My research agenda includes:
- Scholarship of teaching and learning at the undergraduate level of higher education
- Understanding and use of formative assessment data to make instructional decisions
- Factors that influence the quality of teacher candidates’ cultural competency
The Spring 2014 issue of the College of Education’s EDUCATE magazine included an article about my approach to applied research in order to improve the impact of class instruction in Human Relations in a Multicultural Society. In that article, I am quoted as saying:
“I realized that whatever I was teaching wasn’t making a difference, so the next semester I decided to introduce a new assignment. Students were required to find someone from a different culture, hang out with him or her for nine hours, conduct an interview, and write a paper. There is knowledge and there is experience, and I ask my students to reflect on both. They were getting knowledge and experience the first semester for sure, but they weren’t necessarily reflecting on it in depth. With the addition of in-depth reflection, the cultural competency scores showed significant improvement—positive movement on the continuum toward cultural competency—that second semester and every semester since.”
While there is no concise definition of what may constitute evidence of scholarship, it is generally recognized that a scholar has a wide and critical command of his or her field of study as well as broad cultural interests. The highest indication of scholarship is the ability to make original contributions in one’s field of knowledge. Excellence in scholarship typically reveals itself as continuing research documented primarily in publications appearing in the relevant journals or in the form of books published by respected publishing companies. It may also be “evidenced in certain areas of creativity demonstrated through the medium of communication customary in a discipline.” Citation of a candidate’s work in the professional literature is another indicator of scholarly standing. Here is a Citation request from a research team that wanted to cite one of my articles.