Funded Projects
| Project Title | Overview of the Project |
|---|---|
| Development of a graduate level on-demand course in X-ray crystallography Raymond Trievel Medical School Uhn-Soo Cho Medical School Jennifer Bridwell-Rabb LSA - Chemistry Nicole Koropatkin Medical School $9872.40 |
The goal is to develop and execute an on-demand graduate-level course in X-ray crystallography for current U-M graduate students, postdoctoral fellows, and interested undergraduates. More than 49 U-M faculty use this technique in their research to determine structures of biological molecules to understand chemical and biological systems to support drug design, industrial innovation, or solve environmental problems. The proposed on-demand course will consist of thirteen topics/modules, each integrating conceptual and practical information followed by an online quiz demonstrating mastery and collecting feedback. Modules will be developed and instituted by a team consisting of coordinator Jeanne Stuckey, multidisciplinary faculty currently using X-ray crystallography in their labs, and two students paid by this grant. Three embedded hands-on workshops will be provided each semester by the Center for Structural Biology lab staff. Completion of the course will provide deeper student understanding by coordinating conceptual and technical learning, provide an ongoing resource available for repeated access as needed, and increase research productivity while taking maximal advantage of limited faculty teaching resources. |
| Scaffolded Experiential Learning: An Equitable Approach to Dietetics Training Susan Aaronson Public Health Sarah Ball Public Health Liv Anderson Public Health $10000.00 |
This project aims to holistically and thoroughly evaluate a new dietetics training model where experiential learning is scaffolded into the dietetics curriculum in a novel way with the aim to increase student access to opportunities and educational equity. In a traditional dietetics curriculum, students learn counseling techniques and medical nutrition therapy concepts through standard coursework and are then expected to apply these skills through an internship experience in a real-world setting, often 1 to 2 years later. This leaves students to find and explore their own opportunities to gain experience prior to the real-world internship, which means that certain students get left behind, struggle more, and feel as though they have to catch up. Instead, we will employ a scaffolded approach with more opportunity to grow through simulation and “safe” real-world settings. All students will apply their learning immediately through a stepped approach - 1) learn concept; 2) classroom simulation exercises; 3) peer or community member counseling opportunities with faculty oversight; 4) clinic experiences with preceptor evaluation. We plan to evaluate each step in the process through targeted course evaluation questions, student focus groups and final preceptor focus groups to assess readiness to enter the field of dietetics. |
| Development of a Translation Major Kristin Dickinson LSA - Germanic Languages and Literatures Nicholas Henriksen LSA - Romance Languages and Literatures Julie Evershed LSA - Language Resource Center $10000.00 |
We request support from the Gilbert Whitaker Fund to develop and submit a proposal for a Translation Major, housed in Comparative Literature and open to undergraduates across all departments. The introduction of this new major into the LSA curriculum is based on our department’s ongoing commitment to translation studies, and comes with the enthusiastic endorsement from external reviewers in our Fall 2022 departmental review. The major will encourage students to build on the LSA language requirement by taking advanced courses related to translation; it will enable them to pursue translation as a double major with a specific language or discipline; it will also encourage diverse students with multilingual backgrounds to integrate translation into their undergraduate studies. Translation Majors will learn about translation as a process and a product, and gain skills to prepare for careers in professional translation. We have formed a planning team of six members from Comparative Literature and other units who will meet with external consultants during the 2023-24 academic year, to discuss different models for developing an undergraduate translation program. In addition, our team will reach out to Undergraduate Chairs and Senior Lecturers in LSA language and literature departments, to collaborate on designing new courses that will meet requirements for the major and support enrollment in advanced language courses in other units. After gathering external and internal feedback, the team will submit our complete proposal in March 2024 to the LSA Curriculum Committee, with the goal of launching the Translation Major in Fall 2025. |
| Addressing Technical and Ethical Issues in Information Retrieval David Jurgens Information $5942.00 |
This project aims to develop course content for undergraduate and graduate level Information Retrieval courses that will expose students to the technical and social challenges of developing these systems. Information Retrieval covers technologies that enable people to access otherwise-unreachable information, including the most common example, web search engines. Building these types of technologies requires solving hard technical challenges, such as how to effectively organize millions (or billions) of documents for efficient retrieval or how to understand how to interpret a user’s search query. However, these search technologies play an increasingly important social role as mediators and arbiters of what information can be retrieved. When search engines are designed without social or ethical considerations in mind, the technology has the potential to detrimentally impact society and further marginalize people. For example, in her book Algorithms of Oppression, Prof. Safiya Umoja Noble points to an early example of Google’s search behavior for the query “black girls”; due to feedback loops, early versions of the search engine returned mostly links to pornography on the first page of search results. Furthermore, new issues of search engines gone awry have become more pressing as misinformation and adversarial behavior by website providers both influence what is retrieved on the first page of results. This Gilbert Whitaker Fund proposal would develop a series of homework assignments that helps students deeply engage with the technical and ethical aspects of designing search engines to help prepare them for addressing these real-world harms once they graduate. |
| MBot-ROS: Flexible and scalable mobile robot platform to support robotics coursework at Michigan and beyond Peter Gaskell Engineering - Robotics Abhishek Narula Engineering - Robotics $10000.00 |
The MBot is a small, low-cost mobile robot platform developed at the University of Michigan (UM) to support hands-on labs in robotics courses. The main objective of this proposal is to support development of a new software suite for the MBot platform. The new software suite will be flexible to support modular course development; it will be scalable by enabling easy adaptation, and it will be accessible to the wider robotics community here at Michigan and beyond. To achieve these objectives, we propose to transition the MBot software from the current Lightweight Communications and Marshalling (LCM) framework to the Robot Operating System (ROS). ROS is an open-source robotics middleware suite, consisting of software libraries and tools that support building robotics applications. ROS is widely used across the wider robotics community. Transitioning to ROS will enable flexibility and scalability for the MBot platform; it will allow for robotics students at UM to get hands-on experience with a valuable software suite used in industry and academic research; and it will increase accessibility of the MBot platform and software for robotics students outside UM as the ROS suite is supported by extensive documentation and an online community of robotics researchers. |
