Winthrop Conference on Teaching and Learning

Libraries can help researchers in a multitude of ways, but we want to focus on two resources in particular that can benefit researchers: collaborative online catalogs and open access repositories. A collaborative online catalog is different from a traditional catalog, in that you can find materials beyond what your home library contains. You’ve probably heard about open access repositories, but did you know that your scholarship can be discovered by many if it’s located in an open access repository, such as Digital Commons at Winthrop?

Join this session to learn about the ways that your university library might be able to assist you with your research, whether it’s finding resources through a collaborative catalog or it’s getting your research noticed by others through an open access repository that’s discoverable to anyone in the world. We’ll tell you about the possibilities that these resources offer researchers and teach you practical tips so you can be more comfortable using them in the future.

For more information visit digitalcommons.winthrop.edu.

Teachers meet challenges as they make a plethora of daily choices. It is a responsibility to learn from past choices. An exemplary teacher is a person who accepts the challenge of lifelong learning experiences in the domains of Leadership, Diversity, and Technology. Moreover, exemplary teachers must demonstrate competencies in the themes of School Context Expert, Master Practitioner, Learning Theorist, Curriculum Designer, and Instructional Leader (American Association of Colleges of Teacher Education, 2010, p. 24).

Making the commitment to become an exemplary teacher is a choice one should make with care because it is a decision that will affect the way that one lives one own life and the way others will live theirs. The demands of teaching are great. The demands of becoming an exemplary teacher are even greater. In order to lead and inspire others, one must become the facilitator of his or her own learning and professional growth. In the process, one will become a role model for others to emulate. Being a reflective practitioner is compulsory for continued professional growth.

Using the domains and themes of an exemplary teacher as a framework to guide reflecting on teaching practice, this presentation will discuss how this framework was successfully implemented into a teacher education program via email journaling during student teaching. Specific examples will be provided. Any teacher will benefit from this presentation as effective reflective teaching practices are paramount to improving pedagogy.

Perhaps the most influential current mindset strategy is the one developed by Carol Dweck; growth mindset. At the core of Dweck’s ideology is the notion that challenges are what help to change mindsets and that students can learn more effectively when they let go of the idea that their capabilities are fixed. A challenge for both the Professor and the librarian is how to help First Year English composition students who have a ‘fixed mind” about their abilities to do research and also synthesize that research into a research paper. Additionally, other elements of the paper (high quality writing, avoiding plagiarism, and citation concerns) can create a type of ‘stagnation” for students who have pre-conceived notions about their abilities. In this presentation, a Professor and a librarian relay their work together and separately, to help students leapfrog barriers. Using strategies that help them bypass their own fixed mindsets towards the students, the two accepted the challenges they faced and attempted to confront the trials students faced in the classroom. The website mindsetonline.com states, “Mindsets are beliefs—beliefs about yourself and your most basic qualities. Think about your intelligence, your talents, your personality. Are these qualities simply fixed traits, carved in stone and that’s that, or are they things you can cultivate throughout your life?” The idea that there is a choice in how personal capabilities are perceived is highly influential for teaching and learning. What makes for additional impact here is the work towards the nurturing of certain mindsets for students, professors, and librarians.

It is very easy in academia to get stuck in our offices, stuck in our departments, and stuck in our own silos, as we are wont to say. Yet, from time to time, we manage to branch out and perhaps have an inspiring conversation with a colleague outside of our department. Suddenly, we realize how much overlap our fields have and perhaps, the ways in which we might share that with our students and with each other. Over the past three years, I have co-created and co-taught three different classes with faculty from other disciplines. In this session, I will share the different collaborative models we utilized for each class and discuss the pros and cons of each. More broadly, I will discuss current research on collaborative and interdisciplinary teaching. I will also discuss the general pros and cons of collaborative and interdisciplinary teaching.

With the prevailing global knowledge economy, higher education institutions must continue to ensure that their students have strong critical thinking, problem- solving, collaboration, teamwork, and decision making skills. This is so that students can be career and future ready upon graduation from school. Consequently, it is critical that courses, particularly the upper level ones, are designed and taught in a manner that allows the mastery of skills and competencies that are in high demand by employers.

At Winthrop University, faculty members make use of technology tools and applications in the classroom to offer learning experiences that are challenging, engaging, relevant, and yet fulfilling. Since 2010, Geological Information Systems (GIS) has been used as a learning tool in marketing courses at the University. The application has been specifically introduced in those courses to meet both programmatic goals and help students gain real-world business skills.

