Faculty College 2016

Dr. Regan A. R. Gurung is Ben J. and Joyce Rosenberg Professor of Human Development and Psychology at the University of Wisconsin, Green Bay. Born and raised in Bombay, India, Dr. Gurung received a B.A. in psychology at Carleton College (MN), and a Masters and Ph.D. in social and personality psychology at the University of Washington (WA). He then spent three years at UCLA as a National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) Research fellow.

He has received numerous local, state, and national grants for his health psychological and social psychological research on cultural differences in stress, social support, smoking cessation, body image and impression formation. He has published articles in a variety of scholarly journals including Psychological Review and Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, and Teaching of Psychology. He has a textbook, Health Psychology: A Cultural Approach, relating culture, development, and health published with Cengage (third edition in preparation) and is also the co-author/co-editor of eight other books. He has made over 100 presentations and given workshops nationally and internationally (e.g. Australia, India, Saudi Arabia, New Zealand).

Dr. Gurung is also a dedicated teacher and has strong interests in enhancing faculty development and student understanding. He was Co-Director of the University of Wisconsin System Teaching Scholars Program, has been a UWGB Teaching Fellow, a UW System Teaching Scholar, and is winner of the CASE Wisconsin Professor of the Year, the UW System Regents Teaching Award, the UW-Green Bay Founder’s Award for Excellence in Teaching as well as the Founder’s Award for Scholarship, UW Teaching-at-its-Best, Creative Teaching, and Featured Faculty Awards. He has strong interests in teaching and pedagogy and has organized statewide and national teaching conferences, is a Fellow of the American Psychological Association and the Association for Psychological Science, serves on the Div.2 (Teaching of Psychology) Taskforce for Diversity and is Chair of the Div. 38 (Health Psychology) Education and Training Council. He is also Past-President of the Society for the Teaching of Psychology.

When not helping people stay calm, reading, and writing, Dr. Gurung enjoys culinary explorations, travel, time with his two children, and avoiding political discussions of any kind.

Keep Your Eyes on the Prize: Strategies to Cultivate Learning

It is always easier to work towards goals when you have a clear, inspirational version of what your goals are. As educators we want students to learn, but what exactly is learning? I will unpack different views of learning comparing what faculty want with what students want and then reviewing the key factors that predict learning. I will advance a helpful metaphor for fostering learning and provide pragmatic tools on how we can optimally cultivate student learning.

Dr. Scott Cooper is a professor of biology in his 22nd year at UW-La Crosse. He teaches a variety of courses including molecular biology, pathology & pharmacology, radiation biology, and bioinformatics. Since 2011 Scott has also served as the Director of Undergraduate Research and Creativity and is currently the chair of the UW-System Council on Undergraduate Research (WisCUR). He has mentored hundreds of undergraduates in his NIH funded research lab, as well as developing a client-based undergraduate model that has been used in molecular biology lab for over 10 years. Scott’s publications and grants are a mix of traditional biology research and SoTL projects and he was a Faculty Scholar in 2008.

Morning Seminar: Embedding Research and Creative Projects into an Undergraduate Course

Involving students in an undergraduate research project is considered a high-impact practice. These projects let students experience what it is like to be a scholar in their discipline, design and troubleshoot experiments, analyze results, and make presentations. The faculty to student ratio in a department is often a limitation to the number of students who can be involved. One solution is to use course-embedded undergraduate research projects. These projects can be chosen by the student or instructor, or could be done for an external client. This workshop will train instructors on the use of backwards design to integrate an undergraduate research project into their class.

Dr. Regan A. R. Gurung is Ben J. and Joyce Rosenberg Professor of Human Development and Psychology at the University of Wisconsin, Green Bay. Born and raised in Bombay, India, Dr. Gurung received a B.A. in psychology at Carleton College (MN), and a Masters and Ph.D. in social and personality psychology at the University of Washington (WA). He then spent three years at UCLA as a National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) Research fellow.

