The Provost's Awards Lecture Series is intended to honor and showcase the recipients of the Provost's Awards and provide them an opportunity to present, share and discuss their work with the campus. Another goal of this series is to raise the level of academic and intellectual discourse among our colleagues, and to further enrich connections with others across the campus.

Date: Tuesday, March 9
Time: 3 - 4 p.m.
Location: All seminars will be on Zoom.
Meeting ID: 893 8678 3477
Passcode: 114626

Dr. Blain Roberts and Dr. Ethan Kytle, Department of History
2019-2020 Research, Scholarship, and Creative Accomplishment
“When the Past Becomes the Present: Reflections on Doing History in and for the Public”

Roberts and Kytle will focus on the evolution of their scholarly careers, exploring how they gravitated toward writing history for the general public and on topics that speak as much to the present as to the past. They will also discuss the benefits — and challenges — of co-authorship (especially writing with one’s spouse!).

and

Dr. Beth Weinman, Department of Earth and Environmental Sciences
2019-2020 Innovation
“End-of-Semester Student Symposia to Scale and Assess High Impact Practices”

Since Kuh, O’Donnell, & Reed’s seminal publication in 2013 about the role of high impact practices (HIPs) and the need for taking them to scale, campuses have struggled to integrate HIPS into their everyday institutional practices. Here, we’d like to share how end-of-semester student symposia can be used to improve student learning (Brandsford et al., 2006; Chi et al., 1994), while simultaneously advancing strategic priorities, HIPs awareness, HIPs coordination, and HIPs efficacy at the institutional scale.

Since 2018, Fresno State has encouraged faculty in new-faculty orientations and beginning-of-semester administrative addresses to have their classes participate in end-of-semester “HIPs Student Symposia.” To date, more than 500 students participate each semester, sharing with the campus community their extraordinary problem-based, first-year, internship, and course-based research experiences. Faculty and student-peer assessments enabled during the event helps empirically capture student achievement, while also supporting a socially engaging opportunity for students, faculty, and other community members to come together and connect with one another. In this series, we give examples of how we are using HIPs-related data from events like these to help develop faculty, to measure student learning, and get a clearer understanding as to where HIPs are — and are not — within campus curricula. We also end speculating on the increased necessity of HIPs due to COVID’s recent shift to online learning, with “virtual” end-of-semester symposia ensuring that socially-engaging high impact practices remain enabled (and perhaps even growing) across our academic enterprises.

Upcoming Events

Date: Tuesday, March 23
Time: 3 - 4 p.m.
Location: All seminars will be on Zoom.
Meeting ID: 811 9770 8805
Passcode: 175273

Dr. Tricia Van Laar, Department of Biology
2019-2020 Promising New Faculty
“We Did Something Bad - Is this the end of the antibiotic era?”

Research in the Van Laar lab broadly focuses on all things bacterial. Of particular interest is antimicrobial resistance (AMR), one of the most urgent global health threats. We study how AMR occurs within biofilms and aim to identify molecular mechanisms of AMR evolution in important human pathogens.

and

Dr. Mariya Yukhymenko, Department of Curriculum and Instruction
2019-2020 Promising New Faculty
“Teaching with Purpose: Preparing Our Students for Success Beyond Graduation”

Traditionally, student success has been defined through GPA, retention and graduation. Yet, “success” should also consider what happens to our students beyond graduation, because through their careers, our graduates can become productive and thriving members of our society. Drawing on findings from her research projects, Yukhymenko will discuss the importance of sense of purpose in life and other relevant constructs that are central to the academic success of students and the wellbeing of working adults.

Date: Tuesday, April 27
Time: 3 - 4 p.m.
Location: All seminars will be on Zoom.
Meeting ID: 895 2142 6447
Passcode: 233547

Faith Sidlow, Department of Media, Communications and Journalism
2018-2019 Promising New Faculty
“No Longer the Enemy of the People: Restoring Trust in the Media in the Post-Trump Era”

Sidlow will discuss the damage caused by the deliberate and systemic attack on the media by the former president. She will outline some of the steps the media and others should take to restore public trust in journalism.

and

Dr. Jessica McKenzie, Department of Child and Family Science
2018-2019 Promising New Faculty
“Psychological Continuity and Change in a Changing World: From Southeast Asia to the San Joaquin Valley”

Modern globalization has transformed the lives of young people around the world, rendering them members of local and global cultures whether or not they have traveled beyond their hometown. How do young people negotiate these — at times contradictory — local and global cultural values to construct their identities? McKenzie will address this question by drawing from her ethnographic research with adolescents growing up in rapidly globalizing northern Thailand. She will also discuss how these findings overlap with the ways in which bicultural young adults in the San Joaquin Valley manage multiple sets of cultural values, and the implications of her work for educators who teach and serve a multicultural student body.