Funded Projects
| Project Title | Overview of the Project |
|---|---|
| Technology-Driven Curricular Innovation for Performing Arts Technology 200/201/202 Jeremy Edwards Music, Theatre & Dance Paul Dooley Music, Theatre & Dance Christopher Burns Music, Theatre & Dance $10000.00 |
We propose innovative strategies for teaching introductory topics in recording engineering and music production. These techniques are intended for a newly created course, PAT 200/Introduction to Electronic Music (targeted primarily at non-PAT-major students, and being discussed for inclusion in a potential Popular Music minor), as well as existing PAT 201/Introduction to Computer Music and PAT 202/Computer Music courses for majors. Together, these courses reach 25 PAT majors and upwards of 300 students from other majors each year. We are developing new approaches to instruction and hands-on practice in microphone selection, positioning, and mixing. Previously, these topics could only be explored in group settings, and in highly-equipped recording studio spaces not accessible to introductory courses. Technological advancements, coupled with new pedagogical approaches, make it possible for us to teach these materials in more modestly-equipped classroom spaces such as our Music Technology Lab, and to give novice students individualized, practical experience with these key techniques. We intend to broaden the musical diversity of our curriculum, and thereby increase the inclusivity of our teaching, by adopting new approaches to instruction in music production. Hip-hop and other styles of global contemporary electronic music production are increasingly centered on sample-triggering hardware control surfaces. By embracing these devices for both new pedagogical materials around electronic drum programming and sample manipulation, and existing topics including live performance, we can convey to students from diverse backgrounds that we embrace genres of music important to them, and help to inspire their creative work in the classroom and beyond. |
| Trauma-informed Practice Certificate for Prospective Teachers, Social Workers, and Nurses Shari Saunders Education Julia Seng Nursing Todd Herrenkohl Social Work Beth Sherman Social Work $6000.00 |
Schools are an important context for building resilience in children who have experienced trauma. To do so, school professionals must understand the impacts of adversity and how trauma manifests in the body. They must also learn to interact with students in ways that are sensitive to the social and behavioral challenges that some will inevitably encounter. Pre-service training in trauma-informed practices is notably lacking, which is concerning because undergraduate and graduate students who aspire to careers in education or other helping professions have little or no exposure to this critically important content. Faculty from the School of Education (SOE), School of Nursing (SN), and School of Social Work (SSW) will collaborate on a certificate program for UM students called Trauma-informed Practice & Leadership (TiPL). TiPL is unique in its emphasis on interprofessional education for practice across the three disciplines. Enrollment of practicing school professionals in the certificate program, along with UM students, will enrich the learning environment and bring examples from the field into the classroom. Completion of a sequence of 3 one-credit courses will result in a certificate of completion. TiPL will have a significant impact on the teaching and learning environment at the UM by providing a space for faculty and students in SOE, SN, and SSW to share knowledge and pursue common interests. Because this certificate will also include practicing professionals, there will be a unique opportunity to strengthen ties to schools and to the local community. |
| Girls Encoded Class: Promoting Diversity Within Computer Science and Engineering Rada Mihalcea Engineering Laura Wendlandt Engineering $5725.00 |
Even while the field of computer science (CS) is experiencing rapid growth, women continue to be underrepresented, both in the workplace and the classroom. In an attempt to address these concerns and improve the enrollment of women in UM’s computer science programs, we will be offering a new freshman class “Girls Encoded”. The class will be a one-credit class which, while open to everyone, will be particularly aimed at women with no formal programming experience who are interested in learning more about the field of computer science. We have support from the Computer Science and Engineering (CSE) division for this class and will be offering it for the first time in Fall 2018. It will be taught by Professor Rada Mihalcea and PhD student Laura Wendlandt, co-directors of the Girls Encoded initiative, a CSE organization promoting the recruitment and retention of women in computer science (see girlsencoded.eecs.umich.edu). |
| UARTS 150: Intro to Creative Process-Creating a More Integrative Experiential Teaching and Learning Environment Ali Shapiro LSA Laura Hirshfield Engineering Katie Rubin Art & Design Jeremy Edwards Music, Theatre & Dance Jono Sturt Architecture and Urban Planning $9570.00 |
