Funded Projects
| Project Title | Overview of the Project |
|---|---|
| M-Write MSE 220/250 using an I-Pad Pro Rachel Goldman Engineering $500.00 |
For this project, we will design and utilize power-point-based lecture slides which contain key illustrations and diagrams, along with planned blank spaces. The students will receive the slides at the beginning of class, in the form of a double-sided handout (or “packet”). The packet will also be transmitted to the projector wirelessly from an IPad Pro during class. It will therefore be possible to annotate and advance the presentation using the touch-screen while circulating the classroom, thus encouraging note-taking and in-class “writing to learn” exercises by the students. |
| Korean Language FanFiction Project Hyun-ju Kim LSA $500.00 |
The purpose of this grant is to fund the printing of an Anthology of FanFiction authored by students in the third year Korean language course. This project, underway this Winter 2016 semester, is motivating third-year Korean language learners to be engaged in writing and simultaneously enhancing the four elements of language learning: speaking, reading, writing (grammar knowledge), and listening. In particular, the element of writing in a second language acquisition is known to be the most challenging for language learners to improve in a set time frame. Within this limited condition, this research-proven project provides the following opportunities to our learners: motivation, authenticity, multimodal literacy, balanced language learning, and real publication. |
| Class Attendance of UMS Shows Anna Fisher LSA $500.00 |
I request CRLT IDF funds to bring twenty students in my seminar, “Bad in a Good Way: The Art of Failure” (RCHUMS 334.9, Winter 2016), to one--and ideally two--of the University Musical Society (UMS) productions this semester. Young Jean Lee and Taylor Mac are part of an important new canon of downtown experimental theater makers that we’ll be exploring on the contemporary politics of value. These plays—of which I’m personally familiar—thematize a divestment from traditional notions of mastery and virtuosity and explore the hidden or counterintuitive creative value to be found in amateurism and deliberately “lo-fi” aesthetics. Attending these plays would enable my students the opportunity to experience live—for many, likely for the first time-- the kind of challenging, contemporary work we’ll be reading about during the semester. Both offer masterclasses in the embrace of failure as a creative and critical strategy for feminist and queer political worldmaking. Following the plays, the students would engage in seminar discussion about them and write a short assignment in which they would reflect on what they saw in relation to the course material. |
| Ford School IEDP 2016, Cuba Susan Waltz Public Policy Shobita Parthasarathy Public Policy $500.00 |
Funds are requested to support a one-day field trip to visit sustainable agricultural production and explore rural energy installations during this year's International Economic Development Program (IEDP), a study tour that will take place in Cuba over spring break. The Ford School's IEDP is an experiential learning program, now in its 17th year. The field trip will entail transporting 20 students and 2 professors to designated sites, with visits and host interactions arranged by CIEE, the licensed ground-travel provider with whom we are working. |
| Visit of Alessia Blad to Italian program $500.00 |
Invitation of Prof. Alessia Blad to campus in February 2015. Prof. Alessia Blad leads the prodigiously successful Italian language program at the University of Notre Dame. She also teaches the Methodology course for the Department of Romance Languages and Literatures there. Among the innovations in which she has had a leadership role is the multi-university Consortium on Useful Assessment in Language and Humanities Education, of which Notre Dame is a founding member. This collaboration has produced a consistent set of tools for setting standards and assessing outcomes and that go from the lowest level of language to every level of literature and culture. She has been very active in curricular and extra-curricular initiatives, making the Italian language program the leading innovator in many advances later adopted by other programs (such as assessment, methods of teacher training, and most recently, computer enhanced language instruction, especially hybrid courses. She was invited by UC Berkeley recently for a similar presentation. She would spend one night in Ann Arbor in February, meeting with small groups of faculty and presenting to the entire Italian teaching staff, GSIs, Lecturers and Professors, on a Wednesday when elementary language classes are not held. She would consult and present on assessment strategies to connect lower and upper level courses, computer enhanced courses, and principles and practices of language pedagogy. |
| Creating a digital resource for critical thinking in Molecular Biology $500.00 |
