NLU's Research Month
NLU will virtually hold its second annual Spring Research and Practice Symposium on Friday, June 4th from 1:00 - 3:45 pm. The event brings us together to present and learn around a core question at NLU. This year, our core question is: How are we working toward greater diversity, equity, and inclusion in our research and practice? The symposium plenary session focuses on trust and identity as components of classroom equity, and features NLU student and faculty panels and invited comments by Dr. Catherine Adams of Claflin University. The plenary is followed by a breakout session for presentations by faculty and staff. The symposium closes with a drawing for prizes, and Provost Remarks. Please see the full symposium agenda below. Please RSVP using the link below BY Wednesday, June 3rd.
AGENDA
NLU’s Spring Research and Practice Symposium.
Friday, June 4th from 1 - 3:45 PM
Zoom (Link to be sent)
The RSVP will ask you to select which breakout session you want to attend. The sessions are described in the symposium agenda below; the descriptions are also included in the RSVP.
RSVP
The event brings us together to present and learn around a core question at NLU. This year, our core question is: How are we working toward greater diversity, equity, and inclusion in our research and practice?
1:00-2:30 Plenary Session: Unpacking Equity in college classrooms: The roles of trust and identity
1:00 - 1:05 Welcome and opening remarks, Kamau Rashid, NCE
1:05 - 1:35 NLU Student Panel.
To start our exploration of trust and identity as components of equity, a panel of current NLU undergraduates will offer their responses to questions about their experiences as multilingual/multidialectical college students. In particular, the students will speak to what they would like instructors to know, how we can help them strengthen their own voice, and what makes them feel welcome and validated as part of the NLU community. Facilitators: Harry Ross of NCE and Rachel Waymel of UGC
1:35 - 2:00 Invited comments: Dr. Catherine Adams, Claflin University.
Dr. Catherine Adams is an Associate Professor of African and African American Studies at Claflin University in Orangeburg, South Carolina. Her research interests include Africana literary history, Africana-based pedagogy and curriculum development; Africana science fiction, speculative fiction, and Afrofuturism; digital humanities; and freedom and marronage narratives. Last year, her work with undergraduate students as co-researchers appeared in Rediscovering Frank Yerby: Critical Essays edited by Matthew Teutsch.
Her plenary comments will focus on teaching, learning, and research experiences that are culturally relevant and academically affirming. She will speak to three "case studies" of African American male undergraduates. In each case, students moved from disengagement to acclimation to peer resource during the semester.
2:00- 2:35 NLU Research and Practice Panel
Dr. Adams and three NLU faculty members will have a conversation about NLU practices and research related to equity and identity. The plenary will conclude with a brief description of follow-up plans for the 2021-22 academic year.
Break out Session: 2:40 – 3:20 Please select one session for attendance.
Session 1: Empathy in Hospitality Presenters: Deborah Popely, Michael Krause, Kendall College. Empathy is endemic to the delivery of hospitality. Anticipating the needs of others and acting to meet them is the essence of empathy in the hospitality environment. In research, writing and teaching, we are exploring how hospitality can be an agent for promoting inclusion, understanding and mutual respect and how we can build our students' capacity for empathy to benefit their careers, the industry and society as a whole.
Session 2: Visual Literacy. Presenters: Team members The NCE Visual Literacy Initiative is a collaborative group of NCE faculty from several programs. A major purpose of the initiative is to foster collaborative projects on research and teaching. This breakout session will explore ways the Visual Literacy Initiative supports research and practice on diversity, equity, and inclusion.
Session 3: Creating spaces and centering voice: NLU’s Harrison Fellows. Presenter: Monica Ramos, NLU CLAVE Postdoctoral Fellow. In 2010, the Harrison Fellowship was introduced at National Louis University, after NLU listened to a diverse group of faculty and staff about the importance of reaching more students of color. My research illustrates the ways in which a group of first-generation students of color of Latinx descent used resilience as a way to create spaces for resistance that centered their voices and experiences during their undergraduate studies.
Session 4: Using a Motivational Framework for Culturally Responsive Teaching. Presenter: Holly Muha, Doctoral Candidate, Higher Education Leadership Using Ginsberg and Wlodkowski's Motivational Framework for Culturally Responsive Teaching, the presentation will explore practices that can be implemented in the course development process. The discussion will be focused on which practices attendees have implemented and what their experiences are with them.
Session 5: Using Empathy in the Classroom. Presenter: Carmen Carothers, UGC. The UGC BABA Department is working to create a safe space that creates greater diversity, equity, and inclusion not only in the classroom but also in our workspace. How we are creating this environment is by emphasizing the power of empathy in listening, communication and leadership. We will talk about the definition of empathy and its differences from sympathy, how to create a workspace that welcomes diversity, equity, and inclusion, and the positive effects of using the tool of empathy in the workspace.
Session 6: Learn effective faculty practices from multilingual students. Presenters: NLU students, Harry Ross, NCE, and Rachel Waymel, UGC As educators, we hear so much discussion about how to make our classrooms inclusive and welcoming for bilingual students. Often these discussions center on theory, leaving us to figure out our actual practices on our own. In this roundtable, we invite you to listen to current NLU multilingual undergraduates reflecting on what types of teaching, assignments, and grading have worked for them and what they would like to see more of in their courses.
Session 7: Research Projects in our CLAVE grant. Presenters: CLAVE leadership. Our CLAVE (Collaborating with Latino Communities to AdVance Education) grant has created new post-doctoral positions and opportunities. In this presentation, grant leaders will share reflections of the first CLAVE post-doctoral fellow, and two new research studies with CLAVE doctoral fellows. One inquiry focuses on how we can best mentor Latinx doctoral Fellows during this era of COVID-19; another on "conceptions of writing" questionnaire (Cerrato-Lara, et. al. 2017) shown to correlate with doctoral students' sense of well-being and progress in writing (Lonka, et. al., 2018) are also relevant to U.S. Latinx doctoral students in a context where linguistic injustice is the norm.
3:25 – 3:45 Closing Remarks: Provost Saib Othman
Raffle drawing!
