Pre-Conference Short Courses require pre-registration.
You can pre-register during TLC registration. If you have already registered for TLC but would like to add a short course, please email meeting@apsanet.org.
An Honest Assessment: Balancing the Risks and Rewards of Civic Engagement Work
Fri, February 10, 9:00 to 10:30 AM | Chesapeake Ballroom III
Presenters: Allison Rank, SUNY, Oswego State; Leah A. Murray, Weber State University; Carah Ong Whaley, University of Virginia
Workshop Goals: This workshop will assist faculty in thinking through how to assess the context in which their civic engagement work takes place—both on and off-campus—in order to determine how to best position their work to receive campus and community support as well as to prioritize their own career objectives while still incorporating civic engagement priorities. We’ll focus on the following components:
- Assessing One’s Own Risk Tolerance
- Assessing Off-Campus Partners
- Assessing Your Campus as an Institution
While the amount of time spent on each of these topics may shift based on the baseline knowledge and needs of the participants, we expect the achieve the following outcomes:
- Identify how one’s own professional and personal priorities can be reflected in civic engagement work.
- Identify the distinctions among various off-campus civic engagement partners, particularly those focused on voter engagement.
- Assess one’s institutional context to understand how to effectively align one’s civic engagement work (and the related tenure & promotional materials) with department and college priorities.
- Assess one’s institutional context to understand how to provide evidence of one’s civic engagement work that align.
About the Facilitators:
Leah Murray is the Brady Presidential Distinguished Professor in the Department of Political Science and Philosophy at Weber State University. Murray currently serves as the Director of the Walker Institute of Politics & Public Service. She was recognized as the College of Social and Behavioral Sciences Endowed Professor for 2017 – 2020. Murray earned a BA in political science from Syracuse University and a PhD in political science at the University at Albany. Her primary research interests are in American politics, specifically youth political engagement. Her recent publications include pieces that focus on campus climates for political learning. She teaches courses on all aspects of American politics.
Carah Ong Whaley is the Academics Program Officer at the Center for Politics at the University of Virginia and an award-winning instructor in Politics. Carah currently serves as the Vice Chair of the Civic Engagement Section of the American Political Science Association. She is author of Politics in States and Communities, co-author of American Government: Roots and Reform and has contributed to multiple books about civic engagement and democracy. Her work has been featured in the Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, Forbes, Teen Vogue, NPR, Inside Higher Education, Education Dive, among others.
Allison Rank is an associate professor of American Politics at SUNY Oswego. Her research agenda focuses on the role of youth in politics, civic engagement, and pop culture & politics. Her work has appeared in New Political Science, Journal of Political Science Education, the eJournal of Public Affairs, and the Journal of General Education among others. In addition to teaching traditional political science courses, she serves as the campaign manager for the campus-wide voter mobilization program Vote Oswego. She is the recipient of the John Saltmarsh Award for Emerging Leaders (American Democracy Project, June 2019) as well as the Stand Out Faculty Award (ALL IN Campus Democracy Challenge, November 2019).
Centering Student Connection
Fri, February 10, 10:30 to 12:00 PM | Camden Room
Presenter: Rebecca A. Glazier, University of Arkansas, Little Rock
Workshop Goals: The COVID-19 pandemic has made connecting with our students more important than ever before. Many have found the move to online classes during the pandemic isolating and learning through them difficult. In fact, pre-pandemic research shows that online courses come with a significant downside. Repeated studies across different types of universities, different kinds of programs, and different student populations all indicate a persistent and significant gap in retention. Students are more likely to fail and withdraw from online classes, compared to classes they take in person—about 10 to 35% more likely.
But this crisis of connection is not limited to online students. As we “return to normal” many students and faculty are finding it difficult to connect in the in-person classroom as well. Class attendance and participation is down and both faculty and students are feeling burned out. Universities already struggling with enrollment challenges may find themselves losing an increasing number of students if these trends continue.
Thankfully, there is a solution for the online retention crisis and the broader issues with disconnection that higher education are currently facing. The key building authentic connections—or rapport—with students. Using more than 10 years of qualitative and quantitative research, this workshop will introduce participants to the research on rapport, teach them specific rapport-building strategies they can use in both in person and online classes right away, and engage them in hands-on discussions and activities about ways to improve retention.
Key learning objectives for attendees include:
- Identifying authentic strategies for connecting with students
- Making syllabi revisions to present a welcoming first introduction to students
- Creating a draft email mail merge in order to send personalized email messages to students
About the Facilitator: Rebecca Glazier is a professor in the School of Public Affairs at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock. She has been teaching online and in person since 2009 and is the author of “Connecting in the Online Classroom: Building Rapport between Teachers and Students” (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2021). She has published research in the Journal of Political Science Education and Teaching in Higher Education, and co-taught an APSA summer workshop on Innovations in Online Teaching in 2021.