UCDALI News
University of Colorado Denver Association of Lecturers and Instructors
If you are a CU Denver Lecturer, Instructor, or Clinical Teaching Faculty, then you are one of us!
For more information click here: UCDALI Webpage
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Keep an eye out for upcoming events thoughout the semester!
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Engineering Retention Program
Maryam Darbeheshti PhD
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"Discouraged by the many freshman students who never returned as sophomores, Maryam Darbeheshti, PhD, put her engineering mind to work and built something. Her new creation – a pilot program aimed at keeping students in the field – flourished, boosting student success and cross-campus partnerships.
Now the program has grabbed the eye of the National Science Foundation (NSF), netting the College of Engineering and Applied Science (CEAS) and the university $1.6 million. Of that, $1 million will go toward scholarships aimed at bringing promising young engineering students to CU Denver.
“The main goal is to improve student success through increased retention and graduation rates,” said Darbeheshti, assistant professor in the department of Mechanical Engineering. With the Urban S-STEM Collaboratory award, the project will target urban-campus issues and demographics, such as the disconnect commuting can create for students and the high proportion of under-represented populations.
“We will bring in talented and financially needy students from Denver-area high schools,” Darbeheshti said. “Then we will support their efforts through the Engineering Learning Community (ELC) program and monitor their success as part of a tri-institutional study.”
“We are differentiating ourselves with new ways of doing things, and the NSF support validates our creative ideas,” said CEAS Dean Martin Dunn, PhD. “And building communities that facilitate student success aligns with the university’s strategic goals.”
The ELC program, also buoyed by the help of Undergraduate Experiences, includes a hands-on design engineering class, a calculus class focused on engineering applications, and a composition course centered on writing for engineers that the students take together their first year. Dunn applauded the multi-departmental collaboration.
“We are amplifying the engineering content through this curriculum, and we are also enhancing cross-disciplinary partnerships.” The program goes well beyond original curriculum in addressing student needs, including a focus on mentorship, and the data suggest it works.
Research suggests as many as half of first-year engineering students drop out before their second year. With the ELC program, 72 percent of students returned as sophomores.
“We ran this pilot program for two years, and it was very successful in improving retention rates and decreasing DFW rates,” Darbeheshti said, noting that research suggests as many as half of first-year engineering students drop out before their second year. With her ELC program, the majority of students returned as sophomores (72 percent from spring 2018 data), and the researchers expect those numbers to go up."
- via CU Denver Today, written by: Debra Melani
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Faculty Featurette: Patricia Zornio
This month we had the privilege of interviewing Patricia (Trish) Zornio who is a CLAS Lecturer in Psychology specializing in behavioral neuroscience. Originally from New Hampshire, she’s made Colorado her home now for the last several years. She’s also an announced candidate for the Senate in 2020 and a performing pianist, singer and songwriter.
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Tell us what initially attracted you to the field of behavioral neuroscience.
Ever since I can remember I always found the brain incredibly interesting — it seemed to hold the answers to everything I didn’t yet understand. As a kid, I used to stay after biology class to do extra brain dissections, and I even asked my parents for an anatomy model for Christmas one year. I grew up in rural New Hampshire and still remember in 6th grade when I told my guidance counselor I wanted to be a neurosurgeon, he told me I should pick something more appropriate for someone like me… I wasn’t sure what he meant--I was a straight A student--but nonetheless, as a young girl that really stuck with me and I dropped neuroscience altogether. It wasn’t until my junior year of college when some professors in cognitive and biological psychology saw I was doing really well that they encouraged me to study neuroscience and go to graduate school. I remember feeling really timid about it at first, but with their encouragement I was able to overcome some of the doubt that had been instilled in me as a kid, and by age 20 I was accepted into graduate school. I’m still really grateful for all my professors who believed in me, and it’s part of why I value teaching so much.
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You belong to the Stanford Center for Undiagnosed Diseases—how did you come to join them? What kind of cases have you worked on?
My work as the Lead Research Coordinator for the Stanford Center for Undiagnosed Diseases was an incredible academic opportunity. The project was part of a national network created under the National Institutes of Health (NIH), and I was able to work with some of the top physicians and researchers in the world to advance our understanding of rare and undiagnosed diseases. There were so many unique cases that I was able to be a part of, especially in pediatric neurology, but due to the interdisciplinary nature of the work I was able to expand my repertoire to include everything from cases in cardiology, immunology, genetics, and more. The work was often challenging, especially working with children who have severe disease (some of whom passed away during my time working with them), but it could also be really rewarding when the team would together solve the case and help change the treatment or outcome for the patient. I’m definitely grateful for all I learned during my time at Stanford.
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Instructional Faculty in Research and News
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Instructional Faculty in the Research
“Ignis Fatuus Effect of Faculty Category: Is the Tenure Versus Non-Tenure Debate Meaningful to Students’ Course Experiences?”
Jessica Ostrow, Michel & Diana Chadi & Marisol Jimenez & Corbin M. Campbell. (2018). Innovative Higher Education, 43:201–216.
“The American professoriate is shifting its majority makeup from tenure track to non-tenure track faculty members. Less known, though, is what the implications of this shift are for students’ course experiences. We sought to examine the extent to which the teaching practices, with regard to academic rigor and cognitively responsive teaching, differ between faculty category using observational measures of teaching in the classroom. We found that broad categorizations of faculty may not be meaningful unless they are examined in particular contexts, such as discipline and class size."
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Instructional Faculty in the News
“Colleges Step Up Professional Development for Adjuncts.”
by Michael Anft
The Chronicle of Higher Education. 65.16 (Dec. 21, 2018): pA8.
"DURING HER 30 years as a college teacher, Diane Carter-Zubko has taught English to thousands of students for whom it is not their native language. She has instructed at night, when those students are able to study after their workday… But for all her hard work, she had never felt fully supported by her college's faculty-development programs. Like most contingent faculty members across the nation--adjunct professors and lecturers off the tenure track--she had come to expect little help in improving her teaching and ability to engage students."
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