CIRTL Researchers Present at ASEE Conference

The 2006 American Society for Engineering Education Conference was held in Chicago, Illinois, from June 18-21, 2006.  Delta Research Assistant and Industrial and Systems Engineering graduate student Jen Schoepke, Delta Associate Director and co-Director Wisconsin Program for Scientific Teaching Christine Pfund, and Team Leader of the Delta course College Classroom and Director of the Engineering Learning Center, Sandy Courter, presented a workshop on writing effective teaching philosophies.  The Delta Program in Research, Teaching, and Learning at the University of Wisconsin-Madison is part of the Center for the Integration of Research, Teaching, and Learning (CIRTL) program. 

In the highly-interactive three-hour workshop, “Guiding Future Faculty to Develop an Effective Teaching Philosophy,” current and future faculty began to generate their own teaching philosophy and discuss it with others.  Schoepke, Pfund, and Courter shared their own experiences facilitating the “Teaching Portfolios workshop series: Writing Teaching and Learning Philosophies” at UW-Madison and the challenges of coaching the teaching philosophy development process, as well as successful strategies.  The group discussed potentially implementing this professional development workshop at other educational institutions.   

The workshop was geared towards organizational change agents, instructors, faculty, future faculty, and future faculty developers; all disciplines and institution types were welcome.  

Sandra Courter, along with colleagues Professor Mary Wyer (Psychology and Women’s & Gender Studies) and Hatice Orun Ozturk (Electrical and Computer Engineering & BioMedical Engineering) from North Carolina State University, and Professor Barbara Bogue (College of Engineering) from Pennsylvania State University presented “Content Matters: Designing an Inclusive Syllabus in STEM Courses.”  This workshop provided a basic introduction to making revisions in course content in order to foster an inclusive classroom climate. A mini-presentation followed by discussion covered topics such as assessing current course content, identifying strategic enrichments, locating and “translating” appropriate material, responding to students’ reactions, and evaluating impact. A peer-review of syllabi from participants gave participants first-hand experience at identifying syllabi strengths and opportunities.  The peer-review was followed by a syllabi revision session.

Pfund and Alice Pawley, Diversity in the College Classroom instructor, also presented a paper, “‘Diversity in the College Classroom’: a course for teaching graduate students to be better future faculty” co-authored with Jo Handelsman and Sarah Miller Lauffer (Wisconsin Program for Scientific Teaching).  Their paper suggests a strategy for the direct education of graduate students on issues of diversity and ways that consideration for diversity can be integrated into the pedagogies and content of the disciplinary courses they may teach as future faculty.  They discussed how the strategy was applied to a graduate-level course, “Diversity in the College Classroom,” that was offered for credit at UW-Madison during the 2005 fall semester. The paper outlines the institutional context of the course, describes its structure and learning objectives, and provides detailed evidence of how well students achieved three of these objectives.

For more information visit the ASEE Annual Conference and Exposition website at http://www.asee.org/about/events/conferences/annual/2006/index.cfm.

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