Showcase of Strategies for Student Success

(20th annual Showcase)

The Showcase of Strategies for Student Success was held on March 26, 2024. The showcase featured conversation tables and poster presentations.

• 35 posters
• 4 judges
• 41 participating programs, offices, and departments
• 7 conversation tables
  • 10 leaders
  • 151 participants

Judges’ Choice Winners 

• 1st Place: Share Your Square: An Exploration of Student Belonging at NAU  | Jason Whetten, Assistant Teaching Professor, Psychological Sciences
• 2nd Place: Navigating Community: The Road Trip of Student Engagement and Retention at NAU | Michelle Gardner, Director, Leadership and Engagement

People’s Choice Winners

• 1st Place: Guiding Student Success: Pulse Survey Signals and CARE Team Connections at NAU | Shannon Clark, Director, Lumberjack CARE Center
• 2nd Place: Navigating Community: The Road Trip of Student Engagement and Retention at NAU | Michelle Gardner, Director, Leadership and Engagement

Conversation Tables

• Title: Unpacking Our Math Stories to Reconnect to Mathematics and Limit Bias in Math Teaching
  • Host: Heather Lindfors – Navarro | Assistant Professor, COE: Teaching and Learning
  • Description: We all have a math story—a collection of moments that mark our experiences as thinkers and doers of mathematics. The aggregate of these experiences, the compilation of these micro-moments, creates our math narrative. Every person constructs storylines about the mathematical potential within themselves and others (Shah & Crespo, 2018). Math stories are essential. They frame the context in which learners approach mathematical tasks in school and engage in mathematical problem-solving and the world. Math stories are formed by a series of interconnected mathematical experiences that come together to shape a mathematical identity. Unpacking our math stories provides a way to heal our relationships with mathematics and consider how our stories influence the opportunities we provide for our current and future students.Key takeaways include strategies to rehumanize mathematics, engaging in praxis that allows unpacking implicit biases in mathematics, creating inclusive spaces for learning mathematics, and dispelling myths surrounding who can and cannot do mathematics.
• Title: Centering students’ ways of knowing: Inclusive classroom learning strategies to promote academic excellence
  • Host: Dr. Susana Hernandez | Assistant Professor, COE: Educational Psychology , Dr. Renee White Eyes | Instructor, COE: Educational Leadership, Dr. Lauren Contreras | Assistant Professor, COE: Educational Leadership, Dr. Alana Kennedy | Assistant Professor, COE: Educational Psychology
  • Description: As NAU continues to work towards “Elevating Excellence,” our session will draw from Culturally Relevant Pedagogy (Ladson-Billings, 1995) and Community Cultural Wealth (Yosso, 2005) to focus on inclusive classroom learning strategies that promote academic excellence and success. With a focus on student learning, developing cultural competence, and supporting students’ critical consciousness, we seek to move away from normative teaching. In order to increase motivation and academic success, we have students make real-world connections to feel empowered as well as take ownership of their learning to make an impact in their communities. NAU is committed to serving Hispanic/Latine and Indigenous students and one way to better support these students is to bring in their cultural ways of knowing into the classroom. Our goal for this conversation table is to bring together those who are interested in cultivating a classroom environment where students’ identities are at the center of the learning process. As NAU faculty in the College of Education, we will share our own philosophy and strategies that guide our teaching and invite others to share their own experiences as we build community together. We will have prompts to guide and foster an organic conversation through sharing and learning from one another. Ultimately, we hope that through community we can establish a teaching culture at NAU where students are at the center of the learning process.
• Title: The essential role recitation plays in student success!!!
  • Host: Dale Cummings | Assistant Teaching Professor, Chemistry & Biochemistry
  • Description: Grades, credits, and degrees are often at the forefront of student priorities and for obvious reasons. Although, it is important to not lose sight of the bigger picture of student success outside of courses and grades. One way this is accomplished is instructor/student interactions during recitation sessions. These sessions are smaller and more focused than the general lecture, allowing students to learn in a potentially more productive way. Furthermore, it gives students a chance to interact and conversate with faculty in a more personally tailored way. It is the student-professor relationship that enables growth outside of traditional academic measures and potentially propels them on a more successful path in the short term and sustained success for the long term.
• Title: AI and Inclusive Teaching Practices
  • Host: Susan Purrington | Assistant Teaching Professor, Geography, Planning & Recreation
  • Description: Fear around the use of GenAI technologies may be preventing individuals from seeing the current and potential uses to make classrooms and student life more inclusive. The conversation topic would discuss current inclusive uses of AI and brainstorm additional inclusive practices by using a Universal Design for Learning (UDL) framework.Key Takeaways would include understanding the UDL framework; being more open to adopting certain GenAI practices to improve inclusion; providing insights into current practices being utilized at NAU; and strategies to create or adopt new practices.
• Title: Indigenous Student Affairs: Serving and supporting Indigenous students
  • Host: Sharon Doctor | Director, Office of Indigenous Student Success and Andrea Sequaptewa | Manager, Office of Indigenous Student Success
  • Description: As a Student Affairs professionals within the Office of Indigenous Student Success, we would like to have a table conversation about why we do the student-centered, holistic, and appreciative guidance to new and continuing Indigenous students as they find their community and indigeneity at the university. We will share our theoretical framework via the Indigenous Student Affairs CAS Standard which helps us in creating an Indigenous community that reflects the diversity and complexity of identities, backgrounds, and histories and to promote the academic and personal growth of Indigenous students. We will share data and examples of how we promote student learning, development, and success through Indigenous ways of knowing and being through one-to-one meetings and wellness activities. Through collaborative partnerships, we aspire to create an Indigenous community that promotes the academic and personal growth of Indigenous students.
• Title: Flip the Script: Turn Serving Current Students into Preparing Prospects
  • Host: Maggie Thom | Program Director, Enrollment Management and Micheleen Pennington | Community Program Coordinator, Sr, Enrollment Management
  • Description: Have you ever wondered how to take the lessons you’ve learned serving and teaching current NAU students and used them to help prepare future college students? When it comes to future college students, families are our number one partner when it comes to preparing them for college and helping them retain and graduate. In this conversation, we’ll discuss how to use the current knowledge and expertise you possess and translate that into how these families can help prepare their children to be successful college students in the future. FACTS (Family Access, Communication, Transition and Support) want to discuss what you’re seeing in the students you work with that can help us build out better communication and action plans for families of 8th – 12th grade students. We’ll address topics like, “Do you think students come to NAU prepared with the information they need to be successful, or are there ways in which their community (families, educators, etc.) can better prepare them?” and “When working with students, what are some common battles you see them fight that we could help prepare them for earlier?”
• Title: Campus as a living learning laboratory for high impact learning and engaged student success
  • Host: Dayna Cook | Data & Reporting Analyst, Int, Office of Sustainability
  • Description: Campus as a living learning laboratory embodies a holistic approach to student success, integrating sustainable practices into everyday campus life, high impact, place-based learning. Through initiatives like the sustainable campus ecosystem, students engage in active learning experiences in CURES, undergraduate research, capstones, and community engagement that foster academic growth and advance elevating excellence to reach our carbon neutrality goals while nurturing a well-rounded foundation for success.

View the Abstracts from the 2024 Showcase