Social Sciences

Sociologist explores the spiritual side of nurses’ care

Anonymous — Tue, 16 May 2023 23:18:58 +0000

Sociologist explores the spiritual side of nurses’ care Anonymous (not verified) Tue, 05/16/2023 - 17:18

Doug McPherson

Don Grant’s new book takes readers inside a hospital where nurses and others tending to patients are also navigating between science and spirituality

In talking about how his new book, “Nursing the Spirit: Care, Public Life, and the Dignity of Vulnerable Strangers” (Columbia University Press), came to be, CU �鶹ӰԺ sociology Professor Don Grant explains that he comes from a religious background (liberal Protestantism) but chose to work in the highly secular field of social science.

“As a result, I sometimes struggle with a feeling that I left something important behind,” Grant says.

That sense of unease compelled Grant to spend part of a sabbatical working as a chaplain intern at an academic medical school, where he tried to integrate the sacred and secular.

Columbia University Press officially publishes book, 'Nursing the Spirit: Care, Public Life, and the Dignity of Vulnerable Strangers' on May 23, 2023.

“After weeks of stumbling and bumbling in that role, I discovered that the advice I received from nurses about how to approach patients and address their spiritual needs was often more helpful than the advice I received in the chaplaincy training program,” he says.

That experience, along with serving as a liver transplant donor for his dad, furthered Grant’s interest in the tension between religion and science and led him to conduct a formal study of nurses' spiritual care—the basis for his book, which hits shelves on May 23. Grant surveyed 297 nurses—making it the most in-depth survey on spirituality ever administered at a major non-sectarian organization.

Grant says the main message of his book is that what makes religion socially powerful is caregiving. He adds that, in the past, religion’s power was largely about organizing otherwise irrational beliefs and experiences into doctrines and creeds.

Today, Grant argues that religion’s power increasingly depends on its “person-giving and presence-enhancing” capacity.

“Part of religion’s humanizing function is still carried out in the private realm by friends and family. But as the development of the human species continues to shift from small, informal groups like families to large, science-based institutions like hospitals, these organizations will be increasingly expected to provide humanizing cultures.”

Grant says he believes hospitals will not only offer the benefits of science, but their frontline-care workers also will play a key role in deciding the fate of spiritual care.

Of the 24 therapies that health care experts identify as “spiritual” in nature, Grant says five are recommended by a majority of nurses he surveyed: holding a patient’s hand, listening, laughing, prayer and being present with a patient.

Grant didn’t speculate on what percentage of nurses in the United States conduct spiritual care. “Whether those findings apply to other nurses is unclear,” he says. “But the fact that so many of the nurses I surveyed engage in these forms of spiritual care even within a highly scientized and secularized setting like a public university’s medical center suggests that they might.”

He adds that today, spiritual care of patients is expected of nurses and is reflected in nursing codes of ethics, nurse education guidelines and policy documents. For example, the International Council of Nurses Code of Ethics states that the nurse is to “Provide an environment in which the human rights, values, customs and spiritual beliefs [of the client] are respected.”

Still, Grant says hospital administrators give frontline staff little, if any, formal training in spiritual care. And he says several studies also suggest that colleges and universities do “an incomplete job” training nurses in spiritual caregiving.

Don Grant is a professor of sociology and fellow of the Renewable and Sustainable Energy Institute at the �鶹ӰԺ, and directs their Social Innovation and Care, Health, and Resilience programs.

“This means workers are pretty much on their own: their workplace provides support for meeting goals like efficiency and accuracy, but when it comes to affirming humanistic values like spirituality, workers must improvise.”

In his book, Grant says doesn’t make recommendations about how to address this problem, except to suggest some practical steps that hospitals might take to make staff more comfortable discussing spiritual matters, such as periodically reminding nurses that they probably share an unspoken interest in spirituality because of their constant exposure to human suffering.

On the question of how nurses perform a dual role, Grant says his results were mixed.

“On the one hand, nurses believe they’re able to reconcile science and spirituality through storytelling and even claim that they can provide more spiritual care than chaplains. On the other hand, nurses rarely talk about spirituality among themselves because they are concerned that their colleagues are uncomfortable discussing such matters. Nevertheless, by engaging in subtle practices that honor patients’ ultimate worth as human beings, many nurses are able to instantiate spiritual values of care.”

Don Grant’s new book takes readers inside a hospital where nurses and others tending to patients are also navigating between science and spirituality.

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CU history professor named American Council of Learned Societies fellow

Anonymous — Wed, 03 May 2023 16:19:46 +0000

CU history professor named American Council of Learned Societies fellow Anonymous (not verified) Wed, 05/03/2023 - 10:19

Bradley Worrell

Scholar to use award to finish book project on how African Americans have retained Black Civil War memories

Ashleigh Lawrence-Sanders, a �鶹ӰԺ assistant professor of African American and U.S. history, has won a prestigious fellowship from the American Council of Learned Societies. She was one of 60 early career scholars selected for the fellowship through a multi-stage peer review from a pool of nearly 1,200 applicants for 2023, according to ACLS.