MCDB 427 is an upper level required course for the Cell and Molecular Biology (CMB) major. This course relies on a textbook that emphasizes critical analysis of experimental data and poses a challenge for many of our students. In the past few years several new resources and different pedagogical approaches have been implemented but there remains a few students that have difficulty accessing the material. The focus of this proposal is to generate a new digital resource. Specifically, we will generate video recordings (~12) describing key experiments that students struggle with. These recordings will be made available on YouTube and on Canvas. All of the funds will be used for the salary of one undergraduate who has (1) taken the course and (2) has extensive experience generating digital media for science problems. This student will work closely with the PI over the holiday so that the videos will be available for the winter term. |
| Cinematography workshop $500.00 |
I am continuing development of a new course on cinematography for the Department of Screen Arts and Cultures. I am requesting $500 for the purchase of film stock and processing for students' use during three in-class workshops. The class is a hands-on exploration of the practice of 16mm motion picture photography where students will learn the technical and aesthetic demands of the craft. The use of analog film will encourage students to practice careful planning, gain intellectual and technical understanding of the medium, as well as strengthening their aesthetic instincts about the process of creating moving images. Students will also learn about of the evolution of motion picture technology as well as its relevance in the age of advancing digital technology. |
| Rubik's Cubes in Mathematics 412 Igor Kriz LSA $343.00 |
I am requesting $500.- to supplement Mathematics 412, which I am teaching in Fall 2014, with Rubik's cubes (and possibly additional puzzles) for the students to teach concepts of group theory. |
| Enhancing Application of Health Behavior Change throughout the Dental Hygiene Curriculum Anne Gwozdek Dentistry Janet Kinney Dentistry Dina Korte Dentistry $500.00 |
The goal of this project is to enhance integration of Motivational Interviewing (MI) within the Dental Hygiene Program's curriculum through student application during patient care. Attainment of this goal will continue to facilitate students' abilities to translate MI content learned in the classroom to clinical applications. The use of digital audio recorders will allow students to record their patient interactions, providing a means for self-assessment and faculty evaluation/feedback. |
| Expanding Student Learning Opportunities in Calculus by Teaching GSIs a Culturally Responsive Feedback Strategy $500.00 |
We will be experimenting with the design of the GSI training in the service of improving the instruction in the undergraduate calculus sequence. One central assumption of this project is that access to and equity in postsecondary learning opportunities is determined in part by collegiate teaching. In other words, the very teaching practices enacted by instructors in their courses actually serve to open or erect barriers to learning for particular groups of students, depending on the academic domain. For instance, giving students praise as a form of feedback actually serve to depress academic achievement amongst many women and African American students in mathematics courses (Lepper, Woolverton, Mumme, & Gurtner, 1993). An instructor offering praise equally to all his/her students in a calculus course would be creating inequitable learning opportunities for the women and men as well as white and students of color in the classroom (Yeager et al., 2013). This does not mean that there is malicious intent involved, yet ignoring the empirical research on effective, culturally responsive teaching practice, like the feedback strategy in this project, causes a great deal of harm to already marginalized student populations. We argue that it is especially important to create more equitable opportunities for undergraduate student learning in gateway courses, like pre-calculus (MATH 105), calculus one (MATH 115), and calculus two (MATH 116). We propose to do this by teaching Graduate Student Instructors (GSIs) to employ a culturally responsive practice for giving student feedback. |
| Travel to Buenos Aires to research performance practices, dance pedagogy and attend performances, rehearsals and lectures. Amy Chavasse Music, Theatre & Dance $500.00 |
This application seeks funding from CRLT to support a research trip to Buenos Aires, August 2-10, 2014 to study innovations in performance, composition and dance pedagogy. I will engage in practice-based research while studying, attending and observing classes with Professors of Dance and Theater, Luciana Acuña and Luis Biasotto. They are also co-Artistic Directors of Grupo Krapp, an internationally recognized group of dance, theater and music artists in Buenos Aires, and professors at the Universitario Nacional de Arte. Through this immersive experience-- participating, observing, writing about, documenting, (video and written, I will build dynamically upon my work and research, expanding my teaching modalities and methods here in the courses I teach-- Creative Process, Performance Improvisation, Senior Seminar, Advanced Dance Technique. My dedication to international travel, teaching, performance and research during the summer has infused by teaching practice in important and myriad ways. |
| Travelling to Germany for Professional Development Seminar for Business German "Ready for the Working World" $500.00 |