This request will provide the resources to redesign and refine UARTS 150: Introduction to Creative Process. This is a required 4-credit interdisciplinary arts-integrative project-based writing course for first-year Living Arts students, a Michigan Learning Community (MLC) housed in the Bursley Residence Hall on North Campus. Themed around arts integration and collaboration, this MLC actively recruits students from the School of Art and Design; College of Architecture and Urban Planning, School of Music, Theatre and Dance; College of Engineering; and the College of LSA. The purpose of UARTS 150 is to introduce students to creative process across disciplines, as an exploration of their own creative process as a lifelong skill for success. The course was redesigned prior to the Fall 2017 semester to formally fulfill the LSA First Year Writing Requirement (FYWR) for arts and architecture students (for engineering it fulfills the "creative expression" breadth requirement). A significant challenge of this course is to integrate the FYWR (academic writing) curriculum into this complex and time-intensive course. The existing writing curriculum seeks to connect with the "making" components of the course through written essay assignments concerned with the broad theme of "creativity." However, students report (and instructors agree) that the academic writing portion is separate from the "making" parts of the course, and the disciplinary sections could be better integrated with each other. With Whitaker Fund support, we hope to co-evolve the FYWR curriculum alongside the making component of the course, seeking deeper and more specific connections between the making and writing. |
| Reproductive justice education: collaborating with reproductive justice advocates to create a video-based teaching. Charisse Loder Medical School Lee Roosevelt Nursing Chris Chapman Medical School $10000.00 |
Reproductive justice is defined as “the human right to maintain bodily autonomy, have children, not have children and parent the children we have in safe and sustainable communities”. In the United States, there is a history of reproductive injustices in which health professionals were complicit in coercive sterilization, experimentation with sexually transmitted diseases and new contraceptive technologies on women of color. Currently, there is no formal reproductive justice education for health professionals, however, reproductive justice advocates are interested in designing education in cultural humility, reproductive rights and social determinants of health to train providers.Women's studies undergraduates learn about reproductive justice, however, experts in this topic area are often outside of the academic realm. We propose to create video-based education through collaboration with a diverse group of reproductive justice advocates to educate undergraduates in Women’s Studies, graduate nursing students and medical students. These 5-8 minute videos will introduce key reproductive justice topics and can be used in conjunction with lectures, small group discussion and written case discussions. We will assess student and facilitator satisfaction with the video learning tool, student attitudes and confidence with applying reproductive justice skills. Additionally, we will use qualitative methods to determine if learners incorporate key reproductive justice knowledge and skills into coursework. |
| e-Book Widgets for Experimenting with Materials Processes, Functionality, and Fundamental Concepts John Kieffer Engineering - Materials Science and Engineering $5980.00 |
The principal objective of this project is to create the next-generation study resources for Materials Science and Engineering (MSE) students and professionals. MSE is a very diverse and rapidly evolving field of study, and requires its practitioners to be educated in a broad spectrum of knowledge and skills. For the last two years, I have been working to develop a framework for the rapid preparation, testing, and implementation of effective instructional content. This framework consists of e-books authoring software, a JavaScript (JS) programming environment, and a web server. The products we generate are a series of tablet-based interactive knowledge exploration modules and accompanying web content. The key innovation of these e-books is that they have apps embedded, designed to simulate processes and phenomena that are at the heart of materials behaviors, properties, and processing techniques. These apps are essentially virtual experiments that allow the reader to interactively explore materials behaviors at the atomistic level and fundamental concepts that form the basis for materials theory. Learning takes place by swiping a finger on a tablet to manipulate parameters settings via slider positions or by dragging a curve to change its shape, and then observe the effect that these actions have on the depicted phenomenon or materials response. The interactivity with the learning resource provides a fully immersive and unconventional learning experience. With this request we seek funds to support for student programmers to help develop these apps. |
