Teaching and Research Integration in the Classroom and Community
We are thrilled to announce the Teaching and Research Integration in the Classroom and Community (TRICC) Speaker Series. TRICC Speaker Series features faculty scholars who highlight insights and innovations on how their teaching and research mutually inform each other through research-informed teaching practices, such as testimonio, undergraduate and graduate research, community engagement, self-study in teaching and student learning, Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (SoTL) among others. Our featured speakers will explore how teaching and research intersections contribute to students' sense of belonging and success. Please join us this Spring semester as we learn from and with our featured speakers!Fall 2023
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September 18, 2023 - 11:00am-12:00 p.m. Alyssa G. Cavazos, PhD Director, Center for Teaching Excellence
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Alonso Troncoso, Undergraduate Student SaLT HSI Student Partner Leader
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Understanding Undergraduate Latinx Students’ Learning Experiences in STEM Courses: Prioritizing Student Voices in Teaching and Learning
Alyssa Cavazos
I am an Associate Professor in the Department of Writing and Language Studies where I teach undergraduate and graduate coursework in writing studies. Additionally, I also serve as the Director for the Center for Teaching Excellence where I oversee a plethora of professional development activities and partnerships. I am also fortunate to co-lead and direct our Students as Learners and Teachers at a Hispanic Serving Institution (SaLT HSI) program where we have opportunities to explore meaningful and engaging teaching and learning experiences centered on student voices and success.
I graduated from the University of Texas-Pan American with a Bachelor's degree in English and a minor in Spanish in 2006 and a Master's of Arts degree in English with a concentration in Rhetoric and Composition in 2008. After I earned a doctoral degree in Rhetoric and Composition from Texas Christian University in 2012, I was fortunate to return to the Rio Grande Valley to continue working with students, faculty, and staff from our community. My pedagogical and scholarly interests center on language difference in the teaching of writing, translingual writing across communities, students' learning experiences in higher education, professional development in higher education, and border rhetorics. I am committed to designing linguistically inclusive pedagogies, which can lead to students’ academic success across academic disciplines in higher education.
I am fortunate that my scholarly and teaching efforts have been recognized through both internal and external awarded grants where I have had the opportunity to research students' learning experiences as well as design innovative teaching and learning practices responsive to students' needs and student success. I am also grateful that my care for and commitment to meaningful teaching and learning experiences have been recognized through various teaching awards, such as the University of Texas System 2017 Regents’ Outstanding Teaching Award, the 2017 UTRGV Excellence Award in Teaching, the 2022 Center for Online Learning and Teaching Technology Online Teaching award. Additionally, I currently serve as a fellow in the UT System Academy of Distinguished Teachers. When I am not working, I enjoy exploring nature with my family.
Alonso Troncoso
My name is Alonso J. Troncoso, and I am currently a Senior majoring in Business Administration with a minor in psychology. I plan to graduate on May 2024. Currently, I am a Student Partner Leader with Students as Learners and Teachers at a Hispanic Serving Institution under the Center for Teaching Excellence, and I also served as a Research Assistant with Dra. Alyssa Cavazos for an internal Faculty Research Seed grant where we explored the learning experiences of students in STEM undergraduate courses. I believe that education is constantly evolving, and it would be great if we adapt to these changes in education, so we can succeed. As a student, I care about our education, and I am sure that our contributions through SaLT HSI will help our current students and future generations as well.
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October 05, 2023 - 11:00am - 12:00pm Alejandra Ramirez, PhD Assistant Professsor/Writing & Language Studies
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Jaqueline Medina, Graduate Student Teacher/Curriculum Design Committee Member
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Thania Robles, M. ED., M.A Teacher/Educational Diagnostician
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Studying Anzaldúa in her context, the Rio Grande Valley, as a process of conocimiento and decolonization: healing in research, writing, and teaching.
Alejandra Ramirez
Is an award winning artist and scholar whose research has been published in public news outlets and academic journals. Her edited collection with Routledge, Transnational Decolonial Arts Praxis, is set for publication in early 2024.
