Kelly Heider and Crystal Machado
ÑÇÉ«Ó°¿â Libraries / Professional Studies in Education
Collaborative Practice
Kelly Heider (ÑÇÉ«Ó°¿â Libraries) and Crystal Machado (Professional Studies in Education) have been collaborating in the classroom for years. Their collaborative work in the spring of 2022 resulted in a huge impact on doctoral student learning.
Machado has been teaching CURR 935 Democratizing the Curriculum since 2008 and has revised the curriculum three times. These revisions were geared toward modernizing the course to include the societal curriculum and concomitant curriculum so students could meet course objectives more meaningfully. The most recent revision included an assignment that provided students with three authorship options as well as a LibGuide to support their learning.
The feedback we've received from students, as well as the draft assignments they've submitted so far, confirm that this course has become so much more than it ever was. Students are excited about the work they're producing and are telling us how much their learning has been enhanced by our collaborative effort to create a more versatile, effective, and flexible teaching tool.
Veronica Watson
English
Inclusive Excellence
Sponsored by Office of Social Equity and Title IX
Watson lead the curriculum development team that developed the Humanities Training for Law Enforcement (HTLE) pilot at ÑÇÉ«Ó°¿â's police academy. The HTLE is a 10-hour protocol that uses black detective fiction to engage police cadets in anti-racist, anti-implicit bias training, to improve policing outcomes for people of color.
Humanities Training for Law Enforcement encourages officers/cadets to develop professional behaviors and to cultivate habits of mind that work against implicit bias and racial indifference. It strengthens community policing efforts by enabling law enforcement to better understand how the history of policing in black and brown communities has in the past, and continues today to shape interactions with citizens of color, and it deepens their abilities to identify and correct racial stereotypes that negatively impact their ability to partner effectively with diverse communities. The HTLE enables officers/cadets to explore strategies and pathways for improving police legitimacy and community relations, especially in communities of color.
Lingyan Yang
English
Inclusive Excellence
Sponsored by Office of Social Equity and Title IX
Global, American multicultural, and gender diversity was central to both the course design and implementation strategies in Yang’s English 872/772: Women’s Writing, Gender, and Culture in Fall 2020. Yang used implementation strategies to ensure that all graduate students’ contributions and different perspectives had always been equally valued and respected in the course.
She designed a range of remote pedagogical activities, such as students’ individual Zoom oral presentations (10–15 min. each) on a (feminist) theoretical article or a portion of a woman’s literary text, Zoom breakout room small group discussions, free-flowing large class discussions, encouraging students to share points of interests on Zoom Chat, assigning both the short one-page Critical Responses for each unit and the Final Research Paper. These strategies maximized students’ peer learning from each other, welcomed students’ questions and analyses, resulted in stimulating, sophisticated, in-depth, and fun Zoom class discussions, and encouraged students to apply feminist theories to their own graduate research in their final papers.
Michael Williamson and Collaborators
English
Heiges-Lamberski Experiential Education
Sponsored by Career and Professional Development Center
Michael Williamson collaborated with the Criminal Justice Training centers at ÑÇÉ«Ó°¿â and Robert Morris University, Veronica Watson (leader), and a team of three graduate students (Taylor Jones, Diana Forry, and Danielle Covolo—English and criminology doctoral programs). This team worked to plan and deliver anti-racist implicit bias training to Police Cadets. A total of 8–10 hours of training was planned and delivered for the Indiana 88, 89, and 90 cohorts between spring 2021 and spring 2022. Training was delivered to one cohort at Robert Morris University. This collaborative partnership includes an assessment component featuring criminology (Dan Lee and Bitna Kim) and sociology (Susan Boser and Christian Vaccaro).
This collaborative project, Humanities Training for Law Enforcement, enhanced the learning of Police Academy cadets at the Criminal Justice Training Center in significant ways. Learning about implicit bias (especially alternatives to engaging implicit bias) and anti-racist strategies for policing requires an in-depth participatory set of workshops lasting 8–10 hours.
Wanda Minnick and Collaborators
Safety Sciences
Mentoring
A partnership was established between the MS in Safety Sciences program and the grant-funded Pennsylvania Occupational Safety and Health Administration Consultation program in the Safety Sciences Department to encourage and mentor graduate students in research. Students in the program are offered an opportunity to choose a research topic in the Safety, Health, and Environmental field and be mentored by their academic advisor and a PA OSHA faculty consultant on the development and delivery of an OSHA webinar.
The partnership described has excelled at providing career mentoring that has resulted in student success, specifically OSHA webinars that are delivered live and then made available online. The success of this program has resulted in five OSHA webinars presented by MS in Safety Sciences students, which has offered experience in research but also offers exposure at a national level.
Sanda Maicaneanu
Chemistry
Content Pedagogy
Maicaneaunu demonstrated an innovative approach for teaching the Physical Chemistry module in CHEM 401: Advanced Chemistry Laboratory. Rather than working on a different experiment each week to grasp various concepts, this content-focused methodology allowed an integrated approach, such as that multiple difficult physical chemistry concepts were built in a research-based learning laboratory. The class was designed as a progression, with students working step-by-step, one week at a time, on building their final research reports (full-length manuscript).
The Physical Chemistry module was designed as a research-based learning laboratory that will help students better understand multiple difficult concepts by applying them to a specific context, at the same time preparing them to be lifelong inquirers and learners. Starting from a given project title, students were guided to follow actual research steps, scientific literature review, experiment design, and experiment execution (synthesis, characterization, and testing of the newly synthesized materials). Weekly assignments followed their progress towards the completion of the final assessment, which was a full-length manuscript to be submitted for publication in the Journal of Physical Chemistry and an oral presentation of their research project. This approach proved to be extremely efficient in teaching Physical Chemistry laboratory for chemistry majors.
Jennifer Gossett
Criminology
Content Pedagogy
Gossett has been teaching the only two cybersecurity courses (CRIM 321 Cybersecurity and Loss Prevention and CRIM 323 Cybersecurity and the Law) in the Criminology and Criminal Justice Department for many years. The constantly changing cybersecurity environment attests to Professor Gossett’s comfort and knowledge of cybersecurity content. She strives to have students understand concepts through application in cybersecurity so they can “experience” the concept rather than Googling it. Like Gossett herself, students need to learn how to adapt to the demanding cybersecurity changes that include national standards to password requirements.
Special Faculty Recognition Award
Teamwork
Received by Brian Jones on behalf of the Department of Theatre, Dance, and Performance