Five faculty projects that utilize innovative approaches to improving student learning will be honored next month with Provost’s Teaching Innovation Prizes.
The winning projects were chosen from 38 nominations from students, faculty and staff. Innovations were encouraged from three focus areas:
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- Enhancing student success using alternative forms of assessment.
- Creating student-centered learning environments that empower students to succeed by narrowing gaps in outcomes.
- Using strategies that help students understand potential uses and limitations of generative artificial intelligence tools.
The honorees will talk about their projects during a virtual discussion from 2:30-3:30 p.m. May 7 as part of U-M’s annual Enriching Scholarship conference. Angela Dillard, vice provost for undergraduate education, will moderate the session.
The Provost’s Teaching Innovation Prize is sponsored by the Office of the Provost, the Center for Research on Learning and Teaching, and the University Library. The winners receive $5,000.
These summaries of the 2025 TIP honorees were submitted by CRLT.
Modelling the art of tolerance and reason in a world that is seemingly intractably divided: Pagan-Chistian podcasts featuring historical conversations across the cultural divide of late antiquity
Sara Ahbel-Rappe, professor of Greek and Latin, LSA
Students in Ahbel-Rappe’s course, CLCIV 47: Pagans and Christians in the Ancient World, create podcasts featuring a conversation between two culturally divided characters from the same historical era. The pairs include Christians and polytheists from fourth-century Rome who occupy different positions toward Christianity.
The project begins with a role-playing exercise in which students are invited to a Halloween party as Pagan-Christian pairs. They research their personas, then, at the party, meet other pairs and reveal aspects of themselves. They use that experience at the party to help develop a way of talking to one another, ultimately creating a script for a podcast.
What makes this exercise innovative is having students embody ancient figures while discovering how to coexist despite cultural conflict. Students explore how to negotiate contemporary cultural divisions using history, acting, honesty and radical imagination to face off against the “other.” This also teaches upper-level writing across disciplines by getting students to revise their conversations, incorporate rhetoric and persuasion, and reflect on what they learned.
Modules to introduce social issues into the foundational engineering courses
Cynthia Finelli, David C. Munson Jr. Collegiate Professor of Engineering and professor of electrical engineering and computer science, College of Engineering, and professor of education, Marsal Family School of Education
Finelli’s innovation involves creating one-hour modules that integrate sociotechnical content into Introduction to Circuits, a core course of every electrical engineering program. At U-M, EECS 215: Introduction to Electric Circuits enrolls more than 700 engineering undergraduates annually.
Traditional engineering courses focus solely on technical content, but real-world problems and society’s grand challenges are sociotechnical. While engineering instructors typically agree that social issues are important, they may feel ill-prepared to address them or lack time to create relevant materials. To help instructors integrate social issues into the circuits course, Finelli and a nationwide research team developed modules that link technical circuits concepts with pressing social issues.
For example, the conflict minerals module ties the topic of electric capacitors to human rights issues in mining tantalum in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, while the EV battery module connects the voltage divider principle to the lifecycle management of EV batteries and the circular economy.
The modules feature comprehensive teaching guides with pre-class activities, in-class lesson plans, PowerPoint slides with talking points, and homework and exam questions, making them easy to adopt in diverse classroom contexts.
Consistent with backward course design, the modules include technical and social learning objectives that align with class activities and assessments. By grounding technical instruction in real-world sociotechnical issues, the modules offer a holistic view of engineering as a discipline interconnected with social issues and better prepare students for complex real-world scenarios they will encounter in their profession.
Participatory Action Research in Class to Improve Teaching Across Campus
Michaela Zint, Arthur F. Thurnau Professor; associate dean for academic affairs, professor of environment and sustainability, School for Environment and Sustainability; professor of Program in the Environment, SEAS and LSA; and professor of education, Marsal School
Zint draws on Participatory Action Research and co-designs pedagogies to engage undergraduate, master’s and Ph.D. students in addressing interdisciplinary curricular and societal challenges. Most recently, her work has focused on climate change education as part of the Advancing Climate Education at U-M initiative.
Students in her courses explore key aspects of climate change education through literature reviews, expert interviews, and “just-in-time” mini-lectures, while also learning to function as a collaborative team. Students also apply what they’ve learned by designing interactive activities for campuswide summits that support improvements to climate change education throughout U-M’s 19 schools and colleges.
One hallmark of this initiative is its participatory nature. Students do not just study a topic; they actively shape how it is taught. After the campuswide summits have ended, students’ work culminates in reports with recommendations that are presented to university leadership, contributing to institutional change. By putting students at the center of educational reform, ACE enhances their research, collaboration and leadership skills while ensuring lasting improvements in campus climate education efforts.
Another important aspect of the ACE innovation is its partnerships with campus organizations. ACE 1.0, for example, was conducted in close partnership with CRLT, whereas Counseling and Psychological Services was the lead partner for the more recent ACE 2.0. As a result of interactions with relevant campus units, students come to appreciate the importance of collaboration in addressing complex challenges.
The Pluralism Workbook: Building the Skills to Talk across Differences on Hard Topics
Rebecca Scharbach Wollenberg, associate professor of Judaic studies, LSA
Having taught courses on controversial topics for years, Scharbach Wollenberg observed what tactics worked to get students from different backgrounds to engage with each other (and the professor) with trust, curiosity and respect. After semesters of experimenting, she compiled the innovative “Pluralism Workbook,” a physical book with the aesthetic of coloring books and gratitude journals that many students already employ for personal reflection.
Rather than relying on students to devise the perfectly arrived set of top-of-semester discussion agreements, the “Pluralism Workbook” leads students through a series of reflections and self-reflections on the art of listening, of calming the body when facing disagreement, of getting into the “shoes” of peers through imagination, and so forth.
Its aesthetically brilliant approach primes students for conversations across differences with simple reflection/discussion exercises that are designed to be fun, engaging and manageable. It attends to the anxieties and emotions that students have when discussing controversial topics, but in a way designed to be familiar, warm, playful and creative — a natural extension of reflection activities they might already engage in elsewhere in their lives.
Unlike most course materials students engage with — online, immaterial — this book and its suggested activities connect body and mind, a reminder that empathetic human connection happens most effectively in the physical world.
Teaching Humanities by Designing Generative AI Chatbots
Tung-Hui Hu, associate professor of English language and literature, LSA
Traditionally, the humanities are oriented around critiquing objects through textual analysis. Put another way, classes usually read texts, then discuss them.
In Hu’s Critical AI class, however, students work toward designing their own chatbots. Each student fine-tunes U-M Maizey’s large language model using datasets they’ve developed. The selection and gathering of the dataset are part of the learning path, occasionally creating problems along the way. For example, copyright material from a popular singer once threw up an error and produced reflections around the nature of copyright and what we use data for.
Each student ends up with their own “chatbot,” and there have been interesting discussions around why students want their chatbot to “make things up” and even hallucinate, rather than stick to the facts in their dataset.
This “laboratory” in critical making occurs alongside critical texts that offer historical context for data and early experiments with artificial intelligence, including contemporary scholarly approaches that allow students to think about AI in the context of race, gender and sexuality, and literary authors and artists who use AI for unusual results.