Jacquelyn Ann Medina
Is currently a graduate student working towards a Master’s Degree of Art in English with a concentration in Rhetoric, Composition, and Literary Studies. For the past 7 years, Jacquelyn has dedicated herself to educating underprivileged, at-risk students in Donna ISD. Aside from her roles and responsibilities in the classroom, she has written curriculum for the district for 4 years. As a graduate student, much of her work entails developing and creating culturally-relevant lessons for the students she serves.
Thania Robles
Is a certified teacher and educational diagnostician. Over the past eight years, Thania has worked on helping at-risk students in the RGV use their cultural knowledge and learn new skills to amplify their voices by creating and delivering culturally relevant, evidence based lessons.
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November 09, 2023 - 12:00pm-1:00p.m. Anthony T. Marasco, PhD Assistant Professor of Music Technology and Composition, School of Music
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Integrating Burgeoning Research and Career Paths into the Music Technology Curriculum
I am a composer and performer of electronic and electroacoustic music, a designer of hardware and software instruments, and an educator. As an internationally recognized artist, my music and installations have been presented across the United States as well as in Norway, Italy, Brazil, Denmark, and Canada. As a composer, I write music that showcases the features and functionality of computer music instruments by highlighting their sonic flexibility and varied expressive interface options. The core tenets of my compositions and interactive multimedia installations are to exhibit the artistic viability and performance potential of music technology, using tools that are low cost, modifiable, or open source.
The central focus of my research is to demystify and advance the use of computers as musical instruments. By building new tools to expand their prowess as expressive, collaborative musical instruments, my research—in the form of papers, compositions, live performances, workshops, and software/hardware systems—aims to bring these devices to wider audiences outside of academia and showcase what they provide to musicians of all skill levels. My research has reached a global audience through forums such as the New Interfaces for Music Expression (NIME) Conference, the International Computer Music Conference (ICMC), the Web Audio Conference, the Hybrid Live Coding Interfaces workshop, the Association for Technology in Music Instruction (ATMI) conference, the Society for Electroacoustic Music in the United States (SEAMUS) conference, and the Sound, Image, and Interaction Design Symposium.
I received my degrees at Lebanon Valley College (BM), Towson University (MM) and Louisiana State University (PhD). I’ve been the recipient of numerous awards and grants such as the grand prize for the 2013 UnCaged Toy Piano Festival's Call for Scores, a UTRGV Faculty Seed Grant, the UTRGV College of Fine Arts Emerging Scholar Faculty Excellence Award, and an Alumni Award for Creative Achievement from Lebanon Valley College.
Spring 2024
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January 17, 2024 - 09:00am-10:00 am Cristina Sanchez-Conejero, PhD Professor/ Spanish
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Research Integration in an Undergraduate Spanish Course Syllabus and in Teaching
I am a Full Professor in the Department of Spanish at the University of Texas-Rio Grande Valley. I received my Ph.D. from the University of California, Santa Barbara (2003) and my Master's Degree from Villanova University (2000). My major fields of research are 20th-21st Century Spanish Literatures, Cinemas and Cultures. I am the author of the books Sex and Ethics in Spanish Cinema (2015), Rain, Bamboo (2012), Lluvia, bambú (2011), Una niña postfranquista (2010), Novela y cine de ciencia ficción española contemporánea (2009), ¿Identidades españolas? Literatura y cine de la globalización (1980-2000) (2006), the editor of Spanishness in the Spanish Novel and Cinema of the 20th-21st Century (2007), and over twenty articles published in such journals as Cincinnati Romance Review, Romance Quarterly, Hispanic Journal, Hispanófila, Revista Hispánica Moderna, Studies in 20th and 21st Century Literature, Bulletin of Spanish Studies, Crítica Hispánica, etc. I directed the award-winning films Hispanosophy (2011) and W.H.O.R.E.S (2019, Wanting Humans Onto Reinventing and Educating Society) which I also wrote and executive produced.
