19-20 CFDE Teaching Fellows Projects

This year’s Teaching Fellow Cohort experienced several “firsts.” It was the first time we had so many fellows (NINE to be exact), and it was the first time that most of our fellows were not able to present their final projects publicly because of our move to remote work due to COVID 19.

In place of those presentations, we offer this page, so that the Emory Community can still learn from and celebrate the excellence and innovation of our CFDE Teaching Fellows. We have included their email addresses in case you would like to hear more about their projects or would like a copy of the annotated bibliographies they created on the topics they researched.

Congratulations to all!

Digging into the Archives and Creating an Exhibit

Sheila Cavanagh,Professor of English, Emory College, sheila.cavanagh@emory.edu

I am endeavoring to take material learned during my recent MA in Public History in order to contribute to the ECAS and LGS initiatives to make the Humanities more public-facing and to expand career opportunities for students.  In this class, the undergraduates mounted an exhibition and hosted public programs using Rose Library artifacts created by inmates at Phillips State Prison (the exhibit is currently up on the first floor of the Woodruff Library).  The graduate students will have an exhibit in the Rose (on female Irish poets) starting in January, 2021.

Sarah Fankhauser, Assistant Professor of Biology, Oxford College, sarah.fankhauser@emory.edu

1. Investigating mechanisms to facilitate small and large group discussions
2. Investigating in-class stress-relief mechanisms

My first five years of teaching at Oxford has focused on introductory biology courses, mainly for biology majors.  However, in the Fall of 2020 I plan to offer a discovery seminar that has an original focus on the Science of Stress, and offered to any first-year student regardless of major.  This course is intended to be interdisciplinary and combine aspects from psychology, immunology, biology, sociology and health and wellbeing. Students will explore the manifestations of stress, explore scientific literature around certain stress-relief techniques and then practice these different stress relieving. This course will provide an opportunity for me to grow as a teacher as 1. I have not taught an interdisciplinary course like this and 2. I have not regularly engaged discussion style format in an entire course.  Through the CFDE Teaching Fellowship I planned to investigate similar interdisciplinary courses that are based in the sciences and explore the literature and best practices for discussion-based courses.  The outcomes I hoped to achieve were:

1. Connect with colleagues who work or teach in connected fields that may be relevant to the course, with the idea to leverage their expertise in the course;
2. Draft a syllabus that fully integrates different fields into the study of stress;
3. Construct a model or plan for discussions that will take place in the course;
4. Develop at least two case studies that will actively engage students in the science and practice of stress release techniques;
5. Draft a creative final project for students in the course.

Participation Matters: Creating a Participatory Culture in the Beginning Foreign Language Classroom

Noelle Giguere, Senior Lecturer of French, Emory College, noelle.c.giguere@emory.edu

Technology use in the second language classroom has become ubiquitous; however, the overwhelming choice of digital tools and content often makes it difficult for instructors to use technology meaningfully and constructively. My project explored how applying Henry Jenkins’ theory of participatory culture to a beginning language curriculum could give purpose and coherence to the diverse multimedia tools and assignments used in the course as well as foster student engagement and interest in the material. Jenkins defines participatory culture as a “culture with relatively low barriers to artistic expression and civic engagement, strong support for creating and sharing one’s creations, and some type of informal mentorship whereby what is known by the most experienced is passed along to novices.” I was inspired by his theories to think of ways to empower students who did not feel confident using a new language. During the summer of 2019, I re-designed the FREN 101 and 102 curriculum to include a participatory culture approach and then implemented the changes during the 2019-2020 academic year. Most of the curriculum redesign involved creating multi-step digital projects that replaced more traditional forms of assessment such as quizzes, exams, and oral presentations.

Asbury Circle (“Where Business Meets Society”)

Wes Longhofer, Associate Professor of Organization & Management, Business School, wesley.longhofer@emory.edu 

Asbury Circle is an online learning platform with a mission to create, curate, and convene research on important social issues facing business. Edited by myself and a student editorial board, Asbury Circle is comprised of repackaged research insights, a new podcast series, student commentaries, and short teaching cases on the intersection of business and society. Much of the content on Asbury Circle is generated in my Business and Society course (BBA and MBA) and then curated by the editorial board.