I am planning to attend a seminar organized by Goethe Institute in Germany called "Ready for the working world in Germany", It is a new seminar offered for the first time this year. In this one-week seminar I will learn how to provide my students with the practical and intercultural knowledge they need in order to be ideally prepared for working life in Germany. I will gain insights into company structures and will learn about culture-specific aspects of everyday working life in Germany. I will collect practical information and explore job-specific teaching materials. During the seminar I will then work in a group to develop interactive teaching methods for my own classroom. My students, especially in the class ‘Business German 350', will benefit immensely from the knowledge that I will gain from this seminar. Many of the students in this class are aspiring to apply for an internship or a job in Germany after completing their studies. The learning material offered in this seminar is exactly what they need. |
| Interpreting Maritime History through Performance: Hosting Classroom Guest Performer & Speaker Glenn Gordinier Jamie Jones LSA $1700.00 |
I am applying for funding from the CRLT Instructional Development Fund in order to host the visit of a classroom guest speaker, the maritime historian and performer Glenn Gordinier, in my Winter 2014 course LHSP 230: "Chasing the Whale: Reading and Responding to Moby-Dick. " Students in my course are all part of the Lloyd Hall Scholars Program living-learning community. My course guides students through an intensive critical reading of Moby-Dick and a sweeping survey of literature, art, and performance made in response to Herman Melville's 1851 novel. Throughout the course, students are drafting, work-shopping, and revising creative responses of their own. The teaching philosophy that guides my design of this course is that critical thought and creative expression can be mutually reinforcing. Through taking this approach to learning, I strive to complement the goal of the Lloyd Hall Scholars Program to encourage students' intellectual and personal growth. Through his one-man performance of a 19th-century sailor and his subsequent discussion, Dr. Gordinier will help my students fulfill the main learning outcomes of my course: to approach nineteenth-century culture through critical and creative forms of response. Dr. Gordinier will serve as a thoughtful model and interlocutor for students as they polish their own creative projects. |
| Anne Frank Tree Exhibit Annemarie Toebosch U-M Flint $475.00 |
In this experiential learning project, students in Dutch/Judaic 351 Anne Frank in Context visit the Anne Frank Tree Exhibit at the Detroit Holocaust Memorial Center. They will be in the presence of a sapling of the chestnut tree that Frank watched from her Amsterdam hiding place and described in her Diary. Afterward they will have a conversation with a Holocaust survivor. The combined experience builds a bridge to a far away time and place, and makes an unimaginable form of discrimination and persecution tangible and real to students. |
| Enhancing presentation skills of health policy MPH students Daniel Eisenberg Public Health $500.00 |
The purpose of this grant is to help fund an activity that will enhance students' presentation skills in the "capstone" course for our Masters of Public Health (MPH) students who are interested in health policy careers. If this pilot proves to be successful (as indicated by student feedback and the instructor's observations), we will seek to implement this exercise on a more substantial scale in our masters programs. We will bring in Patricia Russo from the Ross School of Business—she trains MBA students in the art of effective presentations, and comes highly recommended by colleagues at the university. She will be reviewing the videorecordings of 5-7 minute presentations by each of the 21 students in the course, and she will then give feedback to each student about their strengths and opportunities for improvement. She will also deliver a one hour lecture two weeks prior to the presentations, to help students prepare for the presentations. Finally, she will conduct a one-hour debriefing two weeks after the presentations, to discuss general themes in her feedback and opportunities for continued improvement. |
| The History and Evolution of Hip Hop Stephen Ward LSA $500.00 |
This project supports the community engagement component of a new course, AAS 254, "The History and Evolution of Hip Hop."Students will interact with local Hip Hop practitioners—artists, cultural workers, and institutions—by engaging classroom guest speakers and through a partnership between the class and 5e Gallery, a non-profit Hip Hop art gallery and performance space in Detroit. This partnership will include workshops called "5e Fridays" during which students will participate in various facets of Hip Hop culture. |
| Audience Work in Technical Communication Rhonda McCaffery Engineering $500.00 |