I integrate my research into my teaching in several ways including keeping my course content up to date, teaching students to use our most popular database in the profession for research, sharing my own current research findings on the topic/s of the course and applying them to class teaching, relating them to the real world/community engagement, especially with the use of Spanish in our community, etc. The title of my presentation for the TRICC Speaker Series today is “Research Integration in an Undergraduate Spanish Course Syllabus and in Teaching”. I will use the specific example of the Spanish 3314 “Techniques of Literary Analysis” course that I will teach in Spring 2024 at UTRGV to illustrate more specifically how research can be integrated into teaching.
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February 13, 2024 - 11:00am-12:00 p.m. Kelsey Baker, PHD Assistant Dean of Educational Affairs, Pre-clerkships
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Research and education are at the forefront of my passion and the driving forces behind my professional growth and development. Since graduating with my PhD, I have sought to merge the two passions as I continue in my career. I currently serve as an Assistant Professor at UTRGV School of Medicine as well as have the opportunity to serve as the Director of Medical Student Research and Assistant Dean of Educational Affairs Preclerkships. My research lab is housed within the new Institute of Neuroscience that has a state-of-the-art imaging suite on the first floor, including clinical space and a second floor dedicated to clinical research. I have over 9 years of research experience in the field of neuroimaging, neurodegeneration and plasticity. I have individually mentored over 75 students in my research lab. Students have included medical students, undergraduates and high school students. My main research interests lie in (1) elucidating how varying degrees of damage in the brain and spinal cord can limit performance of devices that interface with the central nervous system, (2) developing technologies to boost adaptive re-mapping in hopes to circumvent inherent damage and (3) evaluating strategies to boost re-myelination in the brain following neurological insult.
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April 02, 2024 - 1:00pm-2:00 p.m. Criselda Garcia, EdD. Professor, Teaching & Learning
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As a teacher educator, I recognize the critical intersection between teaching and research with two distinct benefits: producing new knowledge to inform teaching practice and to model evidence-based practice for future teachers. Through my scholarship, I have been able to make these explicit connections. The best examples of this include recent collaborative projects demonstrating this reciprocity involving a two-year multi-institutional research regarding the use of innovative technologies for coaching teacher candidates along with another scholarly inquiry for building a faculty mentoring model for connecting with aspiring teachers at freshman level.
Specifically, using a design development and improvement science approach, one multi-year exploratory study focused on using mixed reality simulation for coaching future teachers culturally sustaining pedagogies with an equity-focus. Through this line of research, coaching of teacher candidates has transformed to include new learnings from this inquiry. The second ongoing project is a case study for developing a mentorship model for supporting teacher candidates early in their academic trajectory by creating a learning community. The selection of methodologies adopted for my research enabled me to approach both teaching and scholarship as iterative, reciprocal processes.
Fall 2024
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September 20, 2024 - 1:15pm-2:15 p.m. Bin Wang, PhD. Professor, Information Systems,
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I am the Robert C. Vackar Professor of Business and Professor and Chair in the Department of Information Systems at the Robert C. Vackar College of Business and Entrepreneurship. I received UTRGV’s Faculty Excellence Awards in Teaching (Tenured/Tenure-Track) in 2018 and Service in 2023. I have published over 60 refereed journal articles on social media, healthcare analytics, and technology adoption and serve as a senior editor at Electronic Commerce Research and Applications.
In today’s rapidly evolving technological landscape, the field of information systems is increasingly shifting towards analytics in both teaching and research, with new topics and techniques continually emerging. Embracing the concept of lifelong learning, I have adapted to this trend by developing and teaching two new courses on social media analytics at the master’s and doctoral levels, focusing on social network analysis and text mining. In these courses, students learn to collect and analyze social media data from platforms such as X (formerly Twitter), YouTube, and Reddit, enabling them to identify social influencers, understand user sentiment, and explore key topics of discussion. The capability to collect and analyze social media data also allowed me to apply these cutting-edge analytics techniques and mentor doctoral students on social media-related research topics such as the diffusion of fake news and the effectiveness of rebuttals, discussions of COVID, MMR, and flu vaccines, the interplay between tweets and Bitcoin pricing, and how linguistics characteristics affect the virality of tweets by humans vs. bots. The synergy between my teaching and research has resulted in research publications in top information systems journals and successful student placements in R1 and R2 institutions and major tech companies.
