CUES announces its fourth cohort of Distinguished Fellows
Guadalupe Lozano
Aresta Tsosie-Paddock
Jonathan Bean
Janine Hinton
Jessica Retis
The four members of the fourth cohort of Center for University Education Scholarship fellows are setting their sights on addressing topics including bilingual journalism, climate change, augmented clinical simulations and Indigenous language preservation.
CUES Distinguished Fellowships support faculty scholarship and innovation in university education. Guadalupe Lozano, CUES director, says the program is a key resource for both faculty and the University.
Fellows are chosen by a multidisciplinary review committee and receive as much as $20,000 per year for up to three years for their projects. All of this year's projects are being funded for three years.
"The fellowship program is the primary mechanism we have to enhance the learning experience at the University of Arizona and beyond by funding projects that center on scholarship and innovation in teaching learning and assessment," Lozano says. "Funding fellows at the level we do through private funds is rare. We're a gem in that sense."
CUES was founded in 2016 with a $3 million gift from a donor who asked to remain anonymous. The center's mission is to strengthen the practice of scholarship and innovation in university teaching and learning.
Read more about the fellows and their projects below.
Aresta Tsosie-Paddock, assistant professor of American Indian studies, was awarded a fellowship for "Shifting Pedagogies for Learning the Navajo Language: Applying a Mentor-Apprentice Paradigm through Technology," a project that pairs students taking a beginner's course in Navajo with fluent Navajo speakers through Zoom in hopes of increasing Navajo language proficiency and cultural knowledge.
"The Navajo language is seeing a decline in speakers, as are many other Indigenous languages," Tsosie-Paddock says. "I am just one of many working to undo language loss as a result of assimilation ideologies and policies, as well as English immersion."
Tsosie-Paddock says the fluent Navajo speakers will also be able to educate students about how the language is connected to culture and traditions, touching on significant places, plants, creation stories and ceremonies.
Jonathan Bean, assistant professor of architecture, was awarded a fellowship for a project titled "Climate Heroes: Transforming the Built Environment."
"When people talk about what they've done for the environment, they'll often tell you about their new hybrid car or shifting to a plant-based diet," Bean says. "These things are great, but the big problem is the buildings we're sitting in, and too often they're not even on the radar."
Bean's project aims to address that problem by introducing architecture students to early-career architecture professionals, and by using platforms ranging from peer-reviewed papers to Instagram videos to share information on the key role the built environment will play in responding to the climate crisis. The project will begin as part of an existing architecture course this fall, with hopes to create an interdisciplinary course the following year and a general education course in year three.
"I'm most excited about the increased visibility that the CUES fellowship will bring to the potential of the built environment – and for those in industry, at national labs and in policy and government – to see how deeply future University of Arizona grads care about solving the climate crisis," Bean says.
Janine Hinton, clinical assistant professor at the College of Nursing and director of the Steele Innovative Learning Center, will pursue a project titled "Preventing and Managing Patient Deterioration: Simulated Clinical Time Travel and Augmented Intelligence."
Hinton will use emerging technologies, such as virtual reality and augmented intelligence, to enhance the use of clinical simulations for health sciences students. Her project will examine the feasibility of allowing health care teams to travel through simulation time as a patient experiences physiologic deterioration.
The goal is to decrease preventable deaths due to medical errors, as simulation scenarios allow for experimentation and opportunities to "go back" to correct mistakes.
The project being pursued by Jessica Retis, associate professor at the School of Journalism and director of the bilingual journalism master's program, is titled "Bilingual Journalism Education in the United States: Development, Implementation and Assessment."
This project is designed to develop a groundbreaking pedagogic model for bilingual journalism education at the University and throughout the country. It also aims to examine the role of bilingual journalism education in the University's mission as a Hispanic-Serving Institution, with a specific focus on the University's master's in bilingual journalism, which was announced in 2020 and will begin in the fall.
A call for proposals for another CUES grant opportunity, the Spanning Boundaries Challenge, will open in early 2022. The theme for the challenge is civic engagement and service learning. The grant funds multidisciplinary collaborations addressing educational grand challenges for up to $100,000 over two years. The 2022 challenge will be informed by recommendations from the recent CUES Mapping Educational Challenges workshop on civic engagement and service learning. Sign up to receive updates from CUES about the 2022 Spanning Boundaries challenge. Read about the first challenge in this Lo Que Pasa article.