his dream and honored his father, who had minimal schooling but was convinced his son could acquire a college degree.
CEHD Student Services helped with the difficult task of evaluating Bell’s previous coursework and identifying remaining requirements for Bell. Connie Magnuson, RPLS director, worked with Bell to create a directed study to fulfill his final credits in the major.
Bell’s story has received national media coverage. See articles by ESPN, the Kansas City Star, Minnesota Public Radio, the Pioneer Press, and the Star Tribune.
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.
Academic Technology Services staffers Tom Nechodomu, Melissa Faldin, and Treden Wagoner and coordinator in CEHD International Initiatives and Relations Marina Aleixo won GPS Alliance’s “Gene Allen Award for Innovative International Initiatives” for their work on the University’s Collaborative Online International Learning (COIL) initiative.
The initiative connects CEHD faculty and their students with classrooms at the National University of Cyprus, Shanghai Jiaotong University, Qingdao University, and the University of Zambia. The award is named after C. Eugene Allen, former provost for professional studies, dean of agriculture, and associate vice president for the Office of International Programs (predecessor to the GPS Alliance). Read more.
Tania D. Mitchell, associate professor in the Department of Postsecondary Teaching and Learning, was selected to receive an AAUW American Fellowship for the 2015-16 fellowship and grant year. AAUW provides one of the world’s largest sources of funding for graduate women and the awards are highly competitive. Candidates are evaluated on the basis of scholarly excellence; quality and originality of project design; and active commitment to helping women and girls through service in their communities, professions, or fields of research.
The oldest and largest of AAUW’s fellowships and grant programs, the American Fellowships program began in 1888, a time when women were discouraged from pursuing an education. Now one of the largest sources of funding for graduate education for women, AAUW has provided more than $90 million to upwards of 11,000 fellows and grantees since awarding its first fellowship to Ida Street, a pioneer in the field of early American Indian history. Previous recipients include Susan Sontag and Judith Resnick.
