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April 27, 2006

Eight teaching proposals funded

Eight teaching proposals have been selected for funding under the Provost’s Advisory Council on Instructional Excellence’s seventh annual Innovation in Education Awards program.

The projects range from the development of a center for creative writing at the Hill House in Pittsburgh’s Hill District to the designing of a program for pharmacy students on how to use problem-solving techniques to reduce drug-related deaths and illnesses.

The awards, instituted in 2000 by Provost James V. Maher, encourage instructional innovation and teaching excellence. Andrew Blair, vice provost for faculty affairs, said the Provost’s Advisory Council, which he chairs, seeks to identify high-quality proposals that give promise of introducing innovative, creative approaches to teaching that can be adapted for use in other courses.

Funding for this year’s eight awards totals $151,400. Winners of the awards and summaries of their proposals follow.

• Trudy Bayer, communication lab director in the School of Arts and Sciences (A&S) Department of Communication, and Karen A. Curto, visiting lecturer, for the project: “Speaking Like a Biologist: Developing Instructional Communication Modules and Synchronous Presentation.”

The goal of this project is to develop a two-part educational innovation that will influence communicative expertise in biological sciences courses and provide instructors’ feedback for oral presentations.

The first part of the project will include the development and recording of two lectures on organizing and delivering an oral scientific presentation, the recording of two student presentations and the implementing of technology to provide written critiques of these presentations.

The second part of the project will store these presentations in streaming-video format on a server.

• Fiona Cheong, associate professor in the A&S Department of English, for “Hill House Center for Creative Writing.”

This project will develop a research-learning component in Pitt’s creative writing curriculum to help students investigate relations of aesthetics to social action. Cheong plans to accomplish this by involving students in coursework that focuses on the current realities facing aspiring writers in economically under-resourced communities.

The project’s course materials will draw heavily upon Find the Rivers!, a community development consulting team located in the Hill District. Students will teach workshops and organize events as they develop skills in cross-cultural collaboration and research.

• Ping Y. Furlan, associate professor of chemistry at Pitt’s Titusville campus, for “Incorporating Modern Nanoscience Into the First Two Years of Chemistry Laboratory Curricula.”

Furlan’s project will introduce students to modern nanoscience through implementing various laboratory experiments at Pitt-Titusville. The project will require a scanning tunneling microscope to allow students to visualize atoms and molecules, and chemical and physical interactions at the atomic/molecular level.

The students will study nanomaterials through direct observation and experimentation. Early exposure to modern science is expected to better prepare students for their careers.

• Laurence Glasco and Maurine Greenwald, associate professors in the A&S Department of History, for “Image and Context: Viewing Black Pittsburgh Through ‘Teenie’ Harris’s Photographs.”

This project will involve hiring graduate students to scan microfilm issues of the Pittsburgh Courier from the 1940s through the 1960s. Students also will locate and digitally record articles that contain photographs of Charles “Teenie” Harris and other columns that documented music, sports and the Hill District community.

This collection would aid students in interpreting the Teenie Harris Photographic Archive, a collection of about 80,000 photographs acquired by the Carnegie Museum of Art. Students would be taught how to use photographs to generate hypotheses that can be tested with reference to the accompanying text.

• Sherry Koshman, assistant professor in the School of Information Sciences, for “Building Tools for Teaching Interactive Information Visualization Systems.”

Visualization uses computer technology to produce a symbolic or graphical representation of data, information or knowledge. This project aims to improve the methods of teaching information visualization to include interactive visualization systems that may inspire students to develop new ideas, interfaces and models.

The project also will adapt current instruction methods to include dynamic system demonstrations so students can integrate their theoretical knowledge with practical applications to improve the quality of their learning experience.

• Rhonda Rea, assistant professor of pharmacy and therapeutics in the School of Pharmacy, for “A Systematic Approach to Ill-Defined Problem Solving Using a Computer-Aided Learning Branched Tree Algorithm in Combination With Problem-Based Learning.”

Pharmaceutical faculties and the American Association of Colleges of Pharmacy are working to change the model of pharmacy practice from merely dispensing medications to emphasizing the delivery of pharmaceutical care.

Rea’s project plans to develop learning tools that will teach pharmacy students how to become independent learners and expert problem solvers in an effort to reduce drug-related death and illness. A computer-aided learning branched tree algorithm and problem-based learning will be used to teach students a step-wise process of solving a clinical problem in the form of a patient case.

• Larry J. Shuman, associate dean for academic affairs and professor of industrial engineering in the School of Engineering, for “Internationalizing the Undergraduate Industrial Engineering Curriculum.”

In an effort to train undergraduate industrial engineering students to be more innovative and able to work collaboratively with colleagues around the globe, Shuman has proposed two classroom innovations. First, students will look at existing case studies addressing ways U.S. industry might work with international partners. These case studies then will be supplemented with additional readings and video clips for classroom use.

Second, Shuman plans to identify international partners and develop opportunities that allow students to participate in a virtual team design experience with countries such as India, China and Japan.

• Valerie Swigart, assistant professor in the School of Nursing, for “Teaching Ethics in the Era of Globalization.”

Swigart’s project seeks to better prepare Pitt nursing students to deal with such aspects of globalization as multiculturalism, international travel and potentially life-threatening pandemic communicable disease.

The development of a global ethics instructional unit will enhance an existing, required web-based ethics course for master’s degree students in nursing. It will provide students with information about global ethics and cross-cultural communication. The ethics unit also will be incorporated in the school’s new global health course, which is taught on the undergraduate and graduate levels.


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