Funded Projects
| Project Title | Overview of the Project |
|---|---|
| Great Books for the 21st Century Student Carrie Wood LSA $6000.00 |
Great Books, the Freshman Honors introduction to a core curriculum that surveys important works of literature and philosophy, has a storied career in the University of Michigan’s Honor’s Program. Since the retirement of Classics Professor Don Cameron, who taught a two-semester version of course for several decades under the rubric of a Great Books Program, the course has seen several changes. The course is now a one-semester class that is one of several Honors humanities core electives. Therefore, the Classics Department, which now houses the course together with the LSA Honors Program, must rethink the scope and purpose of the one-semester course, in light of the intellectual priorities of the Honors Core and in light of the goals of the University as a whole, which include the fostering of diverse, multi-cultural, global, and inclusive teaching, together with a holistic approach to the education of our first year students. |
| Design-Specific Leadership in Architecture Irene Hwang Architecture and Urban Planning Reetha Raveendran Architecture and Urban Planning Joana Dos Santos Architecture and Urban Planning McLain Clutter Architecture and Urban Planning $10000.00 |
Our team’s objective is to develop and introduce design-specific leadership models and concepts to the architecture curriculum (graduate and undergraduate) and pedagogy at the Taubman College of Architecture and Urban Planning. The goal is to shift the culture of architectural education and practice from one that is more individualistic and authoritarian, to one more collaborative and inclusive. We plan to begin this project on design-specific leadership through the continued evolution of the required, graduate-level course, Arch 583 Professional Practice. Arch 583 is considered the primary academic course where students learn about the profession of architecture. In spite of this course’s core position in the design curriculum, its format, concepts, and pedagogy have not changed in many decades. Evolving demands placed on the discipline of architecture, where projects are far more complex and require a higher level of collaboration and communication across diverse perspectives and concerns, require that our graduates possess an understanding of updated leadership principles and frameworks. Working with experts from our field and other fields, with our students and our faculty, our project team will learn how leadership impacts our design profession. To improve the effectiveness of Arch 583, as well as to evolve the entirety of the architecture curriculum, this project aims to first understand and discern those concerns and priorities of leadership in architecture and then to create a path to make the teaching of leadership concepts a standard component of architectural education. |
| Continuing Implementation of Gameful Pedagogies and Gradecraft in Second Language Classes Qian Liu LSA $10000.00 |
In 2018, our team of four language instructors were awarded an LSA Level 2 grant to develop and implement gameful learning practices into their respective curricula; Chinese 405, French 103, and Italian 232. This proposal is to support follow up activity based on the work accomplished and successes realized from our initial work. The work the Whitaker grant will support is codifying the best concepts of gameful learning for second language acquisition and to build on the previous pilot courses; to examine the results of attitudinal surveys, course feedback, and instructor experience, to synthesize those results, then revise the gameful implementation strategies piloted in Fall 2018 and Winter 2019 courses in the next iteration of course designs, to be implemented during the Fall 2019 and Winter 2020 semesters. For example, one beneficial aspect of designing the curriculum around gameful pedagogies is the ability to take advantage of a variety of different activities, including relatively spontaneous, real-world, opportunities that may present themselves. A successful example of this occurred in Italian, when Lasker-Ferretti added a “mini translate-a-thon” to her course. This service based learning experience engaged the students with real-world, authentic, language allows them to experience practical use of their emerging language skills. Facilitating this type of iterative course re-design provides opportunities for students to engage with real-world topics, experiential learning, and creates space for diverse learning styles, as well as provides learning opportunities that traditional learning courses may not have the impetus to include. |
| Moving Forward with a Backward Design: Revision of German 221/231 Mary Gell LSA - Germanic Languages and Literatures $6000.00 |
German 221/231 is a fulcrum course. It is the bridge between first-year German, where students acquire a basic command of the language and familiarity with German culture, and the culmination of the language requirement in the German 232 special topics courses, which are vital feeders to our upper-level courses. We offer around 15 sections of 221/231 each academic year, serving an annual total of roughly 240 students. Students review and build on what they have learned in the first year and begin a more complex engagement with written and visual texts addressing a range of social and cultural issues. In its last major revision in 2006, 221/231 was organized around 5 feature-length films, 2 easy-reader novels, numerous shorter texts and videos, and online grammar and vocabulary quizzes. We feel the time has come for a much more flexible and sustainable course structure, more adaptable to changes in the world, more in line with Rackham’s DEI strategic plan, and more open to flexible implementation by instructors in accordance with their individual expertise. Consequently, we propose a complete revision of the course by means of backward design. We will start by establishing clear and common learning outcomes for all sections and develop a modular course built around themes. We seek funding to support our work over the summer of 2019 to establish learning outcomes, develop assessments, conduct brainstorming sessions within the department and create lesson plans and teaching materials, in order to offer the re-envisioned course as of Fall Term 2019. |
| Improving Chemistry Teaching Through Instructional Coaching $10000.00 |
Science faculty typically begin teaching with minimal experience and limited opportunity for professional development, while at the same time meeting high expectations for research excellence. This tension makes learning to teach challenging for all faculty, but in particular women and people of color who are additionally challenged with developing teaching identities in classrooms where their authority is more likely to be questioned. The proposed project will address these challenges by initiating an instructional coaching community that empowers new chemistry graduate students, postdoctoral teaching fellows, and faculty to reflect and improve on their teaching practice while honoring their individual beliefs about teaching. |
| Acquisition of remote access technologies to advance student learning in Wildlife Ecology $6000.00 |