| Standardizing Language Instruction in Spanish 280 $5883.50 |
Spanish 280, Conversation through Spanish/Latin American Film, was created in 2011 to respond to the students demand for more oral practice at the advanced level. Since then the course has grown from 4-6 sections per academic year to 10-12. This growth has come hand in hand with a variety of topics and a diversity in teaching approaches that make it very rich in terms of content. However, it has come at the expense of consistency across sections particularly when it comes to the primary reason why the class was created: to improve the level of oral competency of our students. Having already identified the level of oral competency that, on average, students enrolling in Spanish 280 have as Intermediate High according to the American Council for the Teaching of Foreign Languages, this project aims to address the need to create materials that will push our students to the next level of competency, Advanced Low. I am requesting funds to hire 1-2 GSIs who have recently taught the course to help establish linguist goals and develop material that can be used in all sections to standardize language instruction in Spanish 280. This material would then become the skeleton around which each one of the 280 sections is built and filled with content. We would create a sort of textbook for the course that would emphasize the linguistic objectives of the class and define ways in which each instructor can work with their group to achieve those goals |
| Layering Film Into Anatomy Curricula B. Kathleen Alsup Medical School Glenn Fox Medical School $5992.00 |
The goal of this project is to incorporate film as part of mixed multimedia learning strategies for students in U-M Anatomy curricula (ANAT 403; M1 Foundations of Gross Anatomy; D1 Head & Neck Gross Anatomy; etc.) and for non-U-M students who also use U-M anatomical resources. Incorporating micro-documentary style with parsimonious learning objectives, we will develop and produce films which educate and serve as a useful conduit to inspire continuous learning for students in the study of anatomy. Film provides a link of engagement at a lower cognitive load for students in ways that text-based and other visual-based multimedia are unable. Our goal with process creation will be to create a means by which project films may be developed and produced by various groups of students, faculty, and clinicians. These films will be curricularly-incorporated into existing U-M Anatomy courses and publicly available by incorporation into our existing web resources. |
| Integrating basic and diagnostic sciences using team-based pedagogy in the DDS curriculum Carol Anne Murdoch-Kinch Dentistry Vidya Ramaswamy Dentistry David Brzezinski Medical School Erika Benavides Dentistry Theodora Danciu Dentistry $10000.00 |
Oral Health practitioners need to draw upon the basic sciences to make high quality clinical decisions for optimal patient care. Supporting this principle, the American Dental Association will implement an integrated national licensure exam as of 2020 testing students’ ability to use basic science knowledge to inform clinical practice. One challenge at the School of Dentistry (UMSoD) is the reliance on lectures to teach basic sciences. Team-Based Learning (TBL) is an instructional strategy that allows active learning, fosters better integration and decision making than lecture and promotes critical thinking. The TBL focus is on application of knowledge with immediate feedback from the instructor; this instructional strategy promotes student engagement and assists in the development of team skills while allowing a single instructor to manage several small groups in a large classroom. Team skills are a necessary foundation for interaction between healthcare professionals. Our intent is to conduct this study as a pilot in the Winter 2018 2nd year diagnostics course and, if results are promising, to implement across the basic sciences 1st year curriculum (Fall 2018-2019) and eventually in parts of the entire dental curriculum. This project thus will provide foundational data for ongoing efforts to reinforce integration of basic science concepts with clinical practice skills in the UMSoD curriculum using the TBL pedagogy. |
| The Impact of Assessment Collaboratives on Secondary Mathematics Teaching Interns' Development Maisie Gholson Education $10000.00 |
The project is designed to improve the system for collecting and analyzing secondary mathematics teaching interns performance in field placements by providing timely, coherent, and authentic feedback. Assessment collaboratives will be comprised of faculty, field instructors, and local-area cooperating teachers, and will leverage automatic following devices that record and live stream video data to remote computers. The use of an automatic following device system allows multiple members of the assessment collaborative to provide immediate feedback regarding the enactment of specific teaching practices. Assessment collaboratives will participate in training sessions to learn the technology and clarify the performance criteria of teaching interns. At the end of the semester, the project will be analyzed as a set of case studies that describe the functioning of different assessment collaboratives and teaching interns growth and development around programmatic teaching competencies. |
