A 2022-2023 Instructor Learning Community Grant has been awarded to Dr. Stephanie Cawthon and doctoral students Ana Guadalupe Vielma, Taylor Payne, and Henry Enrique Aguayo for their team project, Graduate Student Resources for Instructional Pedagogy.
Designed to build instructor capacity for supporting an inclusive campus climate, ILC grants are awarded by the Center for Teaching and Learning (CTL) at The University of Texas at Austin.
The team seeks to better support UT Austin graduate students who work as Assistant Instructors by building a community for them to share new experiences, problem-solve together, and learn inclusive teaching strategies from each other.
The project will boost the voices of graduate students from different backgrounds and doctoral programs while highlighting a wide array of inclusive teaching pedagogies. Its overall aim is to create more culturally responsive graduate student instructors, more inclusive classroom environments, and build a sense of community for those appointed to these academic positions.
Team leads Vielma, Payne, and Aguayo are doctoral students in the College of Education’s Department of Educational Psychology, in which Dr. Cawthon is a professor and area chair of the Human Development, Culture and Learning Sciences specialization. They are trained in various learning and cognition theories and have multiple years of experience leading workshops and collaborating with other graduate students. All identify as BIPOC, and two of them are first-generation students. Payne and Aguayo have worked as Assistant Instructors for three and two years respectively, and Vielma has worked as a Teaching Assistant for 2 years.
The $2,500 ILC grant will provide 10 graduate student instructors with a one-time stipend to undergo and complete the program, which will include a summer meeting, four different workshops, and a final reflection meeting.
Example topics for the workshops include strategies for increasing accessibility, examining course activities and in-class lectures, understanding intersectionality, and fostering classroom community.