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October 29, 2024 - 12:30pm-1:45 p.m. Teresa Patricia Feria, PhD. Professor, School of Integrative Biological and Chemical Sciences (SIBCS), College of Sciences
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I am a full Professor in the Biology Department at the University of Texas Rio Grande Valley (UTRGV). I serve as Associate Dean for Faculty Success at the College of Sciences (COS) and as interim Director for the School of Biological and Chemical Sciences at the College of Sciences. I have mentored high school, undergraduate, and graduate students, and new faculty at UTRGV. To create a supportive community, I founded a program at UTRGV called “Juntos al Exito” - together, we succeeded – where a panel of faculty/administrators and students share their successful testimonials. Topics included a sense of belonging, family culture, education, student mentoring, and more. My inclusive and culturally responsive teaching and mentoring strategies and activities include icebreakers, self-reflections, creating support networks, community and service-learning activities. I have mentored more than 100 students doing research in my lab. I pioneered the development of Service Learning and Community engagement bilingual courses, and collaborative online learning courses at COS. I have received ~8M dollars in external grant funding as PI and CoPI. I received the Provost’s International Studies Award (2011) and the Excellence in Teaching Award from the College of Science and Mathematics (2012), the USDA Kika de la Garza Science Fellowship (2013). In 2028, I received the Outstanding International Faculty Female at UTRGV Excellence Award in Community Engagement at the College and University levels and the Fred W. and Frances H. Rusteberg Fellowship. I was Chair of the Women’s Faculty Network at UTRGV from 2018-2019. In 2022, I co-founded the Women in Science Network at COS. I received the prestigious UT System Regent’s Outstanding Teaching Award in 2020 and was inducted as a UT and UTRGV System Distinguished Teacher in 2023.
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November 14, 2024 - 12:00pm-1:00 p.m. Sue Anne Chew, PhD. Associate Professor
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I am an Associate Professor in the Department of Health and Biomedical Sciences and am teaching in the BS in Biomedical Sciences (BMED) program. I am the Program Director of the Biomedical Freshman Research Initiative Program (BFRI) that provide first-year students the opportunity to be exposed to research through their courses at UTRGV. I am also the Program Director of the Rio Grande Valley Bridges to Baccalaureate in Biomedical Sciences Program (B2BMED) which supports the bridging of students from South Texas College (STC) and Texas Southmost College (STC) into the BMED program at UTRGV. Besides conducting my biomedical science research which focuses on the development of biomaterial-based strategies for bone tissue engineering and the treatment of cancer, I am also interested in investigating the benefits of undergraduate research experiences on student success. I am very passionate about getting students involved in research starting at the high school and undergraduate level. Besides conducting research, I also enjoy teaching and was a 2019 Regent’s Outstanding Teaching Award and 2023 UTRGV Faculty Excellence Award in Student Mentoring recipient and I am currently a member of UTRGV Academy of Distinguished Teachers Fellows.
The BFRI program is a course-based undergraduate research experience (CURE) that is part of the BMED Program at UTRGV. Compared to other undergraduate research experiences and research initiatives, BFRI allows a much larger number of students to be exposed to research and a lower cost and manpower. The BFRI program provides me as well other faculty an opportunity to intersect our teaching and research. Besides benefiting the students, the BFRI program provides an opportunity for faculty to increase their research productivity as they get students involved in their research in the classroom setting. The BFRI program have also provide me an avenue to conduct educational based research by assessing the benefits of BFRI on student success.
Please complete your nomination with the follwong information:
- Full Name of Faculty Member
- Academic rank
- Department
- College
- UTRGV e-mail
- Why do you nominate this faculty member to serve as a speaker in TRICC?
- How does the faculty member engage teaching and research integrations in the classroom and/or community to enhance student learning and success?