One of the key challenges that faculty in the field of environmental studies face today, is a fundamental lack of real-life experience and practical training among the incoming cohorts of ecology students. Substantial first-hand experience with natural organisms is the well-spring of understanding for anyone hoping to be a successful ecologist or natural resource manager. However, students today hail increasingly from urban settings and often have had very little exposure to nature. This lack of previous exposure to nature has strong repercussions on the knowledge, abilities and training of professional ecologists at the University of Michigan. Increasingly classes are taught without student exposure to the outdoors. However, the gold standard for the discipline is direct interaction and training on live wild animals and plants, and this standard is becoming increasingly hard to maintain. The University of Michigan lags sorely behind peer institutions when it comes to the introduction and adoption of new wildlife technologies (radiotelemetry and remote observation) in teaching and in training our students. To my knowledge no course on campus utilizes or teaches about the use of these technologies, creating a significant disadvantage for our students. What is urgently needed is an initial investment into the purchase of wildlife radiotelemetry equipment, which can then be used long-term within the framework of existing courses. I would therefore like to request funds that will be used to purchase radiotelemetry, remote monitoring and related field equipment for wildlife study. |
| Training Data Savvy Public Health Practitioners: A Proposal to Modernize Computer Labs for Biostatistics 521 Matthew Zawistowski Public Health $6000.00 |
Biostatistics 521 is an introductory statistical analysis course offered in the School of Public Health (SPH). Designed to foster data analysis skills in future public health practitioners, the course serves a large and diverse audience of >200 graduate students each Fall semester. Increasing expectations on practical data analysis skills have rendered the computer lab component of BIOS 521 outdated in content and philosophy. The current format of closed-ended problem sets and antiquated data simply do not meet the training needs of today’s public health students. We propose to modernize computer labs to an “authentic” learning experience that explicitly mimics the open-ended statistical tasks these students will perform in their future careers. First, we will team with faculty from across SPH disciplines to identify public health datasets that are current standards in their fields and develop a set of timely scientific questions for students to explore. Next, we will design a set of innovative, modular lab assignments that each focus on a specific piece of the statistical analysis procedure. The modules will naturally build upon each other to guide students through the logical steps of a statistical analysis. At the conclusion of the semester, each student will have designed and implemented a complete statistical analysis, from exploratory figures to multivariate inferential modeling, on a modern public health dataset. Our revised lab structure provides hands-on experience and enhances the training of first-year graduate students eager to jump into analyzing data on the latest public health topics. |
| A holistic approach to calibrating clinical dental faculty for assessments that support a “growth mind-set” Diane Hoelscher Dentistry Tracy de Peralta Dentistry Carol Anne Murdoch-Kinch Dentistry Vidya Ramaswamy Dentistry Romesh Nalliah Dentistry $9960.00 |
Standardization of faculty, which occurs as a result of calibration activities, is a particular challenge across all of dental education. Dental students must learn and be assessed on literally hundreds of procedures, techniques and clinical activities. At the UMSD as in other dental schools, dental faculty are diverse, graduating from clinical training programs around the world, with variations in clinical philosophies of care. The UMSD employs hundreds of full-time and adjunct-faculty often teaching in different clinical disciplines and in multiple locations, who must be calibrated on teaching and assessment; these factors create barriers to successful and sustainable calibration programs using traditional approaches. Calibration activities seek to achieve “consistent application of protocols, techniques, and philosophies, so the student experience is as consistent as possible.” (McAndrew, 2016). In this proposal, we present a much broader approach to calibration that supports and broadens faculty members’ knowledge of educational principles and their ability to facilitate a growth mind-set culture and humanistic learning environment within the UMSD learning environment. This program will utilize a variety of technology-based solutions to make learning opportunities more accessible to faculty and provide innovative ways to track and communicate the outcomes of calibration activities. Program goals will include increasing faculty intra and inter-rater reliability for selected student assessments and increasing faculty participation and collaboration in calibration activities. Study design and analysis will include a needs assessment, preliminary assessment of current systems using mixed methods, a calibration training intervention and a program outcomes assessment. |
| Debriefing Training for Healthcare Learners: Learning to Process Distressing Events Together Nasuh Malas Medical School Kelcey Stratton Medical School Kathleen Robertson Medical School Katie Feder Medical School Patricia Keefer Medical School $10000.00 |
Healthcare professionals are likely to be exposed to traumatic events and emotional distress repeatedly during their training and careers. However, many learners report receiving limited or no training in coping with patient deaths and other distressing events, which can contribute to isolation, professional stress, moral or ethical distress, and burnout. The proposed project seeks to fill an important training gap in how distressing events in healthcare settings are identified and discussed. The Departments of Psychiatry, Palliative Care, Clinical Ethics, and the Office of Counseling and Workplace Resilience propose an innovative, interactive, and multidisciplinary training initiative to teach healthcare learners essential skills for debriefing. The debriefing workshop is a 2-hour training session in which skills are discussed, modeled, and practiced. The workshop provides a unique opportunity for self-reflection and active learning, as well as an inclusive forum that recognizes the diverse roles, responses, and experiences of healthcare team members and learners. Debriefing sessions are effective in addressing the emotional impact of distressing events, and can improve concentration, morale, work engagement, and individual and team performance, which are critical components of learning. Funding will allow for the refinement of training materials, assessment of the implementation strategy, and partnership with academic divisions and educators to create multidisciplinary learning opportunities. The project will also contribute to Michigan Medicine and GME priorities regarding learner, faculty, and staff well-being and resilience. |
| Virtual Anatomy Glenn Fox Medical School B. Kathleen Alsup Medical School $5997.00 |
The goal of this project is to create and integrate 3-dimensional (3-D) anatomical images into curated, curriculum-specific virtual reality (VR) experiences for students in Anatomy curricula. These VR experiences will be curricularly-incorporated into existing U-M Anatomy courses and publicly available as free resources by incorporation into our existing web resources. |
