Ignite Faculty Awards | University of Portland

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”

Lindsay Benes and Joanne Olsen, School of Nursing
“Designing the Learning Ecosystem to Ignite Education”

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.

Alexa Dare and Ali Na, Department of Communication Studies
Lauren Alfrey, Department of Sociology and Social Work
“Radical Praxis: Race and Gender Inequality In and Beyond the Classroom”

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.

Laurie Dizney, Tara Prestholdt, and Christine Weilhoefer, Department of Biology
“Advancing the Biology Curriculum through the Franz Campus”

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.

Ian Parkman, Sam Holloway, and Itzel Megchun, Pamplin School of Business
“Makerspace Curriculum”

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.

Rebecca Smith, Nicole Ralston, and Ben Gallegos, School of Education
“Going Beyond the Classroom: Using Virtual Reality to Enhance Classroom Learning”

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.

Jeffrey White, Department of International Languages and Cultures
Carolyn James, Department of Mathematics
“Peer Learning Capture”

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.