By Ryan Gourley, Music Teaching Effectiveness Award Essay, 2023 Teaching the history of recorded sound poses a unique set of challenges. Class discussions involve technologies and recordings that have fallen into obscurity. Photos and diagrams do little to convey the feeling of operating devices such as a phonograph or a…
By Nancy Freitas, Energy and Resources Group Teaching Effectiveness Award Essay, 2023 Figuring out how to fund your research and education as a graduate student is a daunting task. Most of us know that writing for grants and fellowships can help defray these costs, but learning how to navigate applications,…
By Salvador Gutierrez Peraza, Ethnic Studies Teaching Effectiveness Award Essay, 2023 As a Graduate Student Instructor (GSI) in the Department of Ethnic Studies part and parcel of my pedagogical training is the teaching of courses on the Ethno-Racial experience of U.S. minoritarian subjects and cultures. Our discipline entails “the critical…
By Kyra Sutton, Rhetoric Teaching Effectiveness Award Essay, 2023 As a rhetoric instructor, I have found that undergraduates enter my courses having learned to subdue their feelings about academic texts. Whether they like the text, they have learned in high school, is beside the point; they are here to analyze…
By Morgan Jennings, Film & Media Teaching Effectiveness Award Essay, 2023 In my Film R1B course we examine what monsters and representations of monsters in film and television reveal about the cultures that create and consume them. By looking closely at the various forms in which monstrosity appears on screen,…
By Kay Xia, Chemistry Teaching Effectiveness Award Essay, 2023 Current efforts toward increasing diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) in STEM fields generally focus on increasing the numbers of women and racial minorities in these fields, but only rarely do we pose the question of whether the existing ideals of scientific…
By Enze Chen, Materials Science and Engineering Teaching Effectiveness Award Essay, 2023 A hallmark feature of the Materials Science and Engineering (MSE) curriculum is the hands-on laboratory courses where students perform experiments using advanced scientific instruments. There have been numerous content enhancements over the years, but the assessment at the…
By Leah Gulyas, Plant and Microbial Biology Teaching Effectiveness Award Essay, 2023 All classes have a personality: some are enthusiastic, some are curious, some are talkative. Others…not so much. Sometimes it can seem like a challenge to motivate student interaction. Long classes and odd timeslots present likely candidates for low…
By Ethan Boynton, Plant and Microbial Biology Teaching Effectiveness Award Essay, 2023 While the return to in-person education was a welcome return to normalcy, it was a novel challenge for much of the student body. As an instructor, I sought to mitigate the negatives of hybrid-learning by encouraging low-stakes participation…
By Mengxin Wang, Industrial Engineering and Operations Research Teaching Effectiveness Award Essay, 2022 During my first remote teaching experience in the fall of 2020, I observed that without seeing students face to face, it is hard to monitor student learning and adjust the teaching pace and depth. Conventionally, an instructor…