He has received numerous local, state, and national grants for his health psychological and social psychological research on cultural differences in stress, social support, smoking cessation, body image and impression formation. He has published articles in a variety of scholarly journals including Psychological Review and Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, and Teaching of Psychology. He has a textbook, Health Psychology: A Cultural Approach, relating culture, development, and health published with Cengage (third edition in preparation) and is also the co-author/co-editor of eight other books (see CV). He has made over 100 presentations and given workshops nationally and internationally (e.g. Australia, India, Saudi Arabia, New Zealand).

Dr. Gurung is also a dedicated teacher and has strong interests in enhancing faculty development and student understanding. He was Co-Director of the University of Wisconsin System Teaching Scholars Program, has been a UWGB Teaching Fellow, a UW System Teaching Scholar, and is winner of the CASE Wisconsin Professor of the Year, the UW System Regents Teaching Award, the UW-Green Bay Founder’s Award for Excellence in Teaching as well as the Founder’s Award for Scholarship, UW Teaching-at-its-Best, Creative Teaching, and Featured Faculty Awards. He has strong interests in teaching and pedagogy and has organized statewide and national teaching conferences, is a Fellow of the American Psychological Association and the Association for Psychological Science, serves on the Div.2 (Teaching of Psychology) Taskforce for Diversity and is Chair of the Div. 38 (Health Psychology) Education and Training Council. He is also Past-President of the Society for the Teaching of Psychology.

When not helping people stay calm, reading, and writing, Dr. Gurung enjoys culinary explorations, travel, time with his two children, and avoiding political discussions of any kind.

Dr. David Voelker is an Associate Professor of Humanistic Studies and History at the University of Wisconsin–Green Bay. He arrived at UWGB after completing a PhD in U.S. history at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 2003. He teaches primarily early American history and environmental history and humanities, including introductory, upper-level, and online courses. Since 2005, he has engaged in UWGB’s First Nations Studies Fusion program, which focuses on the integration of American Indian history, culture, and pedagogy into courses across the curriculum. He was a Wisconsin Teaching Fellow in 2006-2007, and he currently co-directs the Wisconsin Teaching Fellows & Scholars program. He documented his Wisconsin Teaching Fellows project in an August 2008 article in The History Teacher. As a participant in the OPID-sponsored Signature Pedagogies project, he co-authored with Joel Sipress (UW-Superior) an essay on the impact of the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (SoTL) on history pedagogy. He and Sipress went on to publish an essay in the March 2011 Journal of American History that combined historical analysis with SoTL research to suggest an alternative to the dominant coverage model of teaching introductory history. (This article won the 2012 Maryellen Weimer Scholarly Work on Teaching and Learning Award.) He also co-authored an essay with Anthony Armstrong for the OAH Magazine of History (July 2013) titled “Designing a Question-Driven U.S. History Course.” He is currently collaborating with Sipress on a textbook alternative for teaching U.S. history.

Morning Seminar: Going Behind the Scenes of the Learning Process: The Scholarship of Teaching & Learning

The Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (SoTL) offers an exciting opportunity for higher educators to integrate teaching and research. SoTL scholars systematically inquire into their students' learning using the tools of their own disciplines and other accessible methods. Participants in this interactive workshop, co-led by Professors David J. Voelker and Regan A. R. Gurung, will engage in an open discussion of the goals, challenges, and basic steps of pedagogical research. Participants should be prepared to discuss student learning and learning problems in a specific course, for which they will formulate a possible research question and will begin considering research methodologies. Attendees will learn about a range of research designs and methods to analyze findings that will complement their own disciplinary styles. In addition to improving their understanding of SoTL research methods, participants will discuss strategies for fine-tuning course learning goals and evaluation techniques.

