Faculty Research
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Item Learning and Teaching as Communicative Actions: Improving Historical Knowledge and Cognition Through Second Life Avatar Role Play(2012-9) Wakefield, J. S.; Warren, S. J.; Rankin, Monica A.; Mills, L. A.; Gratch, J. S.; 0000 0000 6293 6366 (Rankin, MA); 2009035690 (Rankin, MA)We examined a higher education history course where virtual role play was implemented as an assignment. The course was designed to help students gain an overall understanding of the causes, trajectory, and aftermath of the Cuban Revolution. Assignments included readings and discussions of historical essays and primary sources that were intended to prompt students to think critically about political, cultural, and scholarly debates surrounding the revolution but also inquiry and role play. In particular, students were encouraged to set aside pre-existing opinions in favor of or opposed to the revolutionary regime of Fidel Castro and U.S. Cold War diplomatic policy toward Cuba. The theoretical framework learning and teaching as communicative actions, in which communication and discourse, and the interplay among the four communicative actions proposed as the basis of human understanding, guided the course. Active learning through role-playing in a constructivism learning environment and classroom discourse helped students develop a higher level understanding of the complex events by perspective taking both for and against the Castro regime.Item Sinology, Sinologism, and New Sinology(Routledge, 2018) Gu, Ming Dong; Zhou, X.; 0000-0001-8952-5978 (Gu, MD); Gu, Ming DongSinologism is a recent cultural theory that focuses on Sinology, China–West studies, and cross-cultural knowledge production. Since its proposition at the turn of the 21st century, it has aroused substantial interest and given rise to discussions and debates both in and outside China. The special issue has selected seven articles in full or excerpted form to offer an initial introduction to the topic. ©2018 Taylor & Francis Group, LLC.Item Collaborative Curriculum Design and Assessment: Piloting a Hybrid First-Year Writing Course(National Center for Online Learning Research, 2018) King, Carie S. Tucker; Keeth, Sara; Ryan, Christopher J.; King, Carie S. Tucker; Keeth, Sara; Ryan, Christopher J.We needed to provide options and to create space for first-year writing courses at a growing tier-one, four-year, public university. Therefore, three faculty members-the program director, the associate director, and a full-time teaching fellow-collaborated to create, pilot, and assess a hybrid version of our writing course. The teaching fellow taught four face-to-face sections of the course and then shifted her curriculum design to teach four hybrid sections the following semester. After both semesters, she provided blinded data to the other two faculty for collaborative assessment of three data sets: the student performances per assignment-specific and final grades, the instructor's journal, and the students' survey responses. Students in the face-to-face and hybrid sections performed equally, with mean final grades differing by only 10.74 points on a 1000-point scale (means of 815.54 points in face-to-face and 804.80 in hybrid-a difference of 1.07%, which is not statistically significant). We discovered the value of journaling for the instructor to reflect, note questions, revisit design decisions, and document solutions for future courses. We identified issues in the course design and found that inconsistencies in assignment-specific grades were paralleled with concerns in the instructor's journal and students' survey responses. We also noted that collaborative design and assessment benefits our students, our faculty, our program, and our university. ©2018 Journal of Interactive Online Learning.Item The Theoretical Debate on “Sinologism”: A Rejoinder to Mr. Zhang Xiping(Routledge, 2019-03-28) Gu, Ming Dong; 0000-0001-8952-5978 (Gu, MD); Gu, Ming DongThis article is a direct response to Zhang Xiping’s criticism of Sinologism in particular and to the overall critique of Sinologism in general. With a succinct account of what Sinologism is, it provides detailed answers to a series of questions brought up by the critics. In an effort to clarify the relationship between Sinologism on the one hand and Orientalism, postcolonialism, deconstruction, New Historicism, postmodernism, and ideological theory on the other, it attempts to rethink the issues of paradigms for Sinological studies, China–West studies, and cross-cultural studies. © 2018 Taylor & Francis Group, LLC.Item Ethics as a Rare Bird: A Challenge for Situated Studies of Ethics in the Engineering Lab(Routledge, 2019-04-25) Lee, Eun Ah; Gans, N. R.; Grohman, Magdalena G.; Brown, Matthew J.; 0000-0002-5361-5143 (Brown, MJ); 0000-0009-4356-7464 (Lee, EA); Lee, Eun Ah; Grohman, Magdalena G.; Brown, Matthew J.Engineering ethics cannot be reduced to the ethics of individual engineers but must be considered in situ, within the sociocultural and environmental contexts of a research or design project. We studied teams in academic engineering research laboratories and how they understood and practiced ethics in their own work. Problems arise for ethnographic methods for researching this aspect of engineering ethics; namely, voluntary ethics discussions rarely occurred in the lab. In our field site, we observed many spontaneous discussions, but engineering ethics issues were not among the topics discussed. Ethical decision-making seemed to be like a rare, shy species of bird, hard to spot, requiring methods to flush it out of hiding or attract it. We adapted structured interview and facilitated discussion protocols to accomplish this. Success was modest. The problem lies both in engineering culture and in the methodological difficulties in studying situated, distributed ethical deliberation and responsibility. ©2019 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group.