Staff members from the Center for Teaching and Learning and the Boise State Uniting for Inclusion and Leadership in Diversity, or BUILD, program recently presented at the Professional and Organizational Development Network Conference in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.
Devshikha Bose and Jeremy Harper presented a research poster titled “Inquiry for Inclusion: faculty learning to use data for equity” highlighting the efforts of the Boise State Howard Hughes Medical Institute Inclusive Excellence 3 initiative committee to “develop an easily accessible institutional data dashboard and, more importantly, a university-wide culture of data inquiry in the service of equity.” Co-collaborators on the research project were Daniel Sanford, Donna Llewellyn and former Boise State employee Diana Garza.
Bose’s collaborative work was also represented in two other sessions: A round table discussion on how immigrant educational developers’ positionality can be assets for their centers and the national educational development discourse; as well as a special interest group interactive session called “Can We Talk? Fostering Trans-disciplinary Discourse in Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (SoTL) Programming.”
Teresa Focarile and Megan Frary, in collaboration with colleagues from other universities across the U.S., facilitated an interactive session on “Sparking institutional change: Planning Sparkshops within your institutional context.” Sparkshops aim to bring faculty development to faculty in a format that would “spark” their interest in a topic in just 15-20 minutes. In their session, facilitators shared what they’ve learned from delivering these sessions and invited participants to develop plans for implementing them on their own campuses.
Focarile co-led another session titled “CTLs as Disruptors: Managing Up for Institutional Change.” Together with her collaborators from Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University and Appalachian State University, she invited participants to think creatively about ways to engage their teaching and learning work with campus partners, leadership, faculty and students to provoke positive change.
Finally, Frary and Sarah Lausch and were recognized for receiving the 2023 POD Network Research Grant award to support their current work, evaluating the effectiveness of a graduate student instructor learning community on graduate student instructors’ feelings of belonging, teaching confidence and reflective practices.