Spring 2009

Rethinking Courses

The University Teaching Fellows Program aims to help our most intellectually sound and successful junior faculty members develop into exceptionally fine teachers. The selection committee – comprised of award-winning faculty – seeks to choose junior faculty members who show promise of becoming both eminent researchers and inspiring teachers. In existence since 1992 and funded by the Provost, the UTF Program remains true to its original Lilly Endowment goals to support impressive junior faculty as they refine their teaching expertise while pursuing strong research agendas. The Program centers around ongoing conversations about how faculty communicate their academic disciplines to undergraduates, how various teaching approaches might enhance one’s courses, and how research enlivens and inspires teaching. The 2008-09 winners of University Teaching Fellowships will be rethinking these courses:

Hanadi Al-Samman, Middle Eastern and South Asian Languages and Cultures
ARAB 227/527: Culture and Society of Contemporary Arab Middle East is designed to familiarize students with a historical and cultural background to the ongoing political issues in the Middle East.  Drawing on such interdisciplinary fields as history, anthropology, political science, cultural studies, and literature, the course attracts both undergraduate and graduate students with backgrounds ranging from foreign affairs, and Mideast majors desiring a specialized approach to Middle East studies to non-specialists seeking to satisfy the non-Western  course requirement.  My goal is to increase course enrollment while still teaching effectively, and to better integrate the various, seemingly discordant, disciplines with the course.

Reid Bailey, Systems and Information Engineering
As a University Teaching Fellow, my focus will be on redesigning the introductory course in Systems Engineering because of its critical role in defining the undergraduate experience for systems engineering majors.  Primary goals in this redesign include getting more students to take ownership of their education sooner, better integrating the course into the systems curriculum, and creating a sense of community among the nearly one hundred students in each systems engineering class.  Central to attaining these goals is developing an authentic and accessible course where students are engaged in the learning process because they directly experience the need to learn certain material.

Sheila Crane, Architectural History
As a University Teaching Fellow, I will be redesigning an upper-level undergraduate course that I have previously taught, Modern Mediterranean Cities.  In addition to considering how to build on my colleagues’ courses that examine earlier periods of architecture in the Mediterranean region, I aim to restructure the course around collaborative projects and team-based learning.  The goals of this redesign are to challenge disciplinary and pedagogical divisions between architectural history and architectural design as well as to encourage students to take more active roles in the learning process by becoming “experts” on one of the seven cities we will examine.

Stephan de Wekker, Environmental Sciences
During the next academic year, I would like to develop a new course that introduces undergraduate students to the basics and applications of mountain meteorology. The course will consist of intertwined lectures and laboratories that contain a set of clearly defined assignments. The laboratories will introduce students to the scientific method, including the design of a research question, the collection and analysis of data from a meteorological research station in the Shenandoah National Park, and the dissemination of results. Collectively, the students will learn about the effect of the Blue Ridge Mountains on the weather in our area.

Avik Ghosh, Electrical and Computer Engineering
My course development project, ECE487: Fundamentals of Nanoelectronics, will cut across departmental boundaries by introducing the mystical world of nanoscience to a wide body of undergraduate students with no formal training in quantum mechanics.  The course will teach this material using sophomore level math and “hands-on” numerical simulations using popular software packages.  The fellowship will be used for student support to create the web infrastructure for pre-recorded lectures, interactive java applets, and exciting computer lab exercises that will allow students to efficiently learn the material and indulge in the spirit of research by challenging themselves to simulate emerging research topics.

Carmenita D. Higginbotham, Art and American Studies
As a University Teaching Fellow, I will develop a new 200-level discussion and lecture course: Race, Identity and Contemporary Visual Culture.  Students will examine the roles popular visual culture and fine art have played in constructing racial and ethnic identities in the United States in the second half of the twentieth century. Rather than focus on a particular social group, the course will comparatively consider the representation of various racial identities in order to investigate the ways in which painting, sculpture, and photography—alongside cartoons, prints, and films—operate to collapse and differentiate these groups from the 1950s to the present.

Josipa Roksa, Sociology
My endeavors next year will focus on “American Public Education:  Successes and Challenges,” which I will co-teach with a colleague from the Curry School of Education.  We will thus offer students a glimpse into “interdisciplinarity in action,” where not only is the content interdisciplinary, but where faculty teaching the course bring different perspectives, analytical tools, and policy interests to the classroom.  Students will gain substantive knowledge on diverse aspects of educational policy and practice; they will also develop the analytical and critical thinking skills necessary to engage the intellectual and policy debates surrounding American public education.

Photo credit: Dan Addison/U.Va. Public Affairs for all photos except Avik Ghosh, for that photo Jane Haley/U.Va. Public Affairs.