2021 Award Spotlight: Hans O. Mauksch Award for Distinguished Contributions to Undergraduate Sociology

Stephanie Tiexeira-Pot is the 2021 winner of the Hans O. Mauksch Award for Distinguished Contributions to Undergraduate Sociology.

Nominations for the 2022 Award are due January 15th. More info here.

What was the best piece of advice about teaching that you were given?

Meet students where they are not where you want them to be. Some students were placed at a structural disadvantage by not having a high school curriculum that adequately prepared them for college-level coursework. This translates into some students lacking confidence and a growth mindset helpful for excelling in the classroom. For example, students are sometimes anxious to take our social statistics course because they think that they inherently “aren’t good at math” or “can’t do math”. To overcome this barrier, our sociology program implemented several interventions. First, we host a panel session the first week of the social statistics course with students from previous semesters who originally thought that they “weren’t good at math” or “couldn’t do math” and then who ultimately persisted in the course. The students speak about their experience, strategies that they implemented to be successful, and answer student questions. This helps students who are anxious about taking a “math class” gain confidence and begin their journey to having a growth mindset. We then start learning in the course with a math readiness activity followed by a week of review on basic math concepts, such as rounding and order of operations, to meet students where they are and help level set. We supplement this with weekly extra help sessions for students. Following the first exam, we watch a Ted Talk by Eduardo Briceño on “The Power of Belief – Mindset and Success”. Briceño discusses how the brain is malleable, and how a growth mindset helps students take on challenges. We discuss the concept of learning curves and what strategies can be employed when we encounter challenges. Students draw their learning curves when they first learned to drive or ride a bike and share those with the class. During this exercise, I also am vulnerable and share my own learning curve when getting my Ph.D., which involved substantial challenges including my dissertation chair leaving the program, losing my home to a flood and becoming homeless while having a newborn, and going to graduate school while being a full-time working mom. We then apply a growth mindset to learning in the classroom and life more broadly through a reflection exercise. Students generally consider the session on growth mindset to be both memorable and impactful in helping them strategize on how to overcome challenges.

What advice would you give to someone about to teach their first course?

Ask for feedback early and often. In my research, I collaborate with health systems to use data to continuously identify opportunities for quality improvement. I apply a similar approach in both my research and teaching. In my teaching, I don’t wait for students to provide feedback in the formal university-administered course evaluations at the end of the semester. Instead, I continuously ask students for feedback throughout the semester. I formally ask students for feedback at the mid-term and the end of the semester in addition to reviewing the formal university-administered course evaluations at the end of the semester. Reviewing these data gives me a pulse check of my courses and enables me to make changes to my courses in real-time. For example, I asked students the following open-ended questions at mid-terms this semester: What has helped your learning in this course? What has hindered your learning? What improvements would you suggest? What else do I need to know? In response to these questions, one student suggested moving my office hours to later in the week to allow them more time to formulate questions before coming for extra help. This suggestion informed my decision to move my office hours from mid-week to Friday to better meet students’ needs. I have also made more substantial modifications to my courses in response to student feedback (within the constraints of the syllabus), such as revising activities and assignments and changing the content covered to better match student interests and needs. I also recommend being flexible to ad hoc student feedback and working to accommodate ad hoc student needs and feedback. Examples of flexibility include an extension of course deadlines as needed and changing course examples to match the emerging interests of students.

What is one activity, assignment, or feature of a course that you are particularly proud of?

I routinely employ experiential and active learning approaches in the classroom because experience informs understanding; students learn through active involvement. Following my teaching philosophy, my research methods course employs an experiential learning-based approach where students participate in a semester-long mixed-methods group research project in which they learn about and then engage in one step of the research process each week. Each week is organized into a learning module that follows Jane Vella’s 4-A design framework: (1) anchor; (2) add; (3) apply; and (4) away. To anchor the student, each learning module begins with learning objectives and an introduction to increase student interest and tap into the student’s prior knowledge or experience. To add content, each module includes pre-recorded videos and/or live mini-lectures on key course content and instructions for activities. To apply and immediately make connections, each module includes individual reflections and group activities where students try out each research methods approach, such as role-playing exercises to learn about research ethics, survey design activities when learning about survey protocol development, and mock interviews when learning about qualitative data collection. To take away a plan for contextualization and transfer of learning, each activity culminates in one section of a final research paper and final research presentation. In addition, modules include reflection activities for students to debrief on the week’s learnings. Through this experiential group research project, the students leave the course with applied experience searching for journal articles, using an article abstraction tool, conducting a literature review, designing a survey, entering a survey into an online platform, administering a mock survey, importing mock survey data into SPSS and running statistical analyses, creating tables and writing up survey results, designing an interview guide to contextualize the survey results, facilitating mock interviews, transcribing interviews, open coding and developing a codebook, conducting focused coding, conducting content analysis, writing up interview results, triangulating survey and interview results, writing up a research paper, and disseminating research findings via a research presentation. When I worked in industry before joining academia, I had the opportunity to interview bachelor’s level candidates applying for research analyst positions. I found that candidates were well positioned in the job market when they had applied experience. I believe students understanding the research process and trying to do research is much more valuable long-term than students memorizing concepts for an exam.

What is an institutional resource that you are particularly proud of?

Through a National Science Foundation grant, our team (Drs. Aiken Morgan, Lee, Teixeira-Poit, Wade, Doss, Shrestha) examined psychosocial risk factors that undergraduate students at North Carolina A&T State University (NC A&T) were experiencing during COVID-19. By collecting survey and interview data from undergraduate students, we documented how psychosocial risk factors were substantially impacting academic persistence after we transitioned to remote learning because of COVID-19. For example, we asked students to rate their overall mental health before vs. after COVID-19. Twenty-two percent of respondents reported having poor mental health after COVID-19 compared to only five percent of respondents before COVID-19. Furthermore, after the university transitioned to remote learning, one-third of students couldn’t eat because they didn’t have enough money for food. Realizing the deleterious impact these psychosocial determinants were having on quality of life and academic persistence among undergraduate students, our team developed an App to engage undergraduate students experiencing psychosocial risk factors and connect them to resources needed to sustain their learning in the disruptive conditions caused by the COVID-19 pandemic. Our App is known as the Student Hangar, a place where Aggies can take flight. The App will provide undergraduate students with improved connections to campus and community-based resources that will meet psychological and social needs. Meeting these various needs will reduce risk factors and increase academic persistence and success. Beyond helping NC A&T students with the mobile resource App, we see the potential for the App to be widely disseminated for use by other HBCU students as well as students from similar backgrounds who are experiencing psychosocial risk factors. A larger goal of the study is to develop prevention strategies so that we are better prepared for future pandemics that make remote and online learning necessary for all students.