Center for Excellence in Learning and Teaching

Oswego Symposium on Teaching and Learning Poster Sessions 2008

Center for Excellence in Learning and Teaching

ARTSwego

Pinter & Pedagogy: Integrating the Arts Across the Curriculum

Mary Avrakotos

Works of art, both classical and contemporary, vividly explore many of the same themes and issues that faculty and students investigate in the classroom. For several years, ARTSwego has encouraged the wider inclusion of campus arts presentations as a creative element of course syllabi in a variety of disciplines.

With grant assistance from the Gifford Foundation, ARTSwego developed a model project for the 2007-08 academic year. A workshop for faculty in May, 2007 featured four different artworks that would be presented on campus during the following season. Clustered around the the theme “Arts, History & Memory,” each artwork was chosen because it provided a unique lens on the wartime era of the 1940s— Art Spiegelman’s Maus; Paul Rajeckas’ Notes to the Motherland; Lee Ann Roripaugh’s Beyond Heart Mountain; and Olivier Messiaen’s Quartet for the End of Time. Through a combination of performances, discussions with the creative and/or performing artists, exercises and pedagogical reflections, participants were encouraged to consider ways that these works could support their teaching goals during the coming year.

Our poster presentation includes an interactive video presentation of the Arts, History & Memory workshop; results from the workshop evaluation; examples of actual course syllabi that incorporated the four artworks as a course requirement or supplementary activity; and student work developed in response to one or more of the assigned artworks. We will also introduce plans for the 2009-10 theme, “Arts, Identity & Diaspora.”

Counseling and Psychological Services

Using the College Campus Radio Station to Support Student Mental Health

Barbara F. Streets

Some psychological issues make their first appearance during late adolescence, a time for some that corresponds with the traditional college entrance years. If not addressed, a student’s mental health issue can affect many segments of the campus community. In their book, College of the Overwhelmed: The campus mental health crisis and what to do about it, Kadison and Digeronimo (2004) encourage the implementation of community outreach strategies that inform the campus community about mental health issues. This encouragement stems from the much-reported increase in severe psychological problems in college students and an increase in the demand for counseling services observed by college and university counseling centers (Berger, 2002; Gallagher, Zhang & Taylor, 2003). Communicating with college students via radio is a novel outreach approach to address, inform and discuss mental health issues pertinent to college student life. Use of the radio is also a student-friendly, cost-effective and destigmatizing option for providing information about psychological issues. Use of radio as a medium to communicate with students also supports the Division of Student Affairs Vision Statement.

There are over two-hundred college radio stations in the country and several are involved in creative efforts to enhance student mental health. This poster will highlight some of those efforts. Summarizing material collected over twelve consecutive semesters, this poster will display the variety of mental health, wellness and /or psychological topics addressed on the college radio talk show, Mindful Moments, on 88.9FM, Oswego, NY. This poster will highlight several taped shows, demonstrate how they relate to mental health themes, and offer listening segments of selected shows.

Department of Curriculum and Instruction/ Department of Psychology

Supporting Effective Faculty-Student Communications: Sharing Resources in Flexible Digital Formats

Roberta Schnorr, Amanda Fenlon, and Karen Wolford

Department of Curriculum and Instruction

Comparative Education through Inquiry and Discussion

Marcia Burrell

Together, Drs. Burrell and Garii designed a special section of an existing course that explored these issues through an international lens. Working closely with the Benin Ministry of Education and the Versailles Academié outside of Paris, France, the course invited students to compare and contrast issues concerning educational growth and development from the perspective of the United States, Benin, and France. This past January 2008, the class (EDU 301, Schooling, Pedagogy, and Social Justice and EDU 501, Foundations of Education) culminated with a 2-week visit to Benin and Paris during which the 15 graduate and undergraduate students in the class visited schools and classrooms in both countries, met with ministry officials in Benin and school administrators in France.

Through the process of reading a series of articles related to comparative education issues, disusing the articles via a questioning process, they write a reaction paper which synthesizes the articles and their learning.

Department of Curriculum and Instruction

Blogfolios on Students’ Perceived Interaction and Learning

Harrison Hao Yang

The study gives an overview of portfolios development and blogs use in education. It presents a blogfolio approach for teaching and learning that incorporates advantages of both blogs and portfolios. Furthermore, it examines the effects of using blogfolios on students’ perceptions on interaction and learning. Specifically, the study attempts to answer two research questions: (1) What are students’ perceptions on interaction before and after using blogfolios? (2) What are the effects of blogfolio activities on students’ perceived learning? Samples, findings, conclusions, and suggestions from the blogfolio study will be provided in the presentation.

