Loss and grief are challenging enough in “normal” times, but with the pandemic, it seems that everyone has undergone some sort of loss. For many who have experienced the loss of health, a loved one, a relationship, or other significant parts of their lives, the pandemic has exacerbated the challenges.

UD’s mission references “educating the whole person and linking learning and scholarship with leadership and service.” In what ways can we rediscover the link between the vast scholarship on grief and our service to others who are experiencing that grief? How can we demonstrate the family spirit and care for our colleagues who have experienced loss? What resources are helpful for those supporting others in grief? Join a discussion where we pool our knowledge and dig into what we can learn about helping those around us who are grieving loss.

The University challenges its students to live and learn in community, a buzzword used frequently on campus that captures the founders’ mission succinctly. This community spirit makes the University unique. Many students expect to experience community in their residential spaces, but how is community felt in the classroom? Can a deeper sense of community help students learn? In what ways can community be created to make student learning more successful? This roundtable, facilitated by Office of Learning Resources (OLR) team members, explores techniques to get students helping each other in the classroom. Participants will be introduced to active learning strategies and tools and experience some firsthand during the session. Discussion will focus on how students leading classroom activities can help faculty connect better with students and increase student learning. Discussion will also focus on how today’s UD Student brings a unique learning perspective to college given the dramatic impact of COVID-19 and other societal concerns have had on classroom norms and student behavior.

Participants should bring along any classroom strategies they have found successful as well as questions they have regarding how to help students succeed.

The session will also highlight OLR’s peer learning services as another opportunity for students to learn from one another.

This past year has encouraged educators to think creatively about ways technology can keep us connected and help to facilitate student learning inside and outside the classroom. This has been especially true for educators focused on creating global learning experiences. In this session, four panelists will share recent examples of ways in which they supported global learning through virtual engagement. Some examples will include virtual exchange, collaborative online international learning (COIL), adaptations to immersion programs, and student research. We hope this session inspires attendees to think about small and large-scale ways they can virtually integrate global learning experiences into their work.

Promoting student vocational discernment is an institutional responsibility best achieved when faculty and staff across the curriculum and co-curriculum pursue a common set of goals in ways that are most appropriate for the students they teach and lead. We gained this critical insight while co-editing Engaging with Vocation on Campus, a recently published collection of essays detailing our colleagues’ efforts to address vocation in the courses and programs they teach and deliver.

In this session, we will share the lessons we learned editing the book then lead participants through reflective exercises and brief conversations designed to help them articulate their institution’s vocational ethos, share methods of vocation-related faculty and staff development that have worked for them in the past, and identify steps to further support vocational discernment in diverse settings across their institution.

A basic tenet of CMM 100, Principles of Oral Communication, is that oral communication is an inherently interactive and engaging activity. The course relies on students' ability and willingness to engage with course content and with their peers and instructors during presentations and other in-class activities. The long-term goal is that students continue improving this ability and use it in their college activities and professional careers.

We believe the ability to actively engage is central to all four learning outcomes articulated for CMM 100.

While assessment has been a part of CMM 100 since its inception, and while useful data has been collected, we noted a missing element was students’ predispositions (self-perceptions of cognitive and behavioral characteristics) to perform in the activities of the course.

We identified three critical dimensions contributing to success in oral communication: attentiveness, perceptiveness, and responsiveness. Taken together, these are significant dimensions of a construct that we are calling a “predisposition to active engagement.”

In Spring 2020, we received a CAP Course Improvement and Innovation Grant to assess these essential characteristics of engagement. We created and distributed a questionnaire to students in all sections of CMM 100 in Spring 2020 and Fall 2021.

This presentation will share our findings and describe possible redesigns to current assignments and our overall teaching/learning strategies. Additionally, we would invite those attending to share their successes and challenges as assessment becomes more sophisticated and effective at UD.

Pope Francis’ Laudato Si’ - on the Care for our Common Home (LS) is the first extensive Papal document focused on the environment. In May 2021, the Vatican announced a Laudato Si Action Platform (LSAP), a seven-year process calling universities and six other sectors to action on seven LS goals that integrate the UN Sustainable Development Goals. UD was invited to join the international universities network working team. This session is led by students, staff, and faculty members of UD’s LSAP working group.

We’ll give an overview of the LSAP vision, elements, and process and its connections with the UD mission, UD's Marianist identity, and the Vatican’s Global Education Compact.

We’ll also explore connections the LSAP initiative is creating on campus and with other universities globally.

Finally, we’ll explore with you the ways the LSAP can engage all facets of campus life and promote student participation in addressing the urgent climate crisis.

Join this dialogue to explore your and others' understandings of purpose. How has your personal purpose, as well as sense of purpose in the classroom — at UD, in Dayton, in the United States and in the world — evolved over the past few months and years?

While OLR can identify accommodations, success depends on partnerships among OLR, faculty, and students in accommodation coordination. Join us for some real-life discussions about accommodations, student engagement, misconceptions about accommodations, and the process for medical withdrawals.

Topics will include:

1. Frequently requested accommodations (extended testing time, modified attendance, audio recordings, etc.) and the factors that go into making these decisions.

2. Student engagement with faculty on accommodation implementation: how we try to move students beyond the accommodation letter email being the “only” communication addressed.

3. Accommodation misconceptions with real-life scenarios on topics including modified attendance, late exam requests, rescheduling exams, and the OLR final exam schedule.

4. The voluntary medical withdrawal (VMW) process and how faculty and advisors may be engaged in this process, from connecting students to OLR, sharing the last date of attendance, and providing general support for students.

