PTF Impacts

The majority of the clinical population served at the UT Speech and Hearing Center is Spanish-speaking, yet there is no audiology-specific training for students providing care. This program provides targeted training for audiology graduate students to best serve their Spanish-speaking patients. The culmination of this experience results in a digital badge provided by the Moody College of Communication, which can be viewed here.

Julia Mickenberg authored the introduction and one article in the Fall 2024 issue of Profession, an editorial journal of the Modern Languages Association (MLA). 

In Fall 2024, PTF Ruth Shear helped launch the new general chemistry labs, rewritten to include Research Methods material (rebranded "thinking like a scientist"), and taught to 4500 students. This involved a complete overhaul of the CH204 general chemistry lab course, turning it into two classes: CH104M and CH104N. These courses are required for the vast majority of CNS majors as well as all pre-health students. The courses were piloted in Fall 2024 with 400 students, and fully launched in Fall 2025 with over 4500 students.

On April 11, 2024, three Provost's Teaching Fellows presented at the final session of the "Teaching as Wellbeing" mini-conference series, hosted by the UT System Academy of Distinguished Teachers in collaboration with UT System faculty developers. The series served as a monthly think tank about the relationship between teaching, learning, and wellbeing for educators and educational developers across UT system.

As part of Steve Finkelstein's PTF Initiative, a campus-wide faculty learning community constructed a canvas sandbox website where they could share materials related to climate change, with annotations, with the broader UT community. They collected the group's materials, and then tried to organize them in a useful way. The materials include lectures, activities, quizzes, projects, pre/post tests, etc., and are organized both by learning objective and by course. The website is now live, and a publication on pre/post survey results is being prepared.

This video project was designed to be shown in all Signature Courses at UT. Together with a discussion prompt, the video aims to acquaint students with mental and physical health resources on campus, and to teach them strategies for success.

“Bridging Rhetoric and Engineering: Qualitative Results from a Writing Center Program to Improve Engineering Undergraduate Writing,” Proceedings from IEEE ProComm, 2024. Pittsburgh, PA (July 14-17, 2024). I delivered this co-authored conference paper at the IEEE ProComm conference. See the link for the paper.

Each year, the PTF Chair-Elect has the opportunity to share recurring Teaching Tips with all faculty at UT. These messages cover a variety of topics, styles, and methodologies, from brief and practical classroom strategies to in-depth conversations with voices from across campus.

This year’s Teaching Tips  were written by Chair-Elect Nina Telang, from the Chandra Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering.

Julia Mickenberg co-presented about her PTF Initiative in a session at the Modern Languages Association 2023 Convention on January 6 in San Francisco, California. Her paper, titled Valuing the Liberal Arts, was part of Special Session 61: How the Liberal Arts Work.

D'Arcy Randall gave a co-authored presentation about the program developed as part of her PTF Initiative at the Conference on College Composition and Communication on February 16, 2023 in Chicago, Illinois, themed "Doing Hope in Desperate Times." The presentation was part of a session featuring Writing Centers titled "Cross-Disciplinary Collaborations to Promote Transfer and Self-Efficacy," which was among hundreds of sessions of varied topics, formats, and scholarly approaches for over 1000 attendees. 

PTF D'Arcy Randall delivered a co-authored presentation at the American Society for Engineering Education (ASEE) Annual Conference in Baltimore, Maryland, on June 26, 2023.

PTF Julia Mickenberg worked with her Graduate Assistant and collaborator, Ricky Shear (Department of English), on a survey of UT liberal arts alumni aiming to find out what alumni valued about their liberal arts degrees and how they felt those degrees limited them. The College of Liberal Arts provided Mickenberg with additional funding in order to broaden the scope of the survey from department-specific alumni to the entire College.

PTF Vernita Gordon was awarded a National Science Foundation Grant on April 1, 2022 as principal investigator. The research objective of the grant is to develop a predictive framework for understanding how bacteria use proteins in their cell envelopes to sense and respond to the mechanics of the surface to which they attach.

Each year, the PTF Chair-Elect has the opportunity to share recurring Teaching Tips with all faculty at UT. These messages cover a variety of topics, styles, and methodologies, from brief and practical classroom strategies to in-depth conversations with voices from across campus.

This year’s Teaching Tips  were written by Chair-Elect Jessica Toste, from the Department of Special Education.

For her Provost's Teaching Fellows initiative, Nina Telang developed of a Supplemental Instruction (SI) program in a sophomore-level Electrical and Computer Engineering course, EE319K: Introduction to Embedded Systems. 

Supplemental Instruction (SI) study sessions to help students succeed in introductory courses by employing a peer teaching model. SI Leaders – TAs or peers who have already successfully taken the course – plan and lead two identical, voluntary SI sessions each week, which students can join at any point in the semester. 

Former PTF chair Nina Telang co-presented this paper at the American Society of Engineering Education (ASEE) Annual Conference in August 2022.

D'Arcy Randall's PTF Initiative created a collaboration between the Cockrell School of Engineering and The University Writing Center to create resources and consultant trainings to better support STEM students in technical writing projects and assignments. As a result of the Initiative's work and findings, a number of STEM-specific UWC resources have been created and/or revised, which can be found on the UWC website.

Vernita Gordon presented a paper at the 2021 March Meeting of the American Physical Society, an international-scope conference for physics scholars .... The paper was part of a session titled "Physics Education at All Stages,"

Vernita Gordon was a featured presenter at the UT Austin Physics Departmental Colloquium series on December 1, 2021. This series of events features physicists from within and outside of the University, and is open to all UT faculty, students, and staff. Gordon presented on her PTF Initiative, "Being Human in Physics."

Former PTF chair Nina Telang co-presented this paper at the American Society of Engineering Education (ASEE) Gulf-Southwest Annual Conference in March 2021. This paper shares a detailed look into the implementation of a new student initiative focused on promoting student success and well-being.

Read the complete paper here, or find the abstract below.

Each year, the PTF Chair-Elect has the opportunity to share recurring Teaching Tips with all faculty at UT. These messages cover a variety of topics, styles, and methodologies, from brief and practical classroom strategies to in-depth conversations with voices from across campus.

D'Arcy Randall gave a virtual presentation about the pilot program developed as part of her PTF Initiative at the College Composition and Communication Regional Conference at the University of Southern California on Dec. 19, 2020.

Former PTF chair Nina Telang co-presented this paper at the American Society of Engineering Education (ASEE) Virtual Annual Conference in June 2020.