| To App or Not to App: An innovative instructional approach to preparing preservice teachers to critically evaluate educational applications for teaching and learning. Elizabeth Keren-Kolb Education Elliot Soloway Engineering $10000.00 |
We are proposing a unique instructional approach in our teacher preparation program, where UM students engage in authentic professional collaboration. This project will improve teaching and learning at the School of Education by situating student learning in an authentic context. The United States Department of Education clearly stated in the 2016 National Education Technology Plan that preservice teachers must be able to use digital technologies effectively to leverage learning in classrooms today. Towards preparing preserve teachers, then, in EDUC 444, we will have them critically analyze educationally-oriented mobile apps that are being used in classrooms, asking if those apps are meeting specified learning outcomes. Still further, those analyses will serve as the focus of collaborative conversations supported by eHallway, a professional, social network used by industry professionals and inservice teachers. This is an approach to instruction that to our knowledge has never been done before in teacher education and will give UM student teachers a truly engaged learning experience. And, by design, our approach in 444, then aligns well with the UM Provost’s call for instructional methods to include more engage, authentic, learning experiences. |
| Fortifying Diverse Cultural Content in Spanish 231 with Audio Mini-Lectures & Conversations Ann Hilberry LSA Tatiana Calixto LSA - Romance Languages and Literatures $10000.00 |
Spanish 231 is the largest course in the Department of Romance Languages and Literatures with over 1,000 students taking the course each year. Since the majority of students come from high school, Spanish 231 plays an important role in shaping the students’ experience in their first year at U-M. The course is an opportunity to provide incoming with encounters with a rich scope of cultural topics. Commercial textbooks for Spanish instruction tend to highlight common, almost stereotypical cultural themes, and overlook the diversity of social identities and ways of life that would offer a broader and more accurate picture of the pan-Hispanic world. We will create audio materials to support the development of students’ listening skills, and to expose them to more inclusive topics such as topics such as trial marriages in Central and South America, indigenous sports such as tejo in Colombia or chueca in Chile, urban agriculture in Venezuela, and same-sex marriage in Argentina. We will design this material introducing these cultural themes so that the students will engage intellectually with the pan-Hispanic cultures, and also reflect on their own culture(s) using this added perspective of the world. With pre and post-reflective surveys, we will analyze the students’ expectations and interests, as well as the impact these audio materials have in influencing their cultural perceptions. We will use data from Canvas to investigate the correlation of students’ use of extra audio activities with their level of interest in Hispanic cultures, and their development of listening skills. |
| Preparing educators: teaching medical students to teach Caren Stalburg Medical School Michael Englesbe Medical School Jennifer Stojan Medical School Daniel Cronin Medical School $2750.00 |
Historically, despite physicians having a critical role in the education of medical students, residents and patients, teaching doctors how to teach has been an overlooked aspect of medical education. The University of Michigan Medical School has recently recognized this gap and is working to provide core curriculum on education to all medical students. Therefore, identifying optimal instructional approaches for educator preparedness has become crucial. Additionally, the advent of MOOCs has allowed for more diverse curricular landscapes. To this end, our study compares two separate pedagogical approaches. We hypothesize that students engaged in a traditional face-to-face course on teaching will demonstrate improvement in their own teacher preparedness, and that participants in a MOOC teaching instructional methods will have at least equivalent outcomes. Teacher preparedness in each group will be measured by the modified validated METRQ survey (Appendix A) and an Oral Presentation Rubric (Appendix B). Results of our data analysis will provide data-driven guidance for curriculum stakeholders within the medical school for the creation of a new course, designed for all medical students to learn and develop their skills as educators. |