Gurung and Voelker will guide participants through a step-by-step exploration of the process of doing SoTL research, with emphasis on the importance of developing a meaningful research question that focuses on a student learning problem, is informed by existing pedagogical literature, and can be approached with an effective methodology. In break-out sessions, participants will work with small groups from various campuses and disciplines to consider examples of learning problems that they might want to study in their own courses, including problems posed by students' prior knowledge and challenges associated with teaching disciplinary "moves" or threshold concepts. Attendees will also discuss and evaluate evidence-based pedagogical strategies and review literature that systematically investigates how pedagogical strategies can impact their own students' learning. The workshop will conclude with a consideration of how SoTL scholars can improve their own teaching practice, as well as contribute to pedagogical knowledge more generally through presentations and publications.

Dr. Greg Valde is the Director of the Teaching Scholars Program and a faculty member in the Department of Educational Foundations at the University of Wisconsin-Whitewater. A psychologist by training, Greg teaches graduate and undergraduate courses in the psychological foundations of education. He is a co-founder and was the long time director of the LEARN Center, the teaching and learning center at UW-Whitewater.

Greg is the recipient of several teaching awards, including the College of Education Teaching Award and the university W.P. Roseman Excellence in Teaching Award. His most recently published works focus on the development of excellence in college teaching. He has toured the U.S. widely, including in the summer of 1968 when his parents bought a new Oldsmobile station wagon and headed west to California. If you’ve read this far, Greg thinks you really ought to consider re-evaluating your reading and life priorities. He is officially retiring the day after Faculty College 2016.

Morning Seminar: Educating the Whole Person: What Exactly Would That Mean?

Some have argued that traditional higher education is too narrowly conceived – that our approach to learning neglects certain keys aspects of students’ development. This charge has often included the idea that we ought to educate our students’ hearts as well as their heads. More broadly, advocates of opening this proverbial can of worms have raised topics ranging from attitudes, affect, and values to character, morality, emotional intelligence, mindfulness, compassion, commitment, and personal transformation.

In this workshop we will explore a variety of relevant questions:

1. What might it mean to educate the whole person?
2. What kinds of goals might we have for our students that would extend beyond traditional ones?
3. How might we best foster those kinds of goals?
4. How would we know if we had accomplished our goals?

Embedded in our discussion will be two more basic questions:

• Can this really be done in the context and structures of the modern university?
• And, most basically, should this be done? Is it any of our business to enter this realm?

Several visions of what this might look like will be introduced, but this workshop will be primarily interactive in nature – inviting participants to join in the fray. There will be ongoing opportunities for questions and dialogue – as well as chances to begin to consider how you might apply some of these ideas to your teaching.

Dr. Dôna Warren is a Professor of Philosophy and Assistant Dean for Curriculum and Student Affairs of the College of Letters and Science at the University of Wisconsin – Stevens Point.

When she was finishing her Ph.D. at the University of Minnesota, people would ask her what courses she most wanted to teach. “I don’t care,” she’d usually answer, “as long as it isn’t critical thinking.” She was, at that time, convinced that the course was unteachable. She has since changed her mind, having taught critical thinking every semester since joining UW-Stevens Point in 1995 and having won the UW- Stevens Point Excellence in Teaching Award twice (in 1997 and 2015) and the Regents’ Teaching Excellence Award once (in 2010) largely on the basis of her ability to teach critical thinking with a degree of competence that she didn’t anticipate.

Dr. Warren has been honored to receive multiple OPID grants to support critical thinking work on her campus, most recently leading an interdisciplinary team to explore the potential of implementing argument mapping as an approach to critical thinking instruction across the curriculum. This project has matured into UW-Stevens Point’s Quality Initiative, and Dr. Warren looks forward to the implementation and continued development of this work with an expanding circle of interested colleagues.

Dr. Warren sits on the Board of Directors-at-Large for the Association for Informal Logic and Critical Thinking and is always eager to talk with other instructors about critical thinking. Even if they never want to teach it.

