News for and about University of Portland faculty and staff.
UP aims to cultivate world-citizenship in its students; are faculty up to the task? In this week’s Teaching & Learning submission, Lars Larson reviews the book Factfulness: Ten Reasons We’re Wrong About the World – and Why Things are Better Than you Think that can help orient our global imaginations more accurately.
For more information contact Larson at larson@up.edu.
The Teaching & Learning Collaborative will host one more peer-led workshop from noon to 1 p.m. on Wednesday, April 3, in the Murphy Room of Franz Hall. Come hear Carolyn James, mathematics; Jeffrey White, Learning Commons; Rebecca Smith, education; and Lorretta Krautscheid, nursing, offer tips and pitfalls of the newly popular approach to teaching content-heavy courses, dubbed “untethered lecture capture.” Bring your lunch and find out why this strategy has captured so many teachers’ attention and what users wish they had known before they started with ULC.
For more information contact Karen Eifler, Garaventa Center, at eifler@up.edu.
What do you do (or what CAN you do) when a student stops showing up to class? From a recent brownbag conversation on the topic, the Teaching and Learning Collaborative compiled concrete, specific suggestions from the Shepard Academic Resource Center, the Care Team and faculty colleagues.
Big takeaways: follow through on attendance policies in your syllabus (changing them out of sympathy does no one any favors); let students know, in word and email, that you noticed they were gone and that you’d like to help them get back on track; don’t shy away from alerting the Care Team (via Early Alert) when a student misses a week of class without explanation. A lucky list of thirteen strategies and insights from that brownbag session are gathered in this 2-page document.
When you add a link on your Moodle course page to an article in a library database or to a streaming video, how can you tell if the link will work for students connecting from off-campus? Most library databases offer the option to obtain a persistent or stable URL for individual articles or videos, and many of those persistent URLs are automatically set up to connect through the library’s off-campus access system. However, there are exceptions to every rule, and unfortunately not all library resources provide an easy, off-campus-friendly URL for specific items. Check out the library’s Linking to Online Resources from Moodle web page for tips on finding persistent links to content within your favorite library resources, and for indications of which resources offer grab-and-go friendly links ready to be added to Moodle, and which links need a quick-and-easy edit (with instructions provided) to work from off-campus.
If you have questions about linking to library content from Moodle, or other library-related matters, contact Stephanie Michel at michel@up.edu or x7418.
This week from the Teaching and Learning Collaborative: Internationalizing higher education has become a top priority world-wide (Gould, 2017). “Today’s college students must become adept both at interacting, cooperating, and engaging with individuals from diverse backgrounds and at grappling successfully with the kinds of unscripted problems and challenges that characterize life and work in the complex world they will enter upon graduation” (Whitehead, 2015). Expert Dawn Whitehead has spent decades developing integrative global opportunities as well as local experiences that promote intercultural learning. In her article, “Why Global Learning Cannot Wait,” Whitehead shares about the importance of global awareness and engagement. The Models of Global Learning link in this article provides specific ideas on how institutions have proceeded with developing and revising curricula to reflect global integration.
On January 30, Dawn Whitehead will visit the UP campus to share more ideas with us. Please use this link so find more details and join the conversation. For more information contact Kimberly Ilosvay, education, at ilosvay@up.edu.
How can white professors at UP achieve a more complex understanding of race and racism? In this week’s Teaching & Learning blog, Lars Larson offers an overview of this year’s College of Arts & Sciences book group selection, White Fragility: Why it’s so Hard for White People to Talk about Racism, by Robin DiAngelo (pictured).
For more information contact Larson at larson@up.edu.
Want a way to gauge whether you are reaching your students? One simple way to gather informal, low-stakes feedback from students is through exit cards. Rather than relying on end-of-semester evaluations to gauge how a class is going, exit cards can give ongoing feedback to help instructors make decisions about instructional techniques, pacing, or classroom management. Exit cards provide an equitable way for all students to share their voice, and they can open up opportunities for further dialogue with students who may be hesitant to share concerns face-to-face. For links to more information and sample exit card prompts, use this link.
In their roles as instructors, advisors, coaches, and mentors, faculty members are often sought out by students who confide in them about the various academic and non-academic challenges they encounter. Practitioners from various faith traditions have developed the art of compassionate listening as an approach to helping individuals process, heal, and feel truly heard. The Teaching and Learning Collaborative will be hosting a brownbag workshop to discuss the main principles of compassionate listening and how to develop practical skills around understanding a speaker’s words, feelings, body language, and values on Tuesday November 20, from 11:30 a.m. to 12:30 p.m., in Buckley Center room 215.
The workshop will be led by Sarina Saturn, psychological sciences; Fr. Jim Gallagher, C.S.C., Campus Ministry; and Louisa Brad, psychological sciences, as part of ongoing offerings from the Teaching and Learning Collaborative relating to campus mental health.
For more information contact Karen Eifler, Garaventa Center, at eifler@up.edu.
If your students had a chance to tell you what they think about how faculty and academic staff matter to student mental health, what might they say? As a follow-up to a discussion with faculty by leaders of the Active Minds student group at UP, this week’s installment of the mental health series on the Teaching and Learning Community blog offers some thoughts and tips from students on how the way we structure our classes, our advising, and even our office hours matters for student well-being.
As another entry in the ongoing Teaching and Learning Collaborative blog series on student mental health, this week’s post offers an update on a recent brownbag discussion with faculty, academic staff, and Eliot Altschul from the Health and Counseling Center. We talked about some basic updates on mental health services at UP, and also discussed hypothetical but familiar student scenarios: an underperforming student who shows up for office hours with something else on his mind, and a persistent student who may be testing boundaries. Read on if you’d like to think through what you can do when confronted with student mental health concerns.