| Student-centered re-design of Earth 223, Introductory Oceanography Laboratory $6000.00 |
EARTH223/ENVIRON233 is a companion laboratory course to EARTH222 Introductory Oceanography meant to provide hands-on experience associated with selected lecture topics. As we returned to a residential college experience after the Covid19 pandemic, we re-evaluated our curriculum and it became apparent that Earth223 no longer meets students’ expectations and instructors’ teaching philosophies or needs. All our labs will benefit from a student-centered re-design process. Some labs mostly will need updates and the purchase of materials to make them more hands-on, inquiry-based, and experiential. For others, we will create new laboratory exercises that utilize facilities and collections like the Marine Hydrodynamics Laboratory, Natural History Museum, Clark Library, and Zoology Museum. We also have the opportunity of adding new curriculum by utilizing three vacated weeks. This will be a collaborative experience involving faculty, researchers, and graduate and undergraduate students. We particularly value the perspective of undergraduate students that so far has been absent from our curriculum development. We want to hire undergraduates who took the course, science and non-science majors, as curriculum development assistants to help design and evaluate new activities that will replace or add to our current curriculum. This process will be iterative, happening over a full year, allowing us to conduct interviews, focus groups, surveys, mid-term evaluations, and content knowledge assessments before and after the re-design. This project will serve as a prototype allowing other Earth faculty to re-design or improve introductory labs, and we will disseminate the data collected to inform best practices for laboratory curriculum development. |
| Equitable Teaching and Learning in a Large-Lecture R&E Course Victoria Langland LSA - History LSA - Latin American and Caribbean Studies LSA - Romance Languages and Literatures Farina Mir LSA - History $5980.00 |
We co-teach a large, introductory lecture class with a Race & Ethnicity (R&E) designation: “History 101: What is History?” (cross listed with International Studies 205) and are submitting this proposal in order to improve the teaching of this 318-person class. The proposal originates out of exciting new opportunities on campus to make teaching and learning a more collaborative, engaging, and equitable experience, such as that manifested in the opening of the new Central Campus Classroom Building (CCCB). The CCCB is the first facility at U-M to be designed entirely to support active learning in large courses, and we have requested use of the auditorium (CCCB 1420) in the Fall of 2023 to be able to fully take advantage of this opportunity. We are similarly requesting Whitaker funds so that we can substantially re-conceptualize the way that History 101 is taught, moving away from a reliance on majority lecturing and towards the regular integration of well-designed, intentional, active learning strategies in the lecture hall. Among other benefits, active learning strategies promote equitable teaching as they provide multiple opportunities for students to interact with one another and to share responsibility for building and engaging with their learning community. They also offer multiple modes of engagement to reach all students so that all students have equal access to learning. With these changes, we will be poised to foster more active learning and to ensure equally the success of all of our students. |
| I Belong Daicia Price Social Work $6000.00 |
Social work practitioners are classified as health care providers and therefore responsible for delivering services to a diverse population. Practitioners with non-dominant social identities that have been historically marginalized and impacted by systemic, institutional, and interpersonal oppression can experience challenges when working with client systems that perpetuate oppression while receiving services. Course outlines in predominantly white institutions often support new practitioners with dominant social identities in learning how to work with client systems that are marginalized. The current structure further marginalizes new professionals that are attempting to learn ways to work with clients that have oppressive ideas and beliefs while simultaneously learning to work with clients that have similar social identities that lead to issues related to transference. Reports from new professionals that they don’t feel like they “belong” in a profession that is heavily represented by white, heterosexual, cisgender, Christian, women are consistent with President Ono’s reflection at the DEI 1.0 Evaluation report information session. This project, I Belong, seeks to adapt course materials to include real world examples of social work practice with youth and adults with complex and intersectional identities as professionals with complex and intersectional primary and secondary social identities that have experienced marginalization and systemic oppression. Role plays, scenarios, and videos will be developed to enhance the learning experience of students that have diverse social identities, with a focus on ensuring that an equity focused approach is used in the development of resources and tools. |
| Communication education: Using evidence based training Heidi Mason Nursing April Bigelow Nursing Karen Harden Nursing Deborah Price Nursing Jude Divers Medical School $9700.00 |
Proficient communication skills are key to helping patients and families understand their illness and allow them to make decisions based on their personal goals and individual values. Unfortunately most programs do not offer specific communication training. Education to improve communication skills has been associated with earlier and better serious illness conversations. Education and improved communication skills is also linked to an improvement in documentation of goals of care. VitalTalk is an education program that uses evidence-based training methods with simulated patients in a controlled setting to help providers improve their communication skills when having difficult conversations with patients and family members. The course involves a didactic component that teaches the process and a simulation component that enables participants to practice the skills they have learned. Participants are armed with the necessary skills to improve their conversations with patients, particularly those that are sensitive, difficult, or challenging. Nurse practitioners in every specialty need to develop the skills necessary to communicate effectively with seriously ill patients and their families. At the present time the University of Michigan graduate nurse practitioner programs do not have a specific, comprehensive program to teach communication skills to our graduate nursing students. The goal of this project is to teach students specific strategies in effective communication, delivering bad news, and initiating difficult conversations using this method. This can be done though lectures which will teach the evidence based methodology and tools and. This will be augmented by simulation to practice using the skills. |
