Posted 9-26-00
Photo by Mike Sands/IRISThis year's Glennan Fellows are (standing, from left) Susan Hinze, Carol Musil, Robert Slonim, (seated, from left) Catherine Scallen, and Sharona Hoffman. |
CLEVELAND -- Five assistant professors at Case Western Reserve University have each received a $6,500 Glennan Fellowship award to pursue instructional innovations.
The University Center for Innovation in Teaching and Education (UCITE) offers the five annual awards to five untenured assistant professors to support a special project related to teaching and education. Fellowship awards can support efforts such as experimenting with teaching methods, adopting new instructional technologies, or developing new curricula within or across disciplines.
The Glennan Fellows for 2000-01 are Susan Hinze (sociology), Sharona Hoffman (law), Carol Musil (nursing), Catherine Scallen (art history and art), and Robert Slonim (economics).
Hinze is developing a new 300- and 400-level seminar course that will "explore the connections among gender, technology, and society," she wrote in her proposal.
The two key questions which the class will focus on are "how are technologies shaped by gendered social structures and cultures?" and "how do the technologies, in turn, shape gender relations, impact gendered social bodies, and reproduce gendered social worlds (at work and at home)?"
Topics to be covered will include technology, reproduction, and sexuality; domestic technology; and "the built environment," which Hinze described as encompassing domestic, community, and workplace architecture.
The class will use technology to study the intersection of gender, technology, and society. Hinze is planning to offer the syllabus and assignments on the course Web site, as well as links to a wide range of related topics.
"Students will be required to keep an e-mail journal and to post regularly on an e-mail discussion list," she added in her proposal. Hinze also is exploring the possibility of developing multimedia projects as other methods of enhancing the course.
She hopes the course will include "cooperative projects that use available campus resources to understand women's absence in technological fields," she said. "I want students to use class concepts and theories to examine the gender divide in technology at CWRU."
Hinze plans to debut the seminar in the spring semester. She would like to submit an article on how she developed the new course to educational publications in her field.
Hoffman wants to incorporate PowerPoint presentations, video clips, computer exercises, and course Web sites into the three courses she typically teaches -- civil procedure (the process for civil litigation, employment discrimination, and health care and the courts.
"Law school teaching traditionally involves a close reading of judicial decisions and statutes and a combination of lectures and socratic questioning of students in class," Hoffman wrote in her fellowship proposal. "For contemporary students, however, audio-visual aids and interactive exercises are often extremely effective as learning tools."
By preparing PowerPoint presentations with key points of her lectures and summaries of rules, statutory language, and court opinions, Hoffman can avoid wasting class time and battling dirty blackboards.
She also can offer the PowerPoint summaries on the class Web site so that students can listen more attentively and think about the topics raised, which is not as easy if they are taking copious notes. Students can use the notes on the Web site to prepare before class and review for exams, she noted.
Videos likewise are useful teaching tools in the classroom. "The study of law is not only the study of rules and regulations, but also the study of human problems and disputes," she wrote in her proposal. "It is important to bring the material alive for students so that they learn not only the technical aspects of legal practice, but also the real-life aspects."
Hoffman has used some video clips in her classes, but she plans to use some of the Glennan funds to search for and purchase other useful videos.
The law school offers free access to computer exercises available through the Center for Computer-Assisted Legal Instruction, but some of these exercises take hours to complete. Hoffman used some of the Glennan funds to hire a student assistant to review the exercises over the summer and offer suggestions on which would be the most helpful for students.
Hoffman also seeks to establish password-protected course Web sites with the syllabus, course materials, assignments, PowerPoint presentations, an e-mail discussion area, and links to relevant cases and statutes for each course.
Like Hinze, Hoffman wants to publish her experiences with developing her courses and evaluating their effectiveness in journals or newsletters.
Musil's Glennan Fellowship will help her revise the nursing school's research methods course, the second in a three-course sequence in scientific inquiry for students pursuing a master's degree in nursing.
In the research methods course, "students learn about the process of research with an emphasis on learning study design, sampling, data collection and analysis, and the interpretation and reporting of research findings," Musil wrote in her fellowship proposal.
These are important topics to cover because although master's students are not likely to conduct original research, they "lead their specialty areas in making practice decisions and initiating changes into practice," added Musil, who was promoted to associate professor effective July 1.
The course was recently revised in ways that "reflect the state of the art in graduate education and the state of the science in nursing education," Musil wrote. The additional requirements are for students to write a State of the Science paper, which shows the significance of a research proposal they develop, and a Continuing Education presentation to a professional audience on their State of the Science paper.
About half of the students in the research methods course enroll for intensive instruction, meeting eight hours a day for eight straight days. They work on their paper and presentation in their home community, after completing coursework on campus.
A course Web site can help students interact to share reactions to common problems and solutions as they work on their papers and presentation, Musil stated in her fellowship proposal.
The Glennan funds are providing support so that Scallen can revise the second-semester art history survey course, for presentation in the spring 2001 semester as a pilot project.
Now that the Cleveland Museum of Art, where most art history classes meet, has installed Internet access for laptops in one of its lecture halls, Scallen and colleagues can begin incorporating computer-based teaching resources into their courses.
For next semester's course, Scallen wants to use various multimedia resources in her course. Among them will be in-class use of Web sites, CD-ROMs, video images, and PowerPoint presentations.
The Glennan Fellowship will provide salary support during development and testing of the new course materials, and will enable purchasing related hardware and software as needed.
Slonim has successfully developed experimental simulations in his courses, and he plans to use the Glennan funds to develop more experiments that he and colleagues can use in their courses.
"In the classroom experiment students are actively engaged in first-hand experience of the concepts being presented to them. The experiment causes the theory to become immediately visible, rather than an abstract concept," Slonim wrote in his proposal. "After participating in an experiment, students become intellectually curious to understand how to think about the results. I believe this is a critical first step towards motivating general theoretical principles."
For example, for the "Principles of Microeconomics" course, Slonim has developed an experiment to illustrate the effects of price controls. Each student plays the role of a worker or a firm, in three different scenarios. In the first, there are no interventional policies about minimum wages. In the second setting, a minimum wage law is adopted, but at a lower rate than the market level. In the third scenario, the minimum wage is above market levels.
In the first two scenarios, there is little unemployment, and firms claim a greater share of the market surplus than workers do. In the third scenario, about half of the students in the worker role end up unemployed -- and literally standing in an in-class unemployment line to visually demonstrate one of the unintended consequences of the new minimum wage policy.
"While I could simply lecture about the theory of price controls, the minimum wage experiment gets students actively involved; they experience the effects first hand, and discussion often continues outside the classroom," Slonim wrote.
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