Sustaining Student Voices at the University of Washington, Bothell

1
Sustaining Student Voices at the University of
Washington, Bothell

• The UWB campus team sought opportunities to align
  the cluster goals with a campus initiative and
  chose collaborative undergraduate researchan
  initiative recently prioritized by both students
  and faculty.

2
Developing the Project

• We assembled a campus team of students, faculty
  and staff and created two sets of informational
  material one set for students and another for
  faculty. The material highlighted the benefits
  of collaborations between faculty and students
  for both sets of partners and provided examples
  of successful collaborations.

3

• We determined that faculty would be more likely
  to become engaged if the object of research was a
  topic they initiated. The topics need not relate
  to the scholarship of teaching and learning. For
  us, the SOTL was represented by the process of
  bringing together students and faculty as
  co-inquirers, whatever the research undertaking.
  (Once undergraduate research is established on
  campus, we will create opportunities for faculty
  to mentor student-initiated projects.)

4
Failed first effort

• The biggest challenge at the outset was faculty
  members concern that whatever the benefits,
  collaborations are time- and labor-intensive. We
  first proposed that faculty provide us with
  descriptions of research projects in which they
  might engage student partners and for which we
  could offer students some research skills to
  reduce the pressure on faculty. Faculty was
  uninterested.

5
Second effortsuccess!

• For our second iteration, we hit on the key we
  received an internal university grant that we
  used to create small research grants (2000 each)
  for four faculty projects. We received a dozen
  applications involving substantial collaboration
  with students!

6
Keeping students in the design

• But we still needed to be sure students would be
  involved in growing the collaborative
  undergraduate research. In addition to the
  course credit and/or pay (from grants to
  faculty), they receive small stipends (150/
  quarter) to meet together with the project
  developers to assess how its going, what they
  need, and where we should go next.

7
Expanding student experience with scholarship

• Lastly, we used some of our internal grant to
  create a travel fund for students who present
  their research (with or without their faculty
  collaborators) at professional conferences.

8
Resources

• For samples of the materials we developed
  (including the grant application our faculty used
  to apply for Collaborative Undergraduate Research
  grants), visit www.uwb.edu/tlc or contact us at
  tlc_at_uwb.edu.