The Elon University Center for the Advancement of Teaching and Learning has chosen four faculty members to serve in the Scholars program, which dramatically expands Elon’s investment in student-faculty partnerships.
Jeffrey Coker, assistant professor of biology; Megan Conklin, assistant professor of computing science; Anthony Crider, associate professor of physics; and Charles Irons, assistant professor of history, will work with student partners on two-year teaching and learning research projects. These research teams will be active participants in local, national and international dialogues about the scholarship of teaching and learning.
A brief synopsis of each faculty member’s research project follows:
- Jeffrey Coker, “Reinventing Life: A New Paradigm for Biology Teaching and Learning” — The project will take fundamental biological concepts and proven teaching methods and attempt to stretch them 10 to 50 years into the future, in an attempt to pioneer the most engaging model for teaching and learning biology in the United States.
- Megan Conklin, “The Steampunk Project” — Students will answer important questions about science and technology by participating in a historical game set in 19th-century England.
- Anthony Crider, “Testing a ‘Quest-Points-Level’ Game Structure in Introduction to Astronomy” — Crider’s project will design a new classroom structure based on principles derived from role-playing games such as Dungeons and Dragons and World of Warcraft. The project will measure the changes in class engagement, participation and learning between a class based on traditional assignments and one designed on gaming principles.
- Charles Irons, “Other Souths: The Civil War and Reconstruction in Alamance County, North Carolina” — The project will create a Web site containing a searchable database of census records, interactive timelines and other features for Alamance County during the Civil War era. The database will allow students and others to explore how and why the county often went against regional stereotypes, including persistent unionism before the war and a willingness to experiment with biracial democracy afterwards.
The Center for the Advancement of Teaching and Learning’s Scholars program replaces Project Interweave, a campus initiative from 1999 to 2005 which formed unique student-faculty partnerships to do collaborative research on learning and teaching in Elon classrooms. The Scholars program is also an integral component of Elon’s participation in the Carnegie Institutional Leadership program, a three-year project that will explore ways to improve student learning in the classroom by studying the best practices of learning and teaching.