Department of Student Affairs and the Compass Center

Using Targeting Strategies to Bridge the Communication Gap with New Students

Robert Schell, James Scharfenberger, and the Staff of the Compass Center

The Division of Student Affairs and Enrollment Management has been engaged in a project, Targeting Transitions, to design a series of discrete learning experiences and interventions to increase the level of student engagement and the probability of graduation of first-year students. Our work is analogous to the techniques and procedures used by market researchers when they develop segmented marketing campaigns aimed a specific consumer subpopulations.

We identified five distinct clusters of students with common experiences, motives, and aspirations formed from responses to the Noel-Levitz Retention Management System Survey (RMS) completed during the summer orientation program. The members of each cluster had responses more like one another than like students in other clusters. After we examined the responses of the students in each cluster, we labeled these segments as follows:

Reluctant college students
Vocationally indecisive students
Potential transfer students
Intellectually disinterested students
Potentially engaged students

Each of these segments is characterized by scores that are common to all students, as well as, a pattern of scores unique to the cluster members. In other words, they represent distinct variations on a common theme.

We will explore the second phase of the Targeting Transitions project including the construction of a validation instrument, the design of instructional strategies, and development of social marketing tools.

Department of Vocational Teacher Preparation

Students and Online Cooperative Learning

Matt Spindler

The dynamic nature of technology, the coming of age of the digital generation, and the need for more personalized and flexible learning environments is accelerating the expansion of online learning courses, programs, and resources. With that expansion arises an inherent diversification of possible student learning experiences. Research has demonstrated that the cooperative learning approach, when correctly enacted, has a positive impact on a number of student outcomes, such as, achievement, self-esteem, and school attendance. The five essential elements of successful cooperative learning are as follows: 1) clearly perceived positive interdependence; 2) considerable promotive interaction; 3) clearly perceived individual accountability and responsibility to achieve the group's goals; 4) frequent use of the relevant small group and interpersonal skills; and 5) frequent and regular group processing of current functioning to improve the group's future effectiveness (Johnson, Johnson, Holubec, and Roy, 1984). The purpose of this presentation is to describe the online cooperative learning experiences of students in a graduate level course study. Participant learning experiences, exhibiting facets of all five essential elements of cooperative learning were woven into course activities, assignments, and expectations. Technologies that were incorporated to infuse cooperative learning constructs include: the Angel course management platform, blogs; social networking sites; online document/file sharing; visual tool creators; online surveys; online universes; cell phones; and ipods. Data was collected through in-depth phone interviews with students regarding their learning experiences within the context of the online course of study. The data analysis, has constructed a grounded theory that is illustrative of the multiple influences that made varying impacts on the past, present, and future online cooperative learning experiences of the students. The findings of this research provide an operative conceptual framework and working knowledge for course instructors regarding the construction and implementation of cooperative learning strategies in online course environments.

Office of International Education and Programs

ESL Students: Their Challenges-Our Solutions

Gurdeep Skolnik

ESL students at SUNY Oswego fall into several categories. Newly arrive international degree seeking students, semester non matriculated exchange students, and new immigrants to the United States face unique challenges academically and socially.

This presentation will provide a brief overview on these categories of students, their countries or origin, the levels of English proficiency and the diverse challenges that they face within and outside class for the benefit of faculty who may have ESL students in their classes as well as for students who may have ESL classmates or residence hall roommates.

The presentation will also provide an overview of support that is currently available to assist newly arrived international students in acculturating themselves to North American culture, and the support that is provided though engaging, meaningful and integrated courses designed to improve and develop the oral and written discourse of ESL students.

The presentation will also provide strategies that may be useful to faculty in assisting ESL students in their classes to meet their class and course expectations to ensure academic success.

Materials on display will be clearly visible text on sheets that will be tacked onto the poster board.

Penfield Library

Going Beyond Required Readings: Creating Virtual Reading Rooms

Shannon Pritting

Wouldn’t we all love it if our students brought in articles from different newspapers, magazines, and journals that were relevant to course topics? Unfortunately, only the most dedicated student would spend hours skimming dozens of publications to find current information to bring to class. With the use of syndicated feeds from different sources and mash-ups using web services such as Yahoo Pipes, anyone teaching a course can efficiently create a virtual reading room consisting of constantly updated varied resources easily accessible to students. These resources are collected in one place, allowing students to effortlessly access a variety of information related to the course topic. The use of RSS has now become widespread, making it easy to find syndicated feeds from all types of publications ranging from peer-reviewed research journals to tabloid magazines.

