Associate Professor of English
Faculty Director of the Core Curriculum
Director of the Digital Humanities Program
Xavier University of Louisiana
Associate Professor of English
Faculty Director of the Core Curriculum
Director of the Digital Humanities Program
Xavier University of Louisiana
When I started teaching as a graduate student, I received one week of training before the semester began. Obviously, I didn't learn much in that limited time. Since then, and whenever it is possible, I try to take advantage of every professional development I can, be it attending conferences (not so easy recently), watching webinars, enrolling in classes, or simply joining discussion groups. To be honest, I don't think I would have made it more than a few years without the kind of support these opportunities provide. They've made me a more mindful and authentic teacher, characteristics which I believe the students recognize and appreciate.
#LearnEverywhereXULA Advanced Certification, Level 3
Fall 2022. #LearnEverywhereXULA Advanced (#LEX Advanced) teaches Xavier faculty how to use the more complex tools available through our LMS, Brightspace, to teach in a more student-centric and mission-informed way. The #LEX Advanced program currently offers three levels of certification. Since leaving CAT+FD at the end of 2021, I've continued to challenge myself to learn through this unique development system. I have participated in other seminars and workshops about engaged online teaching, and none offer as much as #LEX and #LEX Advanced.
➤ Download my certificate.
AAC&U 2022 Conference on General Education, Pedagogy, and Assessment
Spring 2023. This conference is still taking place: after two days in person, the conference switches to online sessions that happen once a week for the next few weeks. Attending the AAC&U conferences in person, I find great opportunities to see the similarities between colleges and universities around the country. Most of the conversations I had with people at this particular conference focused on the successful core curriculum redesign and implementation.
➤ View a photo of me at the conference (Source: Jennifer Billman)
UNCF TLC Faculty Fellowship
Spring 2023. As I am currently enrolled in this program, I don't have much to say about it so far. I am looking forward to the opportunity to work one-on-one with professional instructional designers as I redesign my Digital Rhetoric & Composition class for online teaching. According to the UNCF TLC, "This fellows’ program is designed to support faculty in their online course development and aid them in intentionally developing culturally relevant courses with embedded industry skills to give students a competitive advantage in the job market." (Source: UNCF TLC)
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P-MAX Online
Spring 2023. Preparing Mentors at Xavier is a long-running initiative "designed to provide participating faculty with the knowledge and skills needed to mentor and advise undergraduate students" (Source: CAT+FD). For many years, I attended the monthly P-MAX workshops hosted through the Center for the Advancement of Teaching and Faculty Development at Xavier. Only since leaving my role at CAT+FD have I felt it appropriate to enroll in the actual program. Due to a teaching overload and new administrative responsibilities, I was not able to make much progress during Fall 2022, but I intend to complete my coursework by the end of Spring 2023.
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Advanced Online Student Engagement
Fall 2021. This four-week synchronous/online workshop taught faculty to enhance their effectiveness in online classrooms by focusing on strategies, techniques, and tools that help increase student engagement in online courses.
➤ Download my certificate.
46th Annual POD Network Conference: Evolving beyond Crisis — Connecting to the Future
Fall 2021. This online conference provided attendees with both synchronous and asynchronous learning opportunities about teaching faculty how to develop more inclusive practices, better engage students in the virtual modality, and other critical topics.
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Michelson 20MM Project
Spring 2022. Faculty members at Xavier were selected to learn how to develop and incorporate engaging learning opportunities to "empower entrepreneurial and creative students with a strong understanding of intellectual property". Following the provided training, I embedded several activities that gave students in my Dystopias, Real & Imagined class a stronger sense of the legal and ethical uses of media and other resources available online.
➤ View an EdPuzzle assignment I created.
1st Annual Innovative Flipped Learning Instruction Project Symposium
Spring 2022. This online conference provided faculty from around the world to reflect upon and share their experiences incorporating flipped learning (inverted pedagogy) in their classes. Sessions focused in particular on how flipped learning empowered more engaged learning during and after the COVID lockdown.
➤ Download my certificate.
How to Encourage Deep Reading Online
Spring 2021. Presented by Dr. Jenae Cohn, author of Skim, Dive, Surface: Teaching Digital Reading (2021, West Virginia University Press), this workshop taught faculty a digital reading framework for helping students think with and through the work of reading on-screen. The need to teach online or to be prepared at a moment's notice to teach online challenges us to think about how we deliver content to our students. Online texts are often less expensive (or even free), but reading them requires different skills than reading paper-based texts.
➤ Visit Dr. Janae Cohn's web site
Doing the Work: Me & White Supremacy
Spring 2021. This semester-long bookclub met virtually once a month as the group worked through Dr. Layla Saad's book Me and White Supremacy: A 28-Day Challenge to Combat Racism, Change the World, and Become a Good Ancestor, which helps readers reflect upon and better understand their white privilege and participation in white supremacy. Once we had explored the entire book, we continued our monthly meetings with other relevant readings for the rest of 2021.
➤ Visit Dr. Layla Saad's web site
Teaching 21st Century Skills
Fall 2019. As a part of Xavier's Career Pathways Initiative (CPI), I was awarded a UNCF Co-Curricular Engagement/Curricular Enhancement mini-grant "to implement coursework to improve student learning and career readiness outcomes". As a part of this award, I participated in this six-week through the University of Wisconsin–Madison to learn about specific and impactful methods for incorporating designated career-readiness skills in my classes, in particular, my class Dystopias, Real & Imagined. The experience challenged me to think about the assignments I had been using without a well-defined outcome of career readiness.
➤ Download my certificate.
POD 2019
Fall 2019. The annual conference of POD, the Professional and Organizational Developer Network, is the largest national gathering of people committed to faculty development and teaching excellence. At this conference, in addition to attending a variety of concurrent sessions and workshops, in particular some that focused on the use of Transparency in Learning and Teaching (TILT), I co-lead a session on the use of podcasts as a means of faculty development, a rather timely discussion given that only a month later, COVID–19 would begin infecting people in the city of Wuhan.
➤ Listen to the recording of our podcasting episode
Sparing Success 2020
Spring 2020. The Sparking Success Faculty Development Conference is hosted by Tulane University's Center for Excellence in Teaching and Learning. The conference allows faculty from local colleges and universities to share successful methods for teaching and instruction.
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Quality Matters: Applying the QM Rubric
Summer 2020. Applying the QM Rubric is the essential training provided by Quality Matters for faculty developing online classes. By participating in this course, I learned not only how to effectively develop my own online classes buy also how to assess those of my colleagues seeking feedback. Since completing the course, I have found that the ideas essential to good online teaching are just as essential to good in-person teaching and have been applying the QM standards to all of my classes, regardless the modality.
➤ Download my certificate.
XULA-FLEX
Summer 2020. In response to the COVID pandemic lockdown and the need to dedensify the campus upon our return in Fall 2020, all Xavier faculty were asked to teach one class online, regardless their inexperience with this modality. To support this, CAT+FD developed self-paced training introduced faculty to better practices as they converted one existing class to be offered through Remote Instruction. The training combines the Quality Matters standards with the mission and culture of Xavier and the tools available through Brightspace, Xavier's Learning Management System.
➤ Download my certificate.
