PTF Impacts

On April 30, 2025, Guyot hosted a public poster session showcasing student projects focusing on datasets from the City of Austin Open Data Portal, held at the University of Texas at Austin. Projects ranged widely in focus, from environmental data to transportation and public safety, demonstrating the breadth of student inquiry and analysis.

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.

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.

PTF Layla Guyot presented a session at Open Data Day in March 2024, hosted by the Austin Public Library. This event was part of International Open Data Day, which celebrates open government data with events hosted around the globe. Guyot presented about promoting the use of a local open data portal for data science projects with her collaborator, former student/current UGCA Dustyn Ransom.

PTF Shelly Rodriguez co-presented a round table session at the Association of Science Teacher Education International Conference in New Orleans, Louisiana in January 2024. The conference welcomes over 500 Association members and students each year, and includes dozens of papers, poster sessions, round tables, plenary sessions, and interactive workshops.

“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.

In 2024, many of Dr. Tanya Clement's student researchers created dynamic Digital Humanities projects, and some were able to share those projects with broader academic audiences:

Trent Wintermeier (graduate student), Monica Olivio, and Nati Roman (undergraduates) presented “Listening and Annotating Spirituality in the Gloria Anzaldúa Archive” as part of Platforms, Power, and Pedagogy. Computers and Writing Conference. Texas Christian University, Fort Worth, Texas, in June 2024. 

PTF Layla Guyot gave an invited presentation at the weekly statistics seminar at Texas State University, to an audience of primarily faculty. In her talk Guyot discussed promoting the use of a local open data portal for data science projects.

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.

Nine students from PTF Layla Guyot's Elements of Data Science course were selected to virtually present the insights gained during their coursework to the Data, Impact, Visuals, and Exploration (DIVE) meetup organized by the City of Austin.

PTF Wenhong Chen presented a paper at the International Communication Association 2023 Conference in Toronto, Ontario, Canada in June 2023.

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 Sarah Sloan co-presented a session at the 2023 National Conference on Race and Ethnicity in Higher Education (NCORE) on May 31, 2023 in New Orleans, Louisiana. NCORE is sponsored by the University of Oklahoma, and its mission is to provide a leading forum for higher education professionals to explore and address the complexities of human differences—including cultural, social, and personal identities—and their profound impacts on access, opportunity, and success.

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 Krishna Kumar presented this paper at the American Society of Engineering Education (ASEE) Gulf-Southwest Section Annual Conference in March 2023. This paper discusses usage and results of the Murder Mystery-style assignments Kumar has developed as part of his PTF Initiative.

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

Nico Osier presented about the Stock Images Database developed as part of their PTF Initiative at the 2022 Open Education Conference. Themed Rise to Action, the conference took place on October 17-20, 2022 and was completely virtual. Osier presentation titled "Creation and Use of a Stock Images Database to Make Lectures More Diverse and Inclusive" and also featured several student researchers. 

"Measuring Impactful Teaching Practices" was presented at the International Virtual Exchange 2022 Conference on October 26-28, 2022, in Valencia, Spain. The paper explored Global Virtual Exchange (or GVE) at the University of Texas at Austin in the previous academic year to measure the impact of the faculty-led program.

Dr. Acosta, Dr. Castleberry, and Dr. Davis presented a poster at the July 2022 Annual Meeting of the American Association of Colleges of Pharmacy in Grapevine, Texas. Their poster described the Pharmacy Practice Lab (PPL) sequence spanning all six semesters of the UTCOP didactic program to consolidate lab components and increase skills development while aligning with and reinforcing curriculum balance.

PTF Ashley Castleberry was one of six UT faculty who presented a poster at the 2022 Midyear Clinical Meeting and Exhibition of the American Society for Health-System Pharmacists describing the Pharmacy Practice Lab (PPL) sequence spanning all six semesters of the UTCOP didactic program to consolidate lab components and increase skills development while aligning with and reinforcing curriculum balance.

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

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.

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 Stephanie Holmsten co-presented a session on her global virtual exchange initiative at the American Council on Education virtual conference on March 24-25, 2021. With international collaborators from Ecuador and Venezuela, Holmsten discussed their 2019-20 international collaboration between (US)-ESPOL(Ecuador)-UAM (Venezuela), and provided evidence of the COIL model for course design in achieving student outcomes. Their experiences with icebreakers, collaborative projects, and assessment tools were also shared.

On December 10, 2020, Pauline Strong coordinated and led a Difficult Dialogues-style workshop and panelist at the virtual meeting of the American Anthropological Association. Strong presented and spoke on a panel alongside other UT Austin colleagues. During this initiative we reached additional faculty through developing a Faculty Learning Community and extensive online Difficult Dialogues resources.