In spring 2016, GSD partnered with UT Libraries to host our first Graduate Teaching Showcase. Over 50 graduate students, staff, and faculty attended talks about teaching from four outstanding graduate students who competed for a chance to present and win a teaching award.
Adena Rivera-Dundas, English, shared her experiences using student presentations in the classroom, and how those presentations can be so rewarding for students, but also carry with them some real risks, such as student complacency and conversations drifting significantly off-topic.
Angelina Dichiera, Marine Science, uses tools such as humor and sharing her experience in the field to connect to her undergrads. Angelina showed us some great SpongeBob and “The Office” memes and other tools she has used to relate to her students to make teaching and learning a more fulfilling experience.
Corrie Jacobs, English, shared her challenges associated with teaching an inherently problematic but canonical text, Emerson’s “Self-Reliance,” and shared some of the creative ways she has handled this in her classroom.
Krittika Krishnan, Psychology Behavioral Neuroscience, her experiences getting students to think critically about research ethics by going off the beaten debate path. Krittika shared a method for debating about the “Tearoom Trade” experiment that allowed students to explore perspectives of various stakeholders.
Attendees participated in lightning rounds of discussion after each presentation. Department of English graduate student and past GRS 097 instructor Laura Thain offered some valuable final reflections on the presentations and used the lens of the five canons of rhetoric to tie together some themes that arose across them.
We celebrated the achievements of these presenters and of our graduate students with a reception and door prizes! UT Rec Sports donated great prizes to the event, including a TeXercise pass and a Climbing Wall that five lucky grad students took home. The University Federal Credit Union and UT Libraries Scholars Commons helped us celebrate by giving away t-shirts and tote bags.