Putting many different sources of information together in one place encourages students to apply critical analysis to information. For instance, a student could read a scholarly article about the Presidential nomination process, and then consult newspaper and magazine articles specific to that topic—all in one place. Students can compare in-depth research with popular publications, which will foster critical thinking about the sources that students will use for information after college. In a virtual reading room, students can explore and find supplemental reading interesting to them and create an ongoing research process.

This poster presentation will offer an explanation of the technology involved in creating a virtual reading room and will include the necessary steps to create rooms comprised of freely available content and library resources. Integrating virtual reading rooms into a course website or course space in Angel will also be covered.

Penfield Library

Building an Active/Interactive Bridge into Scholarly Research and Communication: Redesigning the Information Literacy Tutorial

Jim Nichols

For a redesign of the information literacy tutorial, a team of librarians set out to create an interactive online experience that focuses on engaging learners.

Our design considerations included:

Use a variety of formats and activities to promote student engagement
Make it freely accessible on the web and also within course environments
Include self-assessment tools and live research activities to provide feedback on accomplishment of learning outcomes

To elevate the level of learning, we sought to:

Focus on guiding concepts and applications rather than click-by-click instructions
Prompt discovery and reflection
Point to the core practices of scholarship in the context of the various disciplines

We have closed the communication gap through:

Audience analysis to describe the common situational factors of our first year students
User feedback and classroom observations to drive user-centered continuous improvement

The poster will show how we did these things and demonstrate our new tutorial, the Lake Effect Research Challenge.

Penfield Library

Let’s Chat a While

Shannon Pritting & Karen Shockey

In their day-to-day communication, students have very few barriers. Want to talk to your brother in Bangladesh? Pull your cell phone out and you can talk, text, or have a video meeting. Although Penfield’s virtual reference program was successful before implementing a Meebo Widget, volume increased when we removed the barriers of signing into an IM account. Students now have instant access to a librarian.

We have found that chat users, who are mainly students, appreciate that they need not be physically present to utilize reference services; however, many virtual reference users are in fact in the library. These students often multitask (listening to an Ipod while texting friends, writing an essay, and conducting research for a project, all seamlessly tied together), and will continue to work and wait until a librarian is available to chat. Our Meebo box allowed multitasking students to integrate our services into their complex studying/research/social process.

Librarians have learned to communicate in this format. In face-to-face reference, we hear the question, and interpret many underlying factors such as facial expressions, body language, and tone of voice. This is lost during electronic communications. In virtual reference students must frame their questions more explicitly as librarians cannot read any of the physical cues or signals of the student. In face-to-face reference, the librarian often will advance the conversation with directing questions; in virtual reference, the student assumes more responsibility as the librarian is an equal participant in determining the student’s research needs. The student who uses chat reference becomes a more engaged participant through communicating his or her information needs to the reference librarian.

This poster demonstrates how virtual reference services provide a meaningful and collaborative experience in which librarian and student work together to navigate the research process. The ease of using the Meebo Widget allows students to integrate the library into their complex means of communicating.

Student Advisement Center, Compass

Communicating with Students Utilizing a Strengths-Based Approach

Christy Huynh

It is so EASY for us to identify deficits and notice what students are doing wrong.
But it is so EFFECTIVE to identify strengths and notice what students are doing magnificently.

This presentation will examine how a strengths-based approach to teaching, advising and supervising is an effective communication strategy that creates synergy, understanding and growth. Utilizing a strengths-based approach can revolutionize our work with students both inside and outside the classroom. The purpose of this presentation is to introduce faculty and staff to StrengthsQuest, an assessment tool that can transform interactions between faculty and students; advisors and advisees; and staff and students. A strengths-based approach can be utilized in the classroom, during advisement sessions and when supervising students. It provides faculty, staff and students with a common language for talking about potentiality and opportunities. It also gives students insights about themselves that can be instrumental in making insightful, challenging decisions about their academic career. StrengthsQuest’s model of strengths-based teaching and advising was introduced to SUNY Oswego in February 2006 and has been influential in creating new courses and resources for students who are exploring or confirming their major. Exploring Your Strengths, GST 103 was developed in Fall 2007. This 1 credit course is designed to help students discover and develop their strengths in academics, career selection, and beyond. Hundreds of students, staff and faculty have completed the StrengthsFinder assessment and utilized it for personal, professional and institutional development.

This presentation will display information about StrengthsQuest, strengths-based teaching and advising, student testimonials and resources and information about how to get more involved in the Strengths movement.