This session reports on a problem learning class project developed for junior and senior business majors at Winthrop University. The project, which uses the Arc-GIS application, was specifically designed to instill both critical learning and career readiness skills to the students taking the course. The session will present scaffolding activities implemented by the faculty of the course to help the students build confidence with using the Arc-GIS tool. In addition, the session will present the students perceptions to using of the Arc-GIS tool and their reactions to their involvement on the project. Further, this session will discuss instructional design strategies and explore issues related to how affordances that are imbed in many modern learning tools and classroom technologies can be leveraged to foster the acquisition of critical thinking, collaboration and career-readiness skills by students.

With the growth of online learning on the horizon at Winthrop University, faculty members can be best served in learning strategies for teaching online by participating in a dialogue with colleagues who are currently teaching in this modality.

This panel session will provide strategies for teaching online from the perspective of Winthrop University faculty currently teaching online across a variety of disciplines. Panelists will share their experiences with respect to common pitfalls and lessons learned; skills needed to be a successful online facilitator; roles and responsibilities; cognitive, social, and teaching presence; engagement; accessible online content; and providing the Winthrop experience.

Participants, both new and experienced with online instruction, will gain insight on a variety of approaches to teaching online, tool recommendations, and time-saving strategies. Participants will be able to ask panelists questions using an online chat tool during the live session.

Service dogs, emotional support animals, therapy animals, animals as accommodations - they're everywhere! Is that ok? Should or can I say anything about them? What are the expectations? Faculty and staff across the country are asking these questions as more animals appear on campuses and lawsuits abound when students are denied access to animals. How do we maintain compliance and sanity? This session will provide an easy to understand overview of the different types of animals we may find on our campuses, how to discern between the types, how and why they may be approved, appropriate and legal interactions, and when we can say, "no;" as well as sharing testimonials from students who have benefited from these creatures.

This presentation will focus on the Alpha Beta Game, an interactive class activity that seeks to demonstrate how ingroup and outgroup biases develop. The notion of ingroup-outgroup bias is commonly discussed at Winthrop University in the “HXMP 102: The Human Experience” course via an article by David G. Myers originally included in the HMXP 102 course reader, so the Alpha Beta game can be particularly useful as a class exercise in the HMXP course, or any course that touches upon the concept of ingroup-group bias. The game itself, which was first developed a number of years ago by Dr. Roger Baumgarte (former professor of psychology and chairman of the Department of Psychology at Winthrop University), is an interactive group activity that can be played with virtually any numbers of students. It involves dividing the class in half, with each group receiving a specific set of instructions for how to interact with one another using a deck of cards. The key to this game is that the two groups are instructed to behave in ways that are completely opposite of one another: The Alpha group is instructed to share their cards and treat one another with affection and friendliness, and the Beta group is instructed to hoard their cards individually and to treat one another with sternness and a business-like demeanor. Once each group has mastered the rules of their own “community”, they are instructed to send emissaries to visit the other group, observing the interactions of the players and attempting to learn the other group’s rules. The exercise culminates in the class coming back together to discuss their experiences and describe both their own culture’s characteristics, as well as the characteristics of the other group. Inevitably, each group describes themselves in positive terms, while describing the other group using negative terms. By participating in this game and discussing the resulting positive and negative feelings that are generated between the two groups, students learn how easily ingroup-outgroup bias can develop between two cultures that may be operating with different rules or norms, even in an activity as simple as a card game.

My presentation will provide participants with a brief explanation of the game, including copies of the handouts that are given to students in the Alpha and Beta groups. A set of guidelines for the instructor explaining how to facilitate the discussion that follows the game will also be provided (electronic copies of these documents will be uploaded prior to the conference). Additional anecdotes illustrating the effectiveness of this game in teaching ingroup-outgroup bias will also be presented. It is important to note that the proposed presentation is a repeat of a similar presentation that I originally gave at a Winthrop TLC Conference several years ago. Given the ongoing importance of multicultural understanding and the need to overcome cultural biases whenever possible, I feel that presenting this activity once again as an effective teaching tool is both timely and extremely useful for our current times.

Several previous studies explored the destructive effect of social exclusion on Asian American college students in U.S. colleges. Previous studies reported that Vietnamese American students, as one of largest Asian American minority groups in the United States, faced numerous challenges in reaching their academic s in higher education partly due to the experience of cultural and social alienation and exclusion. The purpose of this study is to examine how Vietnamese American college students perceive the concept of “engagement” on college campus and beyond and how they develop different engagement strategies to promote their academic and social integration. Structured as phenomenological research this investigation will include in-depth interviews with ten to fifteen Vietnamese college students enrolled in either two-year or four-year institutions of higher education in the Southeast. A preliminary analysis from a pilot study suggests that participants interpret “academic engagement” as their individual determination and perseverance to reach each academic and professional milestone while trivializing the significant lack of support provided to them. Their narratives also reflect the stage of “White identification” as they attempt to assimilate and identify themselves with White peers rather than other Vietnamese American peers.