Murphy Award: Karen Foli

Five exceptional teachers have been selected as recipients of the 2015 Outstanding Undergraduate Teaching Award in Memory of Charles B. Murphy. This week, Purdue Today will feature Q&As on each of the recipients. This Q&A focuses on Karen Foli, associate professor of nursing.

Years at Purdue: 7

Teaching interests: Leadership skills and behaviors (including soft skills needed in organizations), quality improvement, nursing and health care theoretical models, and the history of nursing and medicine.

Karen Foli, 2015 Murphy Award recipient and associate professor of nursing. (Purdue University photo/Charles Jischke) Download Photo

Goals as a professor: My goals as a professor include first, extending knowledge of the content, using the best pedagogical strategies available. My second goal is to provide an environment that is free of distractions that interfere with learning by providing clear instructions, prompt instructor communication and well-constructed questions and assignments to evaluate learning. The third goal is to extend a sense of safety and security in the environment so that students feel the freedom to learn and to ensure that participation is supported.

In the final analysis, though, millennial students, although heavily involved with technology, can detect adults who care and those who do not. I have been called "passionate" about teaching and I'm proud of that. 

What Foli enjoys most about teaching: What I enjoy the most is when I hear or read a student say, "What I've learned changed the way I think." It's not just about the facts, although in nursing, the science and skills have to be learned. Beyond the knowledge level of learning -- think Bloom's Taxonomy -- nurses have to understand the distribution of power in health care and how to collaborate with other professionals, their role in organizations and society, and their ethical responsibilities as caregivers.

I also enjoy creating links between teaching and scholarship. I have had many former undergraduate students as graduate students and to see them advance their education is absolutely wonderful. They have my utmost respect.

Last, I absolutely love it when alumni reach out to me. I recently had coffee with an alumna and met her newborn son. To continue to mentor and to see the next generation of practitioners, teachers and scholars create their own careers is very gratifying.

How service-learning contributes to student learning and development: The approach that structured our service-learning (it was a team-taught course and my role was course coordinator) was to facilitate student initiative and responsibility through group projects, which led to the development of leadership behaviors. I would contact community partners during the weeks preceding the course. The partners may or may not have a project in mind. I would offer the student the partner's contact information, the mission of the organization, and then, leave them to it.

They were responsible as a group to create a memorandum of understanding that outlined the project with consensus from the community partner, and a student service-learning grant application by Week 4 of the semester. Somehow, they always got it done. It was also a good experience in that it was a pass/fail experience, but I would not accept the documents until there was clarity, mindfulness, and a level of refinement so that they learned the value of professional communication.

They also learned -- and can't we all? -- that it's not about them. The audience is crucial, from a written memo to sitting down next to another professional and understanding how they want to be communicated with. Understanding the other person's style is critical. For example, the student learned to understand if the other person needed time to process information. Or whether the person needed to socialize prior to getting down to the group work. Or if this person can participate as a productive group member in ways besides being vocal in the group, which may be difficult for them. I've worked with physicians, nurses and others where this is the case -- heterogeneity in groups is a good thing!

One student said it all when she wrote about her service-learning experience in her reflection: "I learned to step up."

How Foli's research on teaching and learning influences her approach: I seek out links between my research and teaching. For instance, I was awarded a National Institute of Food and Agriculture grant that is based in rural Indiana counties. The primary aim of this grant is to provide trauma-informed parenting classes to kinship parents; free child care is provided to the parents. I was able to provide public health students an opportunity to implement their teaching project to the children of the parents who were in these classes. It was kind of like a puzzle with lots of working pieces, but in the end and in this instance, it came together.

In a more formal sense, scholarship of teaching/learning takes a certain thoughtfulness. But it's critical to evaluate whether our strategies are accomplishing what they need to in the classroom and online. Certainly, student feedback is important; however, there is significantly more to evaluating pedagogy. Understanding the gestalt of the four-year curriculum is also a motivator to evaluating instructional innovations within classes. If something works in one class at one level, how do you implement this in other classes or should you? These are some of the questions beyond the specific study that need to be answered.

Innovative ideas sometimes originate from other faculty and I serve as a mentor/"researcher" to help them understand the impact of their innovation. Sometimes the answers to my research questions surprise me and that's a good thing!

On faculty in the School of Nursing: The students who graduate from the undergraduate program at the School of Nursing sit for an examination to receive a license to practice professional nursing; thus, as an organization we have an external metric that is key to our ongoing evaluation. Our board passage rate is an indicator of how well we do as educators.

That being said, the faculty at the school go way beyond that. My peers are dedicated, hardworking, caring individuals who have taught me a great deal about teaching. They role model an ongoing passion to improve. They are the antithesis of complacent teachers. We have a strong record of Murphy Award winners and many others who work long hours because they care about students and want to do the best job they can.

What her students say: Dr. Foli was very helpful in answering questions, very informative, captivated my attention and modeled leadership. I appreciated her organization -- assignments and lectures were very clear and helpful. She was an absolutely wonderful professor. … She is a great role model through her professional achievements in research. She presented a positive aspect to a different side of nursing. She always had a great attitude, and I truly feel like she wanted her students to leave her class with a higher level of knowledge and stronger nursing skills.