Morning Seminar: Seeing What You, and Your Students, are Thinking: Using Argument Maps to Conceptualize, Teach, and Assess Critical Thinking Across the Curriculum

Critical thinking is a central learning outcome of higher education, but it can be frustratingly difficult to exhaustively define. The result is much what we would expect. Conversations about critical thinking are common but often unfocused. Resolutions to help students improve their critical thinking are fervently made but difficult to implement. And efforts to assess critical thinking either rely upon an externally-constructed instrument that may not reflect the focus of the course or else depend upon class-specific assessments in a way that makes it almost impossible to aggregate results across disciplines.

But there’s hope. The critical thinking literature is fairly consistent in taking argumentation – the process of recognizing, analyzing, evaluating , and constructing units of reasoning – to be an essential component of critical thinking. Furthermore, most subjects, from the humanities to mathematics to the social and natural sciences, are deeply concerned with argumentation. It follows, then, that the development of argumentation skills can serve as a cross-disciplinary focus for critical thinking work.

Unfortunately, because arguments have an internal structure that text and speech necessarily obscures, arguments are not best represented in text or speech – the only formats in which most students have ever encountered them. Argument maps, in contrast, are able to display the relationships between the ideas in an argument and this, in turn, enables a deeper understanding and more focused evaluation of the reasoning.

In this highly interactive series of sessions, faculty participants will be introduced to some scholarly literature bearing upon argument mapping, learn how to map and evaluate arguments, and master some strategies for helping their students to acquire these skills. Special attention will be paid to how instructors can incorporate argument mapping into their courses in order to more easily and effectively discuss, teach, and assess critical thinking.

It will be assumed that participants are completely unfamiliar with argument mapping, but curious readers can learn more about the method by visiting the following sites:

* Dona Warren’s Argument Mapping YouTube Channel (aimed primarily at students) https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC_37QhbKCrh-dzJBEfKWKVw
* Argunet (an argument mapping blog with associated software) http://www.argunet.org/
* TruthMapping (a site that uses mapping to manage online conversations) https://www.truthmapping.com/
* ReasoningLab (a subscription-based service that enables computer-supported argument mapping) http://www.reasoninglab.com/

Dr. Scott Cooper is a professor of biology in his 22nd year at UW-La Crosse. He teaches a variety of courses including molecular biology, pathology & pharmacology, radiation biology, and bioinformatics. Since 2011 Scott has also served as the Director of Undergraduate Research and Creativity and is currently the chair of the UW-System Council on Undergraduate Research (WisCUR). He has mentored hundreds of undergraduates in his NIH funded research lab, as well as developing a client-based undergraduate model that has been used in molecular biology lab for over 10 years. Scott’s publications and grants are a mix of traditional biology research and SoTL projects and he was a Faculty Scholar in 2008.

Afternoon Workshop: Establishing Research Networks with Community Partners

There is increasing pressure on institutes of higher education to demonstrate how their students are being prepared for successful careers upon graduation. One high impact practice being used by an increasing number of disciplines is undergraduate research. By having students do research projects for external clients they get the benefits of an independent research project, while at the same time experiencing some of the benefits of an internship. This workshop will discuss the establishment of four research networks at UW-L (Public policy, Non-profits, Business, Biomedical/Health Care), and help participants work through the steps necessary to create similar networks on their own campus.

Dr. Cyndi Kernahan is professor of psychology at UW-River Falls and Co-Director of the Wisconsin Teaching Fellows and Scholars program. She also coordinates the Excellence in Teaching and Learning series at UW River Falls and serves as the Assistant Dean for Teaching and Learning. Cyndi received her PhD in Social Psychology from the University of Missouri in 1999.

Cyndi teaches social psychology, senior seminar in psychology, and the psychology of prejudice and racism. As a scholar, she is interested in how students learn best, especially when the content is controversial and emotionally provocative. She publishes her SoTL work regularly and serves as a reviewer for several SoTL journals. Cyndi also regularly presents about the topics of racial bias, inclusivity in the classroom, and the theory of stereotype threat.

Afternoon Workshop: Implicit Biases and Stereotypes: Evidence and Implications for Student Learning

Have you ever been surprised by the thoughts in your own head? Have you wondered why people perceive you in the ways that they do or how your own perceptions, or the perceptions of others on campus, might be affecting your students? Do you want to better understand the forces that are driving campus activism and protest?