We do not expect everyone will become an expert on accommodations or medical withdrawals, but we hope engaging the campus community will help create a wider understanding, which in turn will support students and strengthen our partnerships. As always, OLR also welcomes questions from participants. Anyone wishing to bring a question to our attention prior to the presentation can send an email to disabilityservices@udayton.edu.

Building on their yearlong efforts, the Diversity ILG Working Group members will share findings from their three-fold mission:

1. Benchmarking institutions with successful scaffolded Diversity Institutional Learning Goals that draw from both curricular and co-curricular work on campus.

2. Mapping the existing co-curricular offerings to build campuswide connections that foreground a complex and robust definition of diversity.

3. Assessing students’ learning in CAP DSJ courses in conjunction with the Diversity ILG Continuum to gauge their experiences and provide insights to faculty.

Working group members will present about the scope of the work and the approach taken; outline the findings; and discuss recommendations for growth and improvement.

Participants in this session are encouraged to review the report and the Institutional Learning Goals websites.

In May 2021, the Vatican announced a Laudato Si Action Platform (LSAP) seven-year process, calling universities and six other sectors to action on seven Laudato si (LS) goals that integrate the UN Sustainable Development Goals and the LS encyclical. UD was invited to join the International Universities Network working team. The call to urgent action is to avert the interconnected human and environmental degradation of global warming. Continuing the conversation started in the 2016 campus conference Laudato Si': Everything is Connected and the 2021 Romero Award focus on environmental justice, this session explores how the LSAP highlights the intersections of sustainability and diversity/equity/inclusion (DEI).

We will give an overview the LSAP and University of Dayton’s role; share examples of the global connections that the LSAP facilitates for UD faculty, staff, and students; and demonstrate applications of the LSAP, particularly in enhancing student learning and engagement in finding integrated solutions.

As educators, we have to be aware of our own trauma in order to recognize and support our students as they manage traumatic life events. This conversation will be a space to interrogate what that trauma looks like and how we as educators can support students as they navigate difficult life events that can impact their academic performance. The conversation will reflect on ways traumatic events have impacted classroom techniques.

Building on our 2021 Learning Teaching Forum and the Academic Senate’s five-year review of CAP, this panel brings together the four CAP Component Coordinators — Elizabeth Mackay (Humanities Commons), Cassandra Secrease (Principles of Oral Communication, CMM 100), Christopher Brough (Social Science Interdisciplinary SSC 200), and Youssef Farhat (Diversity and Social Justice) — to discuss what we are learning about our components and their values, purposes, and roles in practice.

More specifically, we will think together about how our components help us rediscover our roles as coordinators facilitating these conversations; better understand our institutional learning goals and values; and reflect on what has changed or is changing about our components.

While most students and instructors are happy to be back in the classroom, we should retain and improve at least some of the online learning practices we've learned over the past two years. For example, should instructors take the time to develop more asynchronous learning activities so face-to-face time can be used for active learning opportunities and group work? Or is the work to build this content or flip your class not worth the effort?

What elements of online teaching and learning should be kept burning, and which should we extinguish?

At this Catholic and Marianist university, the Catholic Intellectual Tradition is supposed to shape our commitment to intellectual inquiry and dialogue. But what does the Catholic Intellectual Tradition mean to us as educators? This session will be an open dialogue about the Catholic Intellectual Tradition, the role it plays inside and outside the classroom, its connection to the University’s mission and vision, and its potential tension with academic freedom. In dialogue participants explore multiple perspectives and seek mutual understanding rather than agreement.

Societal impacts have brought about great change in educational practices, especially in the need for fluid and flexible learning spaces. The Hub at the Dayton Arcade is an expansion of the campus ecosystem, designed to create access and opportunities for faculty, staff, and students to collaborate with business leaders and the Dayton community. This session will be a co-led presentation and open dialogue about the “gems” in the Hub, focusing on student and community engagement and the value of unique spaces that set the tone for dynamic learning.

Two faculty members from the University Libraries share their experiences surrounding the shift from remote learning to the physical space. After a series of successful instruction sessions using new pedagogical practices, Bridget Retzloff and Zachary Lewis carried the momentum of their newfound confidence into the physical classroom. This session will include details on tools, strategies, and technologies used virtually and physically to create a more dynamic instructional experience. Attendees will be able to share their personal experiences and approaches to rediscovering themselves as instructors and educators.

During the 2019-20 academic year, this project team reviewed tools to support intercultural and global learning and assessment. Our two objectives were to consider opportunities to support student growth and development and to assess student learning at the program and/or institutional levels.

We piloted two tools during the 2020-2021 school year:

1. Global Engagement Survey - assessment tool
2. Global Competency Certificate - learning tool

We will share the experiences of using each tool along with the assessment data collected from the pilot year. Participants will have the opportunity to learn more about the pilot and the tools and explore potential uses in the future.

This session will be a debrief of the success of our first ever “Get Back on Track” event held in the LTC Nov. 10, 2021. Presenters will share background and numbers on the mid-term grade data from Fall 2021 that raised alarms in many areas of the University.

Responding to a desire by various offices to stage some sort of intervention, several members of the LTC got together to plan a one-stop-shop type of event for students who were struggling academically and looking to get back on track. Although the event initially was targeted at students with multiple mid-term grades of D or F, as well as those who had a flag in SSN indicating they should consider dropping a course, word quickly spread throughout campus.

With only five days of planning, over 30 students stopped by the event asking for help. Students were able to get speed academic coaching, have an advising appointment with an advisor from their school/college, as well as meet with an advisor from the Flyer Student Services office. Other support areas had tables as well in case students had questions or wanted to take advantage of their services.

Presenters will share lessons learned, ideas for the future, and breakdown why we need to host more events like this in the future.