Reflections on SoTL, 2025

Cynthia Rutz, Director of Faculty Development

On Friday, April 11, fourteen Valpo faculty and staff attended this year’s annual Midwest Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (SoTL) conference at Indiana University, South Bend. The theme of the conference was “Care, Kindness, and Creativity”. Below is a short account of three sessions that might benefit you in your teaching. The first is about being kind to yourself as well as your students. The second gives strategies for motivating your students to read. The third talks about how to use “Easter eggs” to make an online class more personal and interactive.

Keynote Address: A Pedagogy of Kindness

The keynote speaker was Cate Denial, author of A Pedagogy of Kindness. Professor Denial, a historian whose speciality is indigenous people, spoke about being kind to ourselves as well as to our students. Her advice on how faculty could be kinder to themselves included the following ideas:

Your own self care should be first not last or you can’t help your students
Set limits to your hours of email access, you can’t be available 24/7
For herself, she tells students she is available only 9-5, Monday through Friday
Have one day a week away from email
Stop the constant pings on your phone
Schedule time on your calendar to eat lunch and dinner and make it non-cancellable
Build in flex days on your syllabus, you and/or your students may need make up time
Create community for yourself

Professor Denial told us that she spent some time at a digital pedagogy lab that forced her to ask critical questions about her teaching. At this lab she was asked to consider who the intended audience was for her syllabus. She realized that she was writing to students whom she did not trust. Evidence for this included harsh language, inaccessible text (i.e. a “wall of text” that was hard to read), and an Honor Code that had a negative tone, with words like “plagiarism” unexplained.

So she decided to redraft her syllabus to be more welcoming and inclusive. Her new intended audience is the students she wants to welcome into her classes. Her syllabus now includes:

A cheerful graphic header with helpful Alt Text to make it accessible
Text written in a clear type font with icons to clarify the content
No red or green text that can’t be read by colorblind students
A “basic needs” statement that tells students where they can go for help if they have housing or food insecurity
A positive rendering of the Honor Code
Annotations for any boiler plate language

Many of these syllabus changes came about when Professor Denial stumbled upon Universal Design for Learning and realized that it could benefit all her students, not just those who requested accommodations. This also caused her to make a number of other changes in her courses:

For a class final, she assigns an”unessay”: Show me what you have learned this semester in your medium of choice (blog, photo essay, podcast, etc.)
She creates an atmosphere of trust by giving students the benefit of the doubt concerning late assignments, missed classes, etc.
For class participation, she now counts not just talking in class, in addition any student can send her an email about what they learned in class that day
For reading: she assigns a reading check in, due the night before class. She then uses their comments to shape the lesson

She closed her talk by reminding us that academia is often far from kind. There is a model out there that promotes ideas such as the solitary genius, competition for grants, and research being more important than students. She argues that kindness in academia is not about being nice or lying, but rather honesty about what your discipline is, accountability, and creating an atmosphere of collegiality and trust.

Centering Literacy: Meeting Student Reading Challenges Empathetically and Effectively

Stephanie Alexander from Indiana State University noticed some scary headlines in education journals about how this generation of students can’t and don’t want to read. While she did not completely believe the hype, she did think that she needed to revisit her usual approach to reading in her English classes. Formerly, she had just assigned the reading, then given a pop quiz to ensure that students had read it, without any oversight or assistance along the way.

She tried out a new approach in a class on “Disease, Disaster and the Undead.” For this class she made reading the focal point, not the expectation. Reading became part of their daily conversation in the class. She began the semester by assigning one of the above mentioned negative articles about how students do not read, and they discussed the article in class. Before they began a new reading, she would get students excited about it by examining maps or videos in class first. Instead of reading quizzes, students were assigned a two-question “roadmap” that helped them know what to look for in each reading.

Students also kept a reading journal that included information about where, how long, and in what mode they read. She had not previously used audiobooks, but since many students preferred it, that was a mode they could use. She found free YouTube videos of teachers reading aloud the novel Station Eleven and many videos of people reading assigned poems out loud. Discussion board prompts also had students sharing information about the practice of reading and their habits around it.

Each day there was in-class writing for five minutes. This was not a “gotcha” quiz; instead students were given a passage to respond to, so that even those who had not read could participate. She also had students rewrite passages from a certain character’s perspective. A major assignment was a personal metacognitive essay in their own voice instead of the typical formal literary analysis. For this essay, students had to quote from their own reading journals to discuss their experiences.

Student feedback showed that, due to this new way of viewing reading as about ideas, even those who self-identified as “anti-readers” enjoyed the class. They were also proud of their accomplishment in reading three full novels, as many had never read a whole book before. Stephanie found that this class became more inclusive because it made participation much more comfortable for students. Using personal journals and essays cut way back on the unethical use of AI, especially since they were quoting themselves. She also saw improved student success, fewer withdrawals, and higher attendance. She attributes all this to a changed classroom atmosphere of joint inquiry into the ideas raised by the readings.

Using Easter Eggs in Online Courses

Scott Cook from Ivy Tech in Valparaiso was concerned about the lack of personal connection in his online asynchronous classes. Because he knew that students miss having face time with both professors and fellow students, he was looking for a way to make such classes more personal. So he began to embed “Easter Eggs”in his online classes. Easter Eggs are short, fun, hidden features on a website designed to reward the curious user. His Eggs are usually in the form of short quizzes intended to identify where students are struggling, to look for gaps in their information ,and also to redirect them to important places in the course site (such as the syllabus or feedback on assignments.)

Student responses automatically download into an Excel spreadsheet so Scott can refer to them in future interactions. Students can respond via video or in writing and Scott replies in their preferred mode. Note that Valpo faculty can respond to students via either video or writing directly from within the speed grader for submissions in Canvas.

A question he might ask early on the course is: “What excites you most and what worries you most about this class or assignment? Or he might ask “What do you do to relax?” He also uses that topic for a discussion board, and then refers to it again later to ask “Have you met your relaxation commitment to yourself?” Scott finds that student interaction with Easter Eggs has led to stronger connections with both peers and faculty, enhanced participation, and overall better student outcomes.