In this workshop, participants will be provided with explanations and evidence for how bias works and how it influences our students, specifically in terms on their academic performance and their feelings of belonging on campus and in our classrooms. Short and long term consequences will be discussed as well as how biases operate across a number of relevant social identities (e.g., race, gender, first generation status, body size, age).

Tested and successful classroom interventions will be described and resources for further learning will be provided. You should leave this workshop with more than one idea for how to make your classroom more inclusive and with a better understanding of how bias works.

Dr. Greg Valde is the Director of the Teaching Scholars Program and a faculty member in the Department of Educational Foundations at the University of Wisconsin-Whitewater. A psychologist by training, Greg teaches graduate and undergraduate courses in the psychological foundations of education. He is a co-founder and was the long time director of the LEARN Center, the teaching and learning center at UW-Whitewater.

Greg is the recipient of several teaching awards, including the College of Education Teaching Award and the university W.P. Roseman Excellence in Teaching Award. His most recently published works focus on the development of excellence in college teaching. He has toured the U.S. widely, including in the summer of 1968 when his parents bought a new Oldsmobile station wagon and headed west to California. If you’ve read this far, Greg thinks you really ought to consider re-evaluating your reading and life priorities. He is officially retiring the day after Faculty College 2016.

Afternoon Workshop: Thinking About Learning:  Goals, Students, & Instruction

This workshop will explore some key ideas relevant to teaching in higher education - including the purposes of higher education, student thinking in the college years, the psychology of learning, and state-of-the-art practices in teaching. In the process you will be invited to reconsider what it means to be an excellent teacher.

Along the way we will consider the following questions:

• What are appropriate goals for our students and our courses?
• How do our students think and learn?
• What are some implications of these ideas for our teaching practices and why should I consider adopting them?
• What are some state-of–the-art practices in teaching?

A variety of key concepts and research findings about teaching and learning will be presented and discussed in this workshop. There will be opportunity for questions and dialogue – as well as chances to begin to apply some of these ideas to your teaching.

Dr. David Voelker is an Associate Professor of Humanistic Studies and History at the University of Wisconsin–Green Bay. He arrived at UWGB after completing a PhD in U.S. history at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 2003. He teaches primarily early American history and environmental history and humanities, including introductory, upper-level, and online courses. Since 2005, he has engaged in UWGB’s First Nations Studies Fusion program, which focuses on the integration of American Indian history, culture, and pedagogy into courses across the curriculum. He was a Wisconsin Teaching Fellow in 2006-2007, and he currently co-directs the Wisconsin Teaching Fellows & Scholars program. He documented his Wisconsin Teaching Fellows project in an August 2008 article in The History Teacher. As a participant in the OPID-sponsored Signature Pedagogies project, he co-authored with Joel Sipress (UW-Superior) an essay on the impact of the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (SoTL) on history pedagogy. He and Sipress went on to publish an essay in the March 2011 Journal of American History that combined historical analysis with SoTL research to suggest an alternative to the dominant coverage model of teaching introductory history. (This article won the 2012 Maryellen Weimer Scholarly Work on Teaching and Learning Award.) He also co-authored an essay with Anthony Armstrong for the OAH Magazine of History (July 2013) titled “Designing a Question-Driven U.S. History Course.” He is currently collaborating with Sipress on a textbook alternative for teaching U.S. history.

