4D Symposium: Afternoon Session 2

4Difying Course Design: From Learning Outcomes and High Impact Projects to ePortfolios

Erin Willer, PhD & Communications Capstone: Communicating Grief and Loss Students

Audience:

This session will highlight the Fall 2023 course "Communicating Grief and Loss" as an example of how the four dimensions can be integrated into learning outcomes, high impact course projects, ePortfolios, and assessment. Additionally, audience members will have the opportunity to reflect on ways to 4Dify their own courses to enhance student learning, engagement, and thriving.

Advancing DU's Survey Strategy

Kristy Firebaugh, PhD + Katia Miller + Melanie Kasparian

Audience: all students, faculty, staff

Track(s): assessment

Participants will learn about how the Student Survey Strategy Committee supports the advancement of a data-informed culture to enhance the student experience across campus. This group coordinates large-scale student surveys and creates recommendations for survey strategies at DU to support larger institutional objectives, including advancing the 4D experience. We’ll share the evolution and current work of the group, including some overarching findings related to what we know about DU students’ experiences and satisfaction.  We’ll invite conversation and reflection on the findings and encourage participants to discuss how survey results might be leveraged in various contexts across campus to support the student experience.

Vulnerable Strength: How to Live into the Big Questions (No Final Answers Required!)

Sarah Pessin, PhD

Audience: all students, staff

Ever feel you have more questions than answers? Join Dr. Sarah Pessin, Director of Spiritual Life and Professor of Philosophy, to explore why that's a perfectly imperfect recipe for living a good life! Drawing on intercultural insights from ancient and contemporary thought-leaders, this interactive session is part life-design workshop, part ethics brainstorm, and part existential inquiry into life's biggest questions. Topics include: how can uncertainty help with meaning-making; how can vulnerability elevate our capacity for relationship-building; and how can we combine questions of equity, ethics, and authenticity to strengthen ourselves and our communities towards healing futures.

Reimagining Traditional Events: Centering Well-being in Student Programming

Elise Goss-Alexander, Paige Luna, Rita O'Connell, + Marissa Ronquillo

Audience: staff, faculty

Track(s): well-being

For many students, the defining event of a career services center is the career fair, where employers sit at tables around an event space and students dressed in suits provide their resumes and deliver elevator pitches. As part of DU’s Career & Professional Development team, though, we know that this traditional event format can be inaccessible and exclusionary for many of our students. We have reimagined this event format in several ways to center student well-being. In this session, we will share what we have learned and lead attendees in reimagining their own traditional event formats.

Research Study: Improvements in Student World Beliefs Following a Single Session Intervention

Kateri McRae, PhD + Alyssa Asmar

Audience: faculty, staff

Track(s): well-being

Beliefs about the world are thought to be relatively stable, fundamental aspects of psychology, influencing mental health, well-being, and even career outcomes. We conducted a research study with 158 DU undergraduate participants between April and December of 2023. Students were randomized into one of three groups: two intervention conditions designed to change world beliefs, and one control condition. Undergraduate student participants completed initial online questionnaires measuring world beliefs, a laboratory session, including the intervention, and follow-up online questionnaires 1 and 2 weeks later. In both intervention groups, but not the control group, we observed significant increases in students' beliefs in a safe world over the course of the laboratory session. No significant effects of group were observed at the follow-up time points. Additional analyses indicate that changes in world beliefs were not likely to be caused by changes in momentary emotion throughout the session. This is the first demonstration that an intervention may change these world beliefs, which are thought to be relatively stable. This highlights the potential of brief interventions to improve world beliefs, which may ultimately be able to improve mental health, well-being, and other important outcomes.

Under the Influence... of Stress

Corey Ciocchetti, JD

Audience: all students

Track(s): character

Stress is omnipresent. It lurks in every nook and cranny of our typical day. Work (and particularly colleagues) can be stressful, home life can be stressful, and never mid our commutes to these places. The problem is that excessive stress has major negative repercussions on our bodies and behavior. It roils our immune system, long-term memory, and sleep habits. Stress causes anxiety, fatigue, restlessness, tense muscles, and, in the worst cases, heart disease. But, perhaps more important, stress removes our motivation to live an authentic life, to help others, and to chase after character – we are just trying to get through until tomorrow.