2020 President's Excellence in Engaged Scholarship Award

The Texas Liberator Project

In 2016, the Texas Holocaust and Genocide Commission approached Texas Tech University with the task of creating an educational tool by which students across Texas would be familiarized with the liberation of the concentration camps in the European Theater of War during the Second World War. The commission provided access to the Institute for Oral History at Baylor University's collected oral histories of Texans who were veterans of the Second World War and who played a role in the liberation of concentration camps across Europe. Using these testimonials, the team at Texas Tech University developed a digital app to help share the stories of the Texas Liberators with high school students across the state. Texas Tech created a narrative by which students could come to understand the extremes of savagery and fanaticism, humility, and humanity of the Second World War from the perspective of the American soldier.

The Texas Liberator Project includes an online application, website, large-format quality book display featuring the narratives of 21 Texas liberators, and an exhibit at the Museum of Texas Tech University. Teams of Texas Tech undergraduate and graduate students guided by the Texas Tech faculty project leaders took on the gargantuan task of honoring the men and women who sacrificed so much to ensure the liberation, survival, and memory of the Holocaust.

Winners:

Aliza Wong, Associate Dean, TTU Honors College; Associate Professor of and Director of European Studies, Department of History, College of Arts and Sciences 
Rob Peaslee, Associate Professor, Chair, Journalism and Electronic Media, TTU College of Media and Communication
Randy Reddick, Morris Professor of Journalism, Journalism and Creative Media Industries, TTU College of Media and Communication
Jiawei Gong, Associate Professor, Digital/Transmedia Arts, TTU School of Art
Cameron Saffell, Assistant Director for Operations and Facilities, TTU Museum of Texas Tech University
Andy Gedeon, Exhibits Manager, TTU Museum of Texas Tech University

Students Involved:

Jeremy Huston, English, TTU College of Arts and Sciences
Ian Love, TTU College of Media and Communication
Stephanie Wuthrnow, TTU Heritage and Museum Sciences
Melissa Lambert, History, TTU College of Arts and Sciences
Shakil Shimul, TTU College of Architecture
Chad Campbell, History, TTU College of Arts and Sciences, TTU Honors College

 

Literacy Champions

As a component of the East Lubbock Promise Neighborhood grant, the Lubbock Independent School District (LISD) identified academic writing development as a significant need for K-12 students in the district and asked the Texas Tech College of Education to collaborate on providing support in addressing this need. Inadequate writing development of K-12 students has garnered national media attention over the lack of adolescent writing skills and the economic burden of their placement into developmental writing coursework in post-secondary settings. This trend is reflected in international achievement scores: one quarter of U.S. students in eighth and twelfth grade write "proficiently" (NAEP, 2011). While there is a significant research base for varied and authentic writing instruction, K-12 teachers consider these practices time intensive and irrelevant to the pressure of raising test scores. University faculty are considered out of touch with the immediate writing needs of struggling schools. In this context, literacy education scholars are turning toward engaged scholarship as an approach to bridge gaps between theory and practice to develop meaningful impact for K-12 students. Mellinee Lesley and Julie Smit have served as "Literacy Champions" to LISD for five years. Their partnership has evolved from working with multiple schools to focus on one high school with the highest writing needs. In collaboration with the instructional coach, they investigate how English teachers engage in continuous embedded professional development to transform their writing instruction and, as a result, how ninth and tenth grade students are developing their academic writing skills. While LISD has seen a rise in rigorous writing instruction and gains in writing achievement of their students due to the partnership, university faculty and graduate students have also benefited through manuscript production, presentations at national and regional peer-reviewed conferences, and extending the work of the ELPN grant to include additional external funding.

Winners:

Julie Smit, Assistant Professor, Curriculum and Instruction, TTU College of Education
Mellinee Lesley, Professor, Language, Diversity, and Literacy Studies, TTU College of Education