1999 University Teaching Initiative Grants
Title: "Improving Instruction by Teaching Assistants in Covenant
and Fundamentals of Architecture"
Faculty: Maurice Cox, Kenneth Schwartz, Peter Waldman
Description: Professor Cox, Schwartz, and Waldman propose a
one-day retreat in conjunction with the Teaching Resource Center with faculty
and teaching assistants aimed to improve TA instruction. The retreat with
identify issues and challenges in teaching Architecture 101, "Architecture
as Covenant" and 102 ,"Fundamentals of Architecture, basic courses offered
by the School of Architecture.
Title: "Projects in Technology"
Faculty: Patricia Kucker
Description: Professor Kucker proposes to develop a course web
site as an archive and as a teaching tool for her required course on building
technologies.
Title: "A Physical and Virtual Herbarium of Middle Atlantic Wetland
Plants"
Faculty: Kathy Poole
Description: Professor Poole proposes a collection of physical
plant specimens, organized in the way that planners and designers best
understand them--spatially, according to where they occur within the water-land
gradient. Accompanying the physical herbarium will be a virtual herbarium,
containing a digital data base of critical information on each plant.
Title: "Integrating Technology into Multicultural Education"
Faculty: Robert Covert
Description: Professor Covert proposes to foster an appreciation
of diversity while promoting the most modern technology. He proposes to
create web pages for EDLF 555 (Multicultural Education) that will enable
students to submit and archive their writing in their own electronic portfolios,
thus enhancing student-centered learning.
Title: "Integrated Technology for Critical Teaching and Learning"
Faculty: Margo Figgins
Description: Professor Figgins proposes to disseminate an integrated
technology tool that facilitates critical interaction among teachers, students,
and their peers. It joins research, writing, language, and conversational
practices. It is currently being used in three English education courses,
and it will be refined for use in a variety of other education course settings.
Health Sciences and Curry School of Education
Title: "Improving Instruction in Augmentative and Alternative
Communication for Students in Communication Disorders and Special Education"
Faculty: Janet H. Allaire and Martha Snell
Description: Professors Allaire and Snell propose to upgrade
the course in Augmentative and Alternative Communication in four ways:
(1) the use of pre-posttest and skills checklists; (2) development of six
videotaped cases of individuals with communication disorders; (3) formation
of a lab to give students access to communication equipment, materials,
and guidance; and (4) development of application assignments involving
the lab, the case studies, and collaborative teaming between students.
Title: "Improving Teaching by Improving Advising"
Faculty: Garrick Louis
Description: Professor Louis will develop a class project for
an undergraduate systems engineering class that will produce a Web-based
tool to provide rapid accurate information to undergraduate advisors in
the School of Engineering and Applied Science. This course, SYS 301 Systems
Engineering Concepts is a core course in the systems engineering curriculum.
The grant will be used to fund graduate and undergraduate teaching assistants
to help in the project development.
Title: "Computer Graphics Video Demonstration"
Faculty: David Luebke
Description: Professor Luebke (and others in the Computer Science
department) are developing a sequence of undergraduate and graduate courses
in computer graphics. The funds will be used to purchase a collection of
every video and animation shown at the leading conference on computer graphics,
and will provide an immensely useful teaching tool for the new curriculum.
Title: "Development of innovative teaching/learning activities
in Thermodynamics"
Faculty: T.C. Scott and J.P. O'Connell
Description: Professors Scott and O'Connell propose to develop
alternative learning experiences of laboratory and workshop activities
for the basic thermodynamics course. This course will be offered by the
Departments of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering and Chemical Engineering
and is a core course for students in those departments. The grant will
provide needed instrumentation and summer support for undergraduate students
to assist in the development of the laboratory activities.
Title: "An Innovation for EE's Control Education"
Faculty: Gang Tao
Description: Professor Tao proposes to develop a new sequence
of laboratory design experiments for a 4th year major course in digital
control theory offered by the Electrical Engineering department. The grant
will be used to fund a graduate teaching assistant for the summer to help
develop the new experiment descriptions and test the new experiments.
Title: "Development of 'Spanish for Health Professionals'"
Faculty: Judith K. Sands
Description: Because of the increase of Spanish-speaking persons
in the United States, it is vital that more health care professionals be
able to speak Spanish. Sands proposes a two-stage project, beginning with
a task force to recommend the format and content for a first course, Spanish
for Health Care Professionals I." The second phase will be the implementation
of the task force's recommendations. The course will be an elective in
Nursing and open to students in other schools interested in pursing careers
in health care.