“Feminist Thought in Praxis” (Oxford course-in-planning, Spring 2021)

Alix Olson, Assistant Professor of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, Oxford College, alix.olson@emory.edu

I have used my time as a CFDE fellow to develop the experiential learning course Feminist Thought in Practice (WGSS 385E), to be offered in the Spring of 2020. This will be an exciting way to continue establishing a robust WGSS curriculum at Oxford College. In light of our current political moment, I have been particularly keen to develop a concentration within the course dedicated to a range of immigration justice activisms taking place in the U.S. South. The course will include volunteer trips to El Refugio, an organization that supports detainees (and their families) at the Stewart detention center as well as participating in El Refugio’s fundraising concert series. Additionally, we will visit the Southern Poverty Law Center to learn about their “Southeast Immigrant Freedom Initiative,” specifically their work with the Stewart Center. My hope is that these hands-on experiences with detainees and their families, attorneys, and volunteers will help to frame our case study of the UndocuQueer movement as an art-activist practice. I want students to link questions of sexual/gendered modes of citizenship to those of national citizenship and to see the ways that notions of “belonging” are being creatively challenged on a number of overlapping fronts. I have also applied for the course to have TPSL status so that students will be placed with a variety of organizations doing this work, such as Georgia Equality Now, Tahirir Justice Center, and Project South. Ideally, I want my students to come away from this course with a tangible sense that art, activism and the academy are not discrete domains of knowledge production nor of political intervention. While I am myself a long-time queer artist-activist, I am new to integrating community outreach into my efforts within the classroom. I have been thrilled to have the opportunity to explore- alongside an engaged cohort –literature that examines this kind of hands-on and interdisciplinary pedagogy.

Adding readings, discussions and case studies to an introductory statistics class

Elena Pesavento, Associate Professor of Economics, Emory College, epesav@emory.edu

Undergraduate students are often very scared of a subject like statistics. They associate statistics with math and they imagine this course as being dry and not related to their daily life. With the popularity of Data Sciences and the many discussions that are surfacing now on the importance of ethical data analysis, the perception of students has been changing.

Statistics is still a very hard class to teach. Some of students are very mathematical oriented and tend to focus on the technical details, missing the big picture. Other students are terrified of math and the panic at the sight of an integral missing the big picture. Instructors often have to decide between a non-technical introductory course and one where the students really learn the mathematics that allows us to think in statistical terms.

In a world where we are pushed to do everything, I think our students can indeed do everything. Students should be taught many of the mathematical derivations (leaving the most difficult ones to more advanced courses), but they should also be constantly pushed to find connections to their daily life and to interesting, and relevant discussion.

This project focused on adding readings, discussions, and case studies to an introductory statistics class. I collected an annotated biography and I studied how to best engage students on online and in person discussions. 

Tips for managing large online group discussions.

Quyen Phan, Assistant Clinical Professor, School of Nursing, qphan@emory.edu

This project employs the traditional online group discussion format, but explores the method of breaking up the large class into small groups, to allow students to deeply learn concepts not sufficiently covered in class due to time constraint. Evaluation data provided some lessons learned to make future project a success. 

Developing strategies to make undergraduate labs more inclusive to increase effective learning and expand creativity in Human Anatomy and Physiology.

Cristy Tower-Gilchrist, Senior Clinical Instructor, School of Nursing, cristy.tower-gilchrist@emory.edu

This project focuses on making a course more inclusive and expanding creativity. This
project was designed to increase understanding of concepts covered within an undergraduate prerequisite nursing course and provide a foundation for later courses within the nursing program such as pathology and pharmacology. As the number of individuals interested in pursuing a nursing degree increases, this has led to an ever-growing diverse student population. Studies show that students perform better in more inclusive environments, and that students do not learn in the same way. The pedagogical approaches in this project are geared towards establishing a “safe” and “inclusive” learning environment that fosters belonging for all students and ensuring that every student is successful. One main point was to ensure that there was structure and expand creativity in learning. Students were given topic-based games, multiple low-stakes assessments, and opportunities to co-design elements of lab activities as an effective way to increase student engagement, reinforce concepts, and encourage learner autonomy. Student feedbacks from these experiences were positive.

Jeannie Weston, Assistant Clinical Professor, School of Nursing, eghjhb@emory.edu

1. Interprofessional Education: Collaboration in Pediatric Critical Care
2. N433: Introduction to Pediatric Critical Care

The aim of the course was to discuss and analyze the impact of acute and critical illnesses on hospitalized infants, children, adolescents, and their family members while providing a basis of understanding of pathophysiologic disease states that bring children into the critical care setting. The request for grant funding was for students to have PALS (Pediatric Advanced Life Support) a part of the fall pilot course, paid for.