Workshop Title: Reflective Discussion and Transformational Learning

Reflective discussion is a special kind of discussion that can be used in the classroom (among other contexts) to build community, expand the capacity for listening, and cultivate individual reflection. Common modes of classroom discussion serve many valuable purposes, but they are usually guided in specific directions in the interest of efficiently promoting learning of class content or disciplinary ways of thinking. A reflective discussion, which is only lightly moderated, can perhaps more directly build the capacity for both deep listening and reflection in the classroom community, in a way that can enable a different sort of learning. A reflective discussion opens space for students to work through the intellectual and emotional implications of the content that they are studying, without the pressure for everyone in the room to arrive at the same destination. Reflection (with listening) can be especially productive when students are confronting difficult issues. As Charity Johansson and Peter Felten have explained in Transforming Students: Fulfilling the Promise of Higher Education (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2014), “reflective analysis—employing critical thinking, dialogue, and intuitive discernment to examine their assumptions—opens the learner to other possible ways of seeing the world around them and their place in it” (14). Because reflective discussion emphasizes both listening to others’ perspectives and listening to one’s self, it can play an important role in supporting the cognitive and emotional development that can make learning a transformational process. This workshop will introduce theory and evidence supporting the pedagogical usefulness of reflective discussion and will offer the opportunity to participate in a model reflective discussion.

Dr. Dôna Warren is a Professor of Philosophy and Assistant Dean for Curriculum and Student Affairs of the College of Letters and Science at the University of Wisconsin – Stevens Point.

When she was finishing her Ph.D. at the University of Minnesota, people would ask her what courses she most wanted to teach. “I don’t care,” she’d usually answer, “as long as it isn’t critical thinking.” She was, at that time, convinced that the course was unteachable. She has since changed her mind, having taught critical thinking every semester since joining UW-Stevens Point in 1995 and having won the UW- Stevens Point Excellence in Teaching Award twice (in 1997 and 2015) and the Regents’ Teaching Excellence Award once (in 2010) largely on the basis of her ability to teach critical thinking with a degree of competence that she didn’t anticipate.

Dr. Warren has been honored to receive multiple OPID grants to support critical thinking work on her campus, most recently leading an interdisciplinary team to explore the potential of implementing argument mapping as an approach to critical thinking instruction across the curriculum. This project has matured into UW-Stevens Point’s Quality Initiative, and Dr. Warren looks forward to the implementation and continued development of this work with an expanding circle of interested colleagues.

Dr. Warren sits on the Board of Directors-at-Large for the Association for Informal Logic and Critical Thinking and is always eager to talk with other instructors about critical thinking. Even if they never want to teach it.

Workshop Title: You Are Here: a Brief Introduction to Argument Mapping

If you’re unsure about how to teach and assess critical thinking, you have a lot of company. Instructors frequently express a confusion and frustration about critical thinking that is only exacerbated by increased calls to ensure that their students master critical thinking skills. Presumably, we all think critically or we wouldn’t be where we are, but much like writing, it’s one thing to do it and quite another thing to know how to teach other people to do it. There is, however, a way to approach critical thinking pedagogy that makes the skill set understandable, teachable, and eminently assessable.

Whatever else it might be, critical thinking involves understanding and evaluating pieces of reasoning, or arguments. Arguments are composed of multiple ideas that are related to each other in particular ways. Argument maps, which will be introduced in this session, are better suited to representing these relationships than is traditional text. It follows from all this that argument mapping can help students to improve their critical thinking skills by enabling them to better understand, evaluate, and construct arguments.

This afternoon workshop will quickly introduce participants to some of the literature about argument mapping, acquaint participants with a small but powerful set of argument mapping skills, and explore how participants can use argument mapping to teach and assess critical thinking within the context of their disciplines. Resources for further study and collaboration will be provided to allow participants to grow their skill base from the foundation provided in this session.

It will be assumed that participants are completely unfamiliar with argument mapping, but curious readers can learn more about the method by visiting the following sites:

* Dona Warren’s Argument Mapping YouTube Channel (aimed primarily at students) https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC_37QhbKCrh-dzJBEfKWKVw
* Argunet (an argument mapping blog with associated software) http://www.argunet.org/
* TruthMapping (a site that uses mapping to manage online conversations) https://www.truthmapping.com/
* ReasoningLab (a subscription-based service that enables computer-supported argument mapping) http://www.reasoninglab.com/

More information to be posted in the coming days.