Title: "Upgrade of the Language Laboratory"
Faculty: Rachel Saury
Description: The biggest obstacle in the development of WinCalis
(Computer-Assisted Instruction System for Windows) in the language lab
has been the lack of student help to input data and digitize information
in the language targeted for instruction. Saury proposes to upgrade the
language laboratory by hiring students with the appropriate foreign language
experience to do this work.
Title: "Website Archive for Teaching Modern Hebrew"
Faculty: Daniel Lefkowitz
Description: Professor Lefkowitz proposes the creation of an
archive of digitized audio, video, and textual sources for teaching and
studying the Hebrew language. The project will diversify and increase students'
exposure to spoken Hebrew, by integrating computer, multimedia, and internet
technologies with classroom pedagogical techniques and will establish a
standard curriculum for the first four semesters of the Modern Hebrew sequence.
Title: "Gender and Art in Renaissance Italy"
Faculty: Francesca Fiorani, Marion Roberts, Howard Singerman,
Dorothy Wong
Description: The main aim of this project is to design and create
web-based applications in connection with the undergraduate lecture class
ARTH 331 - Gender and Art in Renaissance Italy. The realization of this
project will bring recent scholarship and current interdisciplinary issues
to a large undergraduate class with the clarity and support of the visual
evidence.
Title: "Creation of a Teacher's Guide for the Salisbury Project"
Faculty: Marion Roberts
Description: The Salisbury Project is an extensive photographic
archive of color images of the Cathedral of Salisbury, which will expand
to include the residences of the clergy that surround the cathedral, the
buildings of the town of Salisbury, its parish churches, and the archeological
site of Old Sarum. The archive is designed as a visual supplement to books
and articles on Salisbury, and for that reason the text has been kept at
a minimum. Roberts proposes to have students work on developing a teacher's
guide for the Salisbury Project.
Title: "Expansion of web site for ARTH 280, Art Since 1945"
Faculty: Howard Singerman
Description: Professor Singerman proposes to expand the size
and scope of the existing web site for ARTH 280, Art Since 1945. The site
will not only include pictures of artwork, but it will also contain textual
material about the art.
Title: "To Create a Web-Based Document for a New Course on Chinese
Painting"
Faculty: Dorothy Wong
Description: This proposal seeks funding to create a web-based
document to support the teaching of a new undergraduate course on Chinese
painting in fall 1999. From monumental ink landscapes to figure drawings
and exquisite flower-and-bird paintings, paintings have been considered
one of the highest achievements of Chinese art. Pitched at the introductory
level, the new course covers the history of Chinese painting, from prehistoric
times to the modern era. It also introduces the aesthetic theories and
the social and cultural backgrounds necessary for appreciating the paintings.
The proposed web-based document consists of 200 images of Chinese painting.
The document would provide easy access for students to study the paintings
introduced in the classroom but not illustrated in textbooks. The web-based
document would also include new archaeological materials that indicate
the state of recent scholarship.
Title: "Development of a Web-Based Chinese Reading Program"
Faculty: Helen Shen
Description: Development of a web-based Chinese reading program
is critical in promoting teaching excellence in the Chinese language. The
increasing political and economic power of Asian countries, especially
China, induce more and more UVa students from different majors to take
Chinese language classes. Students of religion, political science, anthropology,
history, plus MA/MBA candidates who are specializing in Asia are of course
required to take Chinese. Now increasing numbers of students from commerce,
law, medicine, architecture, and education are showing new interest in
this critical language. Materials from Chinese magazines and newspapers
and other sources would be selected and organized into topical categories
and arranged by levels of difficulty appropriate to the students' learning
levels. These materials will include annotation and grammatical explanations,
which the user may access as necessary.
Title: "Teaching and Presenting Biology"
Faculty: Fred Diehl
Description: Professor Diehl proposes to develop, document,
and publicize the materials for a course in which his students will both
learn for themselves about biology while in the process of teaching to
local high school pupils.
Title: "Continuing Development of the Web Site for 'The History
of American Popular Entertainment'"
Faculty: John W. Frick
Description: Professor Frick proposes to finish collecting and
programming links to web sites and finish the placement of readings on
e-reserve. This course examines cultural patterns and issues as they were
treated in popular entertainment from minstrels to MTV.
