By Mike Watters, Professor of Biology Student retention is important to any university, especially keeping commuter students who are traditionally less anchored in campus life. Even more at risk, given the leaky STEM pipeline, are STEM commuter students. To address this issue, a group of Valpo faculty and staff proposed a National Science Foundation grant. […]
Category: 2024
Teaching Underprepared Students and The Hidden Curriculum
By Tiffany Kolba (Math & Stats), Jenna Van Sickle (Lilly Fellows), Jesse Sestito (ME), & Lauren Sestito (ME) This academic year, fifteen Valpo faculty and staff members met biweekly for a Faculty Learning Community (FLC) on “Teaching Underprepared Students and The Hidden Curriculum.” During the fall semester, we focused on reading two books: Teaching Unprepared […]
Reimagining the Curriculum
By Theresa Carroll (CONHP), Alberto López Martín (World Lang & Culture), and Karen Hernes (CONHP) Several of your colleagues have been working to increase underrepresented voices in their courses as part of the “Reimagining the Curriculum” (RIC) Initiative. These faculty attended a three-part workshop series last spring and then implemented their curricular projects this year. […]
Fostering Community and Student Engagement
By Natalie Krivas (English) & Stacy Hoult (World Languages & Cultures) For the past year, a group of Valpo faculty and staff have been meeting as a Faculty Learning Community (FLC) to discuss Fostering Community and Student Engagement. FLC members learned about and experienced the Solutionary Process, to “identify inhumane, unsustainable, and unjust systems and […]
Inside-Out Prison Exchange – A Class Like No Other
By Dawn Jeglum Bartusch, Department of Sociology and Criminology In 1995, Professor Lori Pompa from Temple University took 15 students to a prison in Pennsylvania for a tour and conversation with incarcerated men. My colleague, Danielle Lavin-Loucks, and I have been doing similar prison tours and conversations with our Valpo classes for many years. The […]
What is New in ValpoScholar?
By Jon Bull, Associate Professor of Library Science What is ValpoScholar? Since 2011 ValpoScholar has been Valpo’s institutional repository, hosted by the Christopher Center Library. In short, the platform tries to collect the university’s intellectual output in one place. That output includes University Archives, student work, faculty work, original journals and textbooks. ValpoScholar is like […]
Talking is Teaching
By Abbie Thompson, Department of Psychology In this article Abbie Thompson (Psychology) describes how students in her service-learning courses support new mothers in Porter County to teach our youngest learners: babies and young children. The name says it all. Talking is teaching as many of us faculty know. We share nuggets of our knowledge with […]