Ignite Faculty Awards

Karen Eifler, School of Education
“TeachUP: 10 Steps to Being an Inclusive, Confident, Competent Educator at UP”

Molly Hiro, Department of English
Shaz Vijlee, Shiley School of Engineering
“Improving Writing Instruction, Practice, and Feedback in Introduction to Engineering”

Nursing education stands at the convergence of transformational changes in the educational environment alongside rapid, complex changes in healthcare, necessitating a new vision for today’s learner. As we enhance our pedagogy within the blended classroom, faculty encounter an array of technology applications (apps). Through the Ignite Grant, we aim to: (1) design an evaluation framework to standardize the selection of apps for the SON graduate program, (2) host an Ignite Day for an interactive experience to explore instructional apps and, (3) foster faculty engagement in the app evaluation framework and selection process.

We are applying for an Ignite Grant to help us collaborate on the design and delivery of our Spring 2019 courses (SOC336 – Sociology of Race and Racism; CST301 – Media and Society; CST435 – Visual Communication) around a shared theme of Race and Gender Inequality. We will use digital technology to build an interdisciplinary “hub” for the three classes with opportunities for students in all three classes to learn together through guest speakers, case studies, and shared reflection activities. We will attend a September 2018 conference, Race and Pedagogy, in order to enhance the Race and Gender Inequality focus in each of our classes and to help us coordinate our curricula.

This project proposes to make the Franz Campus the unifying theme of the Field Ecology pillar of the Biology major. We aim to interweave themes and competencies in our new introductory course and make explicit links to students’ upper-division required courses. By integrating the process of science, high impact teaching and learning, and research experiences in urban ecology, our project will ignite a genuine connection between the students, their campus, and their coursework.

This proposal describes a program of curriculum development for creating specific course content, programming, and projects to utilize the interdisciplinary “Pilot Space” makerspace in the Donald P. Shiley School of Engineering, the ThinkTank Innovation Lab in Franz Hall, and UP the Clark Library Digital Lab, along with other related facilities planned for the University of Portland campus.

This project employs virtual reality technologies in Education classrooms to promote equity and bring learning to life. This pilot project involves the use of virtual reality glasses, mixed-reality simulation with virtual avatars, smart phones, and a teacher-directed tablet to create virtual reality spaces for student learning. These virtual realities will include field trips to foreign countries and immersion in the lives of people from diverse backgrounds, which can increase empathy. U.P. students, both preservice and inservice teachers, will experience the technology in their U.P. classrooms, in addition to creating lesson plans for and then implementing the virtual reality technology in their own K-12 classrooms.

Research in peer-tutoring programs reveals that programs with tutor training outperform those without training. Effective training also requires observation, assessment, and debriefing. Studies in applied linguistics and math education conclude that review of recorded interactions (stimulated recall) improves the quality of debriefings about learning events. With the Peer Learning Capture project, Dr. Carolyn James and Jeffrey White propose to use current Untethered Lecture Capture (ULC) technology to capture verbal and whiteboard recordings of tutor-student interaction in order to improve tutor training and interactions while also providing students with recordings of their tutoring sessions in the Learning Commons.