CIRTL Teaching Portfolio

Organized by the University of Arizona Center for the Integration of Research, Teaching, and Learning (CIRTL), the Postdoc Pathway Program is a new, one-year teaching certification program that combines training in theory and pedagogy of evidence-based teaching and an intensive, short-term co-teaching assignment to practice applying new skills in a classroom setting and receive valuable feedback from a faculty mentor.

SEMESTER 1: PREPARE & PLAN

• Completed a massive open online course (MOOC) - An Introduction to Evidence-Based Undergraduate STEM Teaching

• Participated in one elective CIRTL workshop - Bringing an Inclusive Mindset to Teaching, University of North Carolina

• Read Sarah Rose Cavanagh's The Spark of Learning (2016) and engage in biweekly faculty learning community to discuss

• Identified course and faculty mentor for co-teaching experience, HPS 307 Public Health Narratives in College of Public Health with Dr. Laura Gronewold

• Collaboratively developed a co-teaching plan

SEMESTER 2: TEACH & REFLECT

• Observed co-teacher (3 weeks) and prepared to teach

• Co-taught course (3 weeks) - developed and delivered curriculum, facilitated new classroom activities, graded assignments and provided student feedback, evaluated teaching through formal Qualtrics survey, and critically reflected through journaling and weekly meetings with co-teacher

• Read James M. Lang's Small Teaching (2016) and engaged in biweekly postdoc pathway learning community to discuss

My Postdoc Pathway goals for the year were to...

1) Craft an informed and meaningful teaching statement by immersing myself in education literature, learning lingo for evidence-based teaching practices, and finding my own teaching style through intentional application of newly acquired skills during the co-teaching experience.

2) Diversify my teaching experience by co-teaching an undergraduate course in a field (writing) that is slightly outside of my normal comfort zone and yet draws from my strengths as a public health researcher and practitioner.

3) Build a community of mentor educators around myself to learn from as I seek to round-out my research-heavy postdoc experience with teaching experience, to ultimately better position myself to apply for Assistant Professor positions for the 2022-2023 school year.

Course: HPS 307 Public Health Narratives, College of Public Health, University of Arizona

Instructor: Dr. Laura Gronewold

Description: This course is focused on writing and critical thinking. We become good writers by reading and talking about what we have read. We will share about our emotional and intellectual reactions, as well as analysis of the writing, to determine how language and style choices evoke feelings and change perspectives. In HPS 307 we will examine texts that engage compelling public health narratives in various forms. Our analysis of various genres will help us tackle questions such as: How does storytelling function in public health narratives? How does discourse shift between contexts and communities? How can we draw on techniques from literature and creative nonfiction—imagery, metaphor, character development—to persuade our audience about important public health issues? Our engagement with various texts will give you the chance to examine, explore, and challenge various narrative and rhetorical terms, concepts, and genres. HPS 307 will help you develop critical thinking skills, expand your writing and research strategies, and improve your ability to read and write in a public voice. To do so, we will approach our texts with open minds and then use different critical approaches to examine the way components of race, class, gender, sexuality, morality, ethics, politics, and psychology are expressed and function within the texts. As writers your job will be to incorporate your critical thinking into persuasive writing, exploring writing as a process that will unfold through drafts, rereading of your writing, participating in workshops, and incorporating peer feedback to craft strong, credible public health narratives.

Syllabus

Co-Teaching Summary: Dr. Gronewold and I identified a shared interest in advancing our anti-racist pedagogy prior to the start of the semester. The most significant contribution I made to the course was developing new course material on writing positionality statements, giving the students a chance to build on the work they were doing to identify and locate their own social identities, critically reflect on how their worldviews and lived experiences are shaped by their identities, and succinctly describe their positionality to a specific public health topic and/or population of interest. The new content was scaffolded over several class periods with lecture, discussion, in-class writing activities, and culmiated in a homework assignment. Additionally, I created a Qualtrics survey to formally evaluate students' perspectives of the course and instruction. The survey, administered at weeks 5, 10, and 15 queried constructs from The Spark of Learning: interest, content relevance, curiosity, feedback, growth mindset, student choice/autonomy, inclusivity, and complexity and proximal zones of learning.

CIRTL MOOC letter of completion - Intro to evidence-based undergrad STEM teaching

Faculty learning community presentation on Chapter 4 from The Spark of Learning

Co-teaching plan for HPS 307

New course content for HPS 307 - Positionality statement assignment and supplementary guidance

Qualtrics survey, summary of findings from Week 5 of HPS 307

Co-teaching observation worksheet and reflection

Observation letter of Breanne Lott's teaching, written by Dr. Gronewold