Individual Fellow Initiatives

Every writer needs a toolkit tailored to their profession or discipline. Student and instructor needs are not being met as it pertains to training and support for the development of scientific and technical writers.

This project aims to increase educational equity in large, multi-section undergraduate courses by supporting the faculty who coordinate them. These courses often serve diverse student populations and are foundational to many degree programs, yet variation across instructors and assessments can lead to uneven student outcomes. While playing a critical role in maintaining consistency across sections, course coordinators often face challenges such as balancing instructor autonomy and navigating differing faculty perspectives.

This project studies the benefits of implementing tailored hands-on experimental classroom demonstrations to highlight real-world applications of concepts in lecture-based courses. The motivation for this work stems from the limited opportunities undergraduate engineering students have to visualize contemporary applications discussed in core courses as well as to develop engineering-based intuition before the junior year. 

User experience (UX) designers in industry create design prototypes and hand them off to software developers to implement in code which is returned to the designers for feedback. Typically, designers follow an iterative cycle comprising the circle of design, prototype, and test. This cycle is repeated until the product meets the desired user experience.

This initiative addresses the challenge of balancing student accomplishment with the necessary accommodations for student success, particularly in the post-COVID era. The project will collect empirical data from students, faculty, and advisors at the Moody College of Communication to explore how to maintain high academic standards while incorporating essential accommodations for students facing challenges such as mental health issues, food insecurity, and housing instability.

Within social work curriculum, the topic of disability is either explicitly absent or medicalized.  The lack of a rich understanding of disability as a cultural experience that intersects with other cultural experiences is concerning given our ethical guidelines of cultural competence and equity.  Additionally, not only are students excluded via this omission, but so are faculty, staff, and social workers working in the field.  Approximately a quarter of the population identifies as having a disability, yet our curriculum barely acknowledges their experiences.

Each year I attend Teaching Discovery Days and Texas Teach-Up and leave motivated to try new teaching practices. The majority of the practices I observe during Texas Teach-Up, hear about at conferences, or read about in the literature need substantial adaptations to work in my large classes. Figuring out how to make new practices work well and remain manageable sometimes seems insurmountable. Discussions with others who teach large courses often provide insights and ideas, but in any given department at UT there may be just one or just a few professors who teach these large class sizes.

The aim of my proposed project is then the integration of the seemingly disparate studies of law and
religion. The study of both is an important branch of comparative law and global legal history that I aim

This project organized a community of practice for instructors in the Liberal Arts Honors program in the College of Liberal Arts. This community of practice held regular meetings during the academic year to discussion teaching practices, hear from guest speakers, and to share ideas on topics that relate to program goals, student engagement and wellness, pedagogy, and promoting effective student learning.

Project goal: 

Elevate excellence in the classroom through new strategies to understand, measure, and improve rigor in all courses

Project objectives:

Each class is designed and delivered with the expectation of students learning at high levels

Each student is supported so they can accomplish learning at high levels

Each student demonstrates learning at high levels

Outcome:

Large introductory physics courses at UT Austin typically rely on multiple-choice exams due to logistical constraints, including high enrollments and limited teaching assistant (TA) support. While recent instructional reforms have focused on student-centered pedagogies, assessment practices have lagged behind, limiting the alignment between how students are taught and how their learning is evaluated.

This initiative has been archived in compliance with University policies and legal requirements related to communications and web presence. If you have questions about this initiative, or any others, please reach out to the Center for Teaching and Learning for more information.

This initiative has been archived in compliance with University policies and legal requirements related to communications and web presence. If you have questions about this initiative, or any others, please reach out to the Center for Teaching and Learning for more information.

This initiative has been archived in compliance with University policies and legal requirements related to communications and web presence. If you have questions about this initiative, or any others, please reach out to the Center for Teaching and Learning for more information.

This initiative has been archived in compliance with University policies and legal requirements related to communications and web presence. If you have questions about this initiative, or any others, please reach out to the Center for Teaching and Learning for more information.

This initiative has been archived in compliance with University policies and legal requirements related to communications and web presence. If you have questions about this initiative, or any others, please reach out to the Center for Teaching and Learning for more information.