Session II

This presentation will share the joys of cultivating community in English 3260 Language and Culture taught in person in the fall 2021 semester at UW-Platteville. It will focus on the joys attributed to five major assignments (i.e., homework sets, interview project, student-led discussion, film analysis, and a world language and culture map) that cultivated a community of diversity/global learning. The five major assignments provided students with the joys of interacting with each other, members in local and/or global communities, and multimodal instructional materials, which are much needed during the pandemic. The students’ joys will be exemplified by voices of three invited students and those of some other students as expressed in their reaction papers. Attendees will sample the joys by participating in two activities adapted from student-led discussions.

Client-based group projects offer a unique opportunity for students to engage with each other and learn on the job within the safety of a classroom. The pandemic also instigated a slew of problems for local businesses, job within the safety of a classroom. The pandemic also instigated a slew of problems for local businesses, extending an opportunity for university students to help their community. This lightning presentation discusses extending an opportunity for university students to help their community. This lightning presentation discusses how I cultivated community within my classroom by partnering with local businesses to foster high-impact client-based collaborative projects in two undergraduate courses.  Specifically, this presentation will 1) explain how I formed relationships with companies to support student projects, 2) explain how I cultivated a collaborative learning environment and student engagement through a group project-based learning pedagogy, and 3) offer suggestions on how client-based projects can be incorporated across academic disciplines. Attendees will learn how to approach companies and how to create transformative collaboration among students such that group projects advance content learning, teamwork, practical skills, and a sense of community.  

In 2022, UW-Green Bay’s Center for the Advancement of Teaching and Learning (CATL) awarded digital badges to instructors for completing professional development opportunities related to teaching and learning using five badge categories: participation, knowledge, practice, mentorship, and scholarship. These “open” badges are awarded through a website called Badgr and can be displayed on many platforms to showcase new skills to external audiences. Badgr also integrates with Canvas, which means badges can be automatically administered through a Canvas course after a user has met a certain criterion. CATL has been using this feature to issue badges for those that have completed each course in our institution’s Distance Education Certificate sequence. After the success of those badges, CATL also began badging other professional development opportunities offered through or in partnership with the Center. This presentation will provide an overview of CATL’s badge taxonomy and some guidance around getting started with badging.

The following presentations are from participants in OPID's signature program, Wisconsin Teaching Fellows and Scholars. These presentations are the culmination of a year-long engagement in a community of practitioners focused on the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (SoTL).

View WTFS Posters/Presentations Here.

This project explores student perceptions of online and face-to-face discussions of scholarly articles. I observed that in my general education Art History classes students are consistently more willing to participate in online rather than face-to-face discussions of scholarly articles. Furthermore, despite producing high-quality analysis in online spaces, students are often unwilling, or unable, to translate these findings to in-person discussions. This suggests that the online discussions may not provide the intended scaffolding to facilitate face-to-face discussion nor lead to critical engagement with scholarly arguments. Data were collected from students in four general education courses in Fall 2021 and Spring 2022, which ran as fully in-person and on-campus classes. Student perception data were analyzed using qualitative methods looking at both online and face-to-face discussions. I hope these findings will suggest strategies for ameliorating the gap between instructional design and student learning outcomes.

Students bring their attitudes and perceptions into every learning situation. These can reflect confidence or anxiety about their previous skills, how the instructor has affected that confidence or anxiety, levels of interest in a required task, and their broader student goals, to name a few. How do those attitudes and perceptions affect how well they demonstrate the thinking, learning, and reading skills prompted in an academic writing assignment? In this project, questionnaires measured student attitudes and perceptions of a research argument essay, while considering student attendance and frequency of seeking additional help. Those essays were then evaluated for quality and analyzed alongside individual questionnaire responses, for the purpose of developing use interventions during the writing process. Such interventions could bridge equity gaps in instruction that affect student learning, through increases knowledge by students and instructors of how their processes might by affecting their results.