This project involved pedagogy in technical communication. Along with a researcher from another institution, we presented research-based pedagogical strategies and insights for teaching audience in a junior-level technical communication class at the March 2015 Conference on College Composition and Communication (CCCCs) in Tampa, Florida. Audience is a particularly important subject in the technical communication discipline, and it is important for technical communication instructors to convey the significance of this concept so students are equipped to write effective technical documents, both at the university level and in their future careers. Therefore, it is important for instructors to think about how they will teach about audience. The conference panel at the CCCCs conference was based on our colleagues' research on audience, from which they authored a new pedagogical theory. We applied this pedagogical theory on audience in our classrooms. During the 2014 - 2015 school year, each of us used the new pedagogical theory on audience as a foundation in our classrooms to create a more student-centered experience. We greatly modified our existing curriculum, giving students an assignment in which they worked with an actual stakeholder, the Canton Public Library. We shared our teaching strategies at CCCCs 2015 in order to add to the existing conversation on audience in technical communication. |
| Field trips for Hist/Environ 223: Trashed! A History of Garbage in the Modern World Anne Berg LSA $456.00 |
Trashed! explores the history of waste since the 19th century. We will trace how garbage – the actual stuff that humans discard – has changed along with methods of production, distribution and consumption. We will think about waste politics and garbage culture. We will examine how waste shapes societies, how it is managed, what roles it plays in different economies, how it integrates into people's everyday lives, and how it fits into their value systems. Most importantly, we explore how trash connects and divides people in different parts of an expanding and constricting world. In order to make these connections tangible, this course includes active explorative learning in particular two field trips to a waste processing facility and a materials recovery facility. It is in support of these field trips that we apply for funding. |
| App Maker Faire Elizabeth Keren-Kolb Education $399.00 |
In order to prepare preservice teachers to help K-12 students develop grit and 21st century skills such as innovation, collaboration and problem-solving, they will be participating in an app-maker faire in their EDUC 444 course during Spring/Summer 2015. They will be asked to identify a problem in K-12 teaching and learning, and then develop an app to help solve that problem. The app will be published and they will be able to use the app with K-12 students and/or teachers. The funds from this grant will cover the costs of the needed software for developing the apps and publishing them to iTunes and Google Play Stores. |
| Innovative Teaching Curriculum in the Cardiac Intensive Care Unit using Mobile Apps Peter Hagan Medical School $500.00 |
Our project involves the creation of a novel interactive mobile application to implement a newly formed curriculum aimed at educating training physicians practicing in a Cardiac Intensive Care Unit (CICU). To our knowledge a mobile application would be a new approach to education in this setting. The CICU is a challenging learning environment due to the high demands and unpredictable nature of critically ill patients with severe cardiovascular dysfunction; obtaining protected time for on-the-job education is difficult and traditional teaching models have failed. By combining a new curriculum with the mobility, accessibility, and efficiency of mobile application we hope to demonstrate improvement in trainee knowledge as well as increased satisfaction with their educational experience. The project will benefit medical students as well as house officers at various levels of training. The results of this project may be applicable to post-graduate medical education at large. We will study the effect of this educational initiative through the use of pre- and post-implementation surveys and formal testing to assess house officer knowledge and satisfaction. Resources from the Center for Research on Learning and Teaching will be vital to the success of this project as we hope to refine our methods of curriculum design, curriculum implementation, and data analysis. |
| HyFlex Statistics Computer Lab with R $500.00 |
Effective for the Spring 2015 term, Stats 250 will be teaching data analysis to students through the R software, moving away from SPSS. Unlike SPSS, R is available to download for free, so students will be able to download the software to their own computers. This removes the necessity of having Virtual Sites, and allows students more freedom in their technology usage. We would like to expand this freedom by allowing students to attend a lab section remotely. A Hybrid Flexible model for lecture attendance has already been implemented into Stats 250. Hybrid Flexible, or "HyFlex," is an emerging option that provides students the flexibility and freedom to choose how and where they participate in classes. In a traditional hybrid course, the instructor dictates which sessions meet online versus face-to-face, but for a HyFlex model, students are given the decision about whether to attend class face-to-face or synchronously online. Students may attend entirely online (aside from exams, in this case), entirely face-to-face, or any combination of the two. There are different challenges when applying this model to a computer lab. continued in project objectives... |
