Community engagement featured in Teaching Academy video series

Community engagement strategies that support active learning in undergraduate courses are among the topics discussed by the two new Teaching Academy associates in a new video series.

Lindsey Payne and Kyle Vealey are among 11 faculty members and graduate teaching assistants recently honored by the Purdue Teaching Academy. Payne and Vealey share their innovative ideas on engaging students and facilitating learning in a series of videos posted on the Teaching Academy website.

Lindsey Payne

In each short video interview, an honoree discusses the teaching philosophies, strategies, and tools used to engage students in ways that facilitate learning.

In her video, Payne, a graduate teaching assistant in the College of Engineering, discusses how active, authentic experiences help to create new leaders in sustainability. She describes her work with Larry Nies, professor of civil engineering, on CE355 Engineering Environmental Sustainability, a course redesigned through IMPACT in 2011-12. The course of 100 students collaborates in 20 teams and uses a variety of strategies and tools to address real-world problems.

Payne also outlines a course she designed using service-learning to create a cooperative initiative between academic, industry and local community organizations. Her students worked with several groups of stakeholders, including student leaders from a local middle school, to create solutions to local issues that have ownership in all areas. This course uses a variety of critical reflections such as reflective journals, and peer and self-evaluations.

“In order to create a sustainable world, we need to create student leaders that are able to engage in these complexities of sustainability,” says Payne, who is studying in the Environmental and Ecological Engineering/Ecological Sciences and Engineering Graduate Program. “I think that’s where the pedagogical challenge lies, in that, how do you create these active-learning, authentic experiences that really create those leaders that we need for the future?”

Payne’s video is available here.

Kyle Vealey

Community engagement is also a strategy discussed by Vealey, a graduate teaching assistant in the College of Liberal Arts. An English major, he describes his approach to writing instruction with a rhetorical perspective, by helping students respond to a particular situation and audience, and navigate and negotiate complex problems.

He describes a recent project in which students worked with a local farmers market to produce video micro-documentaries on the local farmers. Students were project managers, doing everything from contacting interviewees to writing questions, to shooting video and editing videos.

This type of work takes the emphasis off just producing error-free documents and puts it on creating a product that fits a particular audience and situation.

“The way I see writing is that it is complex, messy, and uncertain work,” Vealey says. “I want students to be able to know that most writing is actually done through rewriting, kind of tinkering with what you’ve produced.”

Vealey’s video interview can be seen here.

The entire series of video interviews is available on the Teaching Academy website.