Title: "Costume Laboratory Worktable/Storage Unit"
Faculty: Gweneth West
Description: Professor West proposes to promote the development
of teaching drama by providing a much-needed worktable for costume design,
storage, and production.
Title: "Developing ENGL 383, The New Addition to our Survey Course
Sequence"
Faculty: Stephen Cushman, Michael Levenson
Description: Professors Cushman and Levenson propose to develop
a systematic mode of presentation for in-class use of the materials used
to supplement their lectures. They propose to develop resources involving
writers from the first half of the twentieth century as well as contemporary
writers. Specifically, for Williams Butler Yeats, T.S. Eliot, Virginia
Woolf, Ernest Hemingway, and William Faulkner, they hope to make these
legendary figures more immediately accessible by establishing a collection
of critical essays and contemporary reviews of their works, as well as
visual images of first editions of the books we read. In the case of contemporary
writers, they will seek to present recently published interviews and essays.
In addition, for both older and new writers, they plan to organize coherent
links to important sites that are now chaotically dispersed on the internet.
Title: "Development of a laboratory course and web site to supplement
Geochemistry"
Faculty: Stephen Macko
Description: Professor Macko proposes to support and expand
the laboratory and computer-based components of general geochemistry (EVGE
504) through the development of laboratory exercises that combine laboratory
analytical methods, local field sampling and website-based technology.
Title: "New Interdisciplinary Lecture Course: 'Politics, Science
and Values'"
Faculty: Vivian E. Thomson
Description: Professor Thomson proposes to develop an interdisciplinary
course, "Politics, Science and Values: An Introduction to Environmental
Policy." The course will have its own website that will provide course
information and links to several public policy agencies.
Title: "Real-Time Teaching Evaluation"
Faculty: Brian Balogh
Description: With graduate student assistance, Professor Balogh
proposes to create "student management teams" to improve the evaluation
of his course in which his students will be using a World Wide Web-based
Electronic Source Book.
Title: "Development of a Visual File as a Supplement to HIUS
202"
Faculty: Olivier Zunz
Description: Professor Zunz proposes to assemble a visual file
(photos, charts, maps) to supplement the second half of the entry level
American History course, which covers the Reconstruction to the present.
Examples of some of the images include photos of early skyscrapers, immigrants
on Ellis Island, people in bread lines during the Depression, people being
liberated from concentration camps by American G.I.s, and race riots in
American cities.
Title: "Development of an Image/Sound/Critical Commentary Bank
for Aesthetics (Philosophy 361)"
Faculty: Mitchell S. Green
Description: Professor Green proposes the creation of an electronic
archive to show students how to relate broad philosophical theories and
questions about art to real artistic productions and critical commentary
thereon. The archive will include: (1) slides of works of architecture,
painting, environmental art, photography, and sculpture of philosophical
significance; (2) published critical commentaries, and (3) excerpts from
philosophically significant musical works.
Title: "Development of a Teaching Handbook for Teaching Assistants
and Those Graduate Students Teaching Independently in the Department of
Philosophy"
Faculty: Mitchell S. Green and Jorge Secada
Description: As part of their doctoral training, graduate students
in the Department of Philosophy normally serve as teaching assistants in
three to five courses. Professors Green and Secada propose to create a
handbook that will provide guidelines for several things, such as construction
of syllabi, ordering of texts, construction of Toolkit class web pages,
assignment of grades. It will also contain a bank of previously developed
syllabi.
Title: "Teaching Religious Studies--Teaching Assistant Development
Seminar"
Faculty: Benjamin Caleb Ray
Description: Professor Ray proposes to establish a seminar for
TA and faculty development. Because the Department of Religious Studies
employs more than thirty TAs in any given semester, it is imperative that
there be a systematic introduction to teaching for the TAs. The Teaching
Resource Center will assist in the running of the seminars.
Slavic Languages and Literatures
Title: "The Animation of Dracula"
Faculty: Jan Perkowski
Description: With graduate student assistance, software, and
expert consultation, Professor Perkowski wishes to streamline, by using
digital technology, the diverse multi-media materials of his course.
Title: "Building a Virtual Meeting Place"
Faculty: Eileen Boris
Description: In order to improve the teaching of interdisciplinary
courses in their program as well as enhance their learning community, Professors
Eileen Boris, Sharon Hays, Ann Lane, and Farzaneh Milani will, through
the hire of student help and the facilities of two workshops, seek to build
a virtual meeting place on an interactive web site.