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Applied Research and Classroom-Based Innovation

Teaching practice, just as any other scholarly activity, is an area about which you can form questions and hypotheses, gather data, and iterate based on the results of your study. Many faculty at Duke engage in applied educational research or scholarship of teaching and learning in which they routinely explore questions about teaching and/or student learning, innovate their own practice based on what they learn, and disseminate their results to grow the body of knowledge around teaching and learning best practices.

This third of three webinars in the series "Imagining the Innovative University of the Future" will feature faculty in different disciplines providing brief 10-min overviews of their recent research and course-level innovation, with time for questions and discussion guided by session facilitator Aria Chernik:

Joan Clifford and Deb Reisinger co-authored a study of undergraduate world language students (French and Spanish) enrolled in service-learning courses and their engagement in transformative learning, specifically which classroom and community‐based activities lead to transformative learning and which modes of communication are associated with changes in students' beliefs, attitudes, and perceptions.
Robert Duvall and colleagues developed a practice that allows students agency to select among several pedagogical approaches within a single course that provides better outcomes than traditionally organized courses across achievement levels, improved attitudes about learning, increased metacognition, and positive student comments about their abilities and confidence.
Aaron Kyle will present on the development, implementation, and assessment of Outreach Design Education, a set of community-facing programs that focus on promoting STEM identity in underrepresented K-12 students through engineering design.

Presenter biographies

Aaron Kyle, Ph.D., Professor of the Practice of Biomedical Engineering, focuses on enhancing undergraduate education while teaching First Year Design, Senior Design and Bioinstrumentation. Kyle aspires to create new courses that will provide robust design experiences for undergraduates between their first and final years of study. He is also devising methods and researching the efficacy of intentionally addressing DEI issues in design projects and engineering education. Kyle created and launched the HYPOTHEKids (Hk) Maker Lab, an NIH-funded set of programs focused on introducing underprivileged and underrepresented minority high school students in New York City to engineering design and biomedical research. At Duke, Aaron works to replicate these efforts for students and teachers in Durham and surrounding communities.

Joan Clifford, PhD., is Associate Professor of the Practice in Spanish in the Department of Romance Studies at Duke University. As Director of Duke Service-Learning, she builds programming and provides resources to support community-based learning in curricular contexts. She regularly teaches undergraduate service-learning courses in Spanish that focus on education, global health, and identity and collaborate with community organizations that work in solidarity with Latine communities. Her commitment to experiential learning extends to directing study abroad programs in Mexico, Spain, and Chile, as well as leading DukeEngage in Ecuador and Miami. Her research centers on community-engaged pedagogies, transformative learning, and intercultural competence.

Robert Duvall, Senior Lecturer of Computer Science, has taught computer science at Duke for over 15 years, and has helped to transform introductory computing curricula several times by consistently being an early adopter of ideas, research, or software design practices. His goal is always to find ways to present novice students with a simplified, yet intellectually rigorous, interface that enables them to take advantage of advances in technology, solve significant problems, and get excited about Computer Science. In recent years, Duvall has worked with colleagues as a member of the Computer Science Education Group to redesign Duke’s introductory computer science course to reach a broader range of students at Duke from a variety of backgrounds and fields. Duvall is also an instructor in Duke’s Coursera Specialization “Java Programming and Software Engineering Fundamentals,” a highly-rated five-course series taken by learners from around the world.

Session facilitator

Aria Chernik will begin a new position as Assistant Vice Provost for Faculty Development and Applied Research in Learning Innovation & Lifetime Education (LILE) on May 1, 2024. Currently, Aria is the Director of LILE's Learning Innovation Development and Applied Research Center and an Associate Professor of the Practice in the Social Science Research Institute. Aria's teaching and research focus on equity-centered design, education innovation, technology and society, and inclusive pedagogies. She has over 20 years of experience as an educator and learning innovation leader across K-12, undergraduate, graduate, and professional contexts.

About the series:

Imagining the Innovative University of the Future

Institutions of higher education are facing numerous stressors and challenges in an evolving landscape of learner and employer needs. Newly established universities and colleges may have certain advantages to well-established institutions, in that they can focus their programs, curricula and pedagogies on what learners need now and will need in the future. How can established and respected institutions such as Duke evolve and innovate based on strong foundations, to expand their quality offerings to reach new audiences of learners, teach new skills and capabilities, and develop new ways of recognizing and tracking learner accomplishment?

This webinar series will highlight some of the ways that innovation can and is happening in higher ed -- at the university scale (macro innovation), program scale (mezzo innovation), and individual course scale (micro innovation).

The other webinars in the series were: