Stories of the Awardees
June He, MFA, Assistant Professor of Product Design
When June He joined Drexel’s Westphal College of Media Arts & Design at the start of the 2021-2022 academic year, she brought years of industry experience to her new role as assistant professor of product design. He drew from her prior work using empathic design in the eyewear, medical and fashion industries to create a series of project-based learning courses focused on Aging & Design. The courses use interdisciplinary collaborations and community partnerships to engage students in designing human-centered solutions for the elderly population in Philadelphia’s Asian immigrant communities.
An initial Aging & Design course He launched in 2022 spawned a second course called Creating Age-Friendly Innovations funded by an Age-Friendly Drexel Pilot Grant. He landed a $30,000 VentureWell Course & Program Grant to support sequential courses that began in the fall of 2023 and will run through 2026.
Christopher Laincz, PhD, Associate Professor of Economics
When Christopher Laincz, PhD, and colleague Yoto Yotov, PhD, examined their principles of economics courses (ECON 201 and ECON 202), they concluded that students struggled with the math required for the intermediate level (ECON 301 and ECON 321), but that it would require a prohibitive number of additional math courses for them to gain command of the concepts.
The math needed is typically taught in calculus IV or linear algebra classes, neither of which are required nor taken by most students. For those students who do end up taking the advanced math courses, they typically do so later in their academic career.
This issue, common at most universities, according to Laincz, exposed an inherent gap between how math and economics are taught, and led him to devise a solution to bridge that gap for students.
Amanda McMillan Lequieu, PhD, Assistant Professor of Sociology
At the heart of her course, Sociology of the Environment (SOC/ENSS 244), Amanda McMillan Lequieu, PhD, assigns students a multi-stage case study and guides them through a process that exposes them to the skills needed to analyze research and use that information to make a persuasive case for a potential policy measure.
“The project’s goal is to teach students how to evaluate existing research and produce a compelling, data-based policy argument,” said McMillan Lequieu, an environmental sociologist in the College of Arts and Sciences (CoAS).
To enable students to produce high-quality, data-based final papers, she breaks this quarter-long assignment into three skill-teaching stages.
P. Mohana Shankar, PhD, Allen Rothwarf Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering
While teaching differential equations to engineering students back in 2010, P. Mohana Shankar, PhD, assigned the class to solve a standard question. Since the solution to the problem required explanation and interpretation, Shankar later wondered whether the students would learn more if they were each provided with a unique question.
Such a step would be time-intensive, requiring the creation of multiple questions of near equal rigor along with their solutions. But with this approach, students could examine and explore individually, while also benefitting from a collective learning experience, since the procedure to solve the questions would be the same.
That was the beginning of an undertaking in which Shankar, a professor in the Department of Electrical & Computer Engineering, would provide unique questions to each student every week during the course.