“ACLS is proud to support this diverse cohort of emerging scholars as they work to increase understanding of our connected human histories, cultures and experiences,” ACLS President Joy Connolly said in a prepared statement. “ACLS fellowships are investments in an inclusive future where scholars are free to pursue rigorous, unflinching humanistic research.”

At the top of the page: Civil 29th Regiment, Connecticut Volunteers, U.S. Colored Troops, in formation near Beaufort, S.C., where Cooley lived and worked. It was Connecticut’s first African American regiment. Library of Congress Above: Ashleigh Lawrence-Sanders received her B.A. from Wake Forest University, her M.A. from Columbia University and her Ph.D. from Rutgers University.

Formed in 1919, ACLS is a nonprofit federation of 70 scholarly organizations and serves as the preeminent representative of American scholarships in the humanities and related social sciences. The ACLS Fellowship program is funded in part by contributions from the Mellon Foundation, the Arcadia Charitable Trust and the National Endowment for the Humanities.

For 2023, ACLS has set aside $3.8 million in research support for the fellows, with fellowships ranging from $30,000 to $60,000 to support the scholars during six to 12 months of sustained research and writing. Awardees who do not hold tenure-track faculty appointments—accounting for half of the 2023 cohort—also receive an additional $7,500 stipend for research or other personal costs incurred during their award term.

“I was very surprised and very happy to learn I was selected,” Lawrence-Sanders said of winning the fellowship. “For humanities scholars, it’s one of the more prestigious fellowships you can receive and there are only 60 people selected from the whole country. It was a good feeling.”

Lawrence-Sanders said the fellowship will allow her to take leave during the next academic year to take some research trips and spend time finishing her manuscript, which is an expansion of her PhD dissertation on African American memory of the Civil War.

Lawrence-Sanders recently fielded five questions about her fellowship, her book project, her love of history, why she believes studying history is so important, and a bit about what she says is the best thing about being a professor on the CU �鶹ӰԺ campus.

Question: The ACLS fellowship will allow you to work toward completing your book on African America memory of the Civil War. What prompted you to pursue that topic?

Lawrence-Sanders: What really prompted me—even before I went into graduate school—was that I really loved history. Part of it is a personal story. I’m from South Carolina originally, where the Civil War started, where the first shot was fired, etc.

But it’s also a place where there’s a lot of Black Civil War memory. It’s a place where the 54th Massachusetts Regiment fought at Fort Wagner, as memorialized in the film Glory. This is a place where Harriet Tubman came to Beaufort, S.C., and led the Combahee River Raid with Union troops and helped free hundreds of enslaved people. There’s a lot of rich black Civil War history and memory that’s really deep in the state … but growing up you didn’t see that. Instead, you saw the Confederate battle flag and Confederate monuments.

I was really interested in the ways that African Americans have maintained—even in the face of a very powerful Lost Cause movement—utilized their own forms of memory themselves.

I really wanted to write a book that focused solely on Black memory of the war, and to think about the uses of it: how it’s been used as an instrument, how it’s functioned, how it’s been political, etc., throughout time.

When I wrote my dissertation in graduate school, it only went up to 1965. That was mostly a practical matter, because I just wanted to finish my dissertation (laughs). But, in complimentary comments my (dissertation) committee insisted that when I wrote the book, I would have to extend it past 1965, which was always was my intent.

Now I can write up to the near present, which has been a very fascinating time, because when I was in graduate school the Emanuel Church massacre (of nine black parishioners by a white supremacist) happened … and after that the Confederate flag came down in South Carolina and Confederate monuments started coming down.

So, now a whole new era history is happening while I finished my dissertation and now book. I realized there could be more written about Black memory of the war, and that there was a space for me to write about it.

Question: Did you always want to be a history professor?

Lawrence-Sanders: When I was young, I loved history. I grew up around a lot of Black history in my life. … I was even a Black history quiz bowl champion with my cousins for two years in a row; I still have the high school newspaper pictures to prove it (laughs). I was really interested in history, but I never felt really connected to the history that I learned in the classroom. It was a different time, and it was in South Carolina, but it never quite matched the robust Black history I received from my family and community.

I was not a history major in undergrad. At college, the classes that really stuck with me were my political science and international studies classes, because I loved political theory and political science. So, that’s what I majored in in college.

After, I got my master’s in human rights studies at Columbia. In that program, I again got really interested in Black history because I read a book in one of my classes, Carol Anderson’s Eyes Off the Prize, which was about the Black fight to get human rights before the United Nations in the early years of the United Nations’ existence. In the end, after working for several years, I decided to apply to history PhD programs having only taken one undergraduate history class. I always tell my history major students that they have taken more undergrad history classes than I have (laughs). So, I did not take a traditional path to a PhD in history and I never thought I would be a professor.

Question: If a group of first-year students asked you why it's important to study history—and the history of the Civil War in particular—what would you say?

Lawrence-Sanders: I always say, ‘Because you want know how we got here.’ … Anything you want to know about what’s happening now—the answer is history. That’s the broad answer about why history is important.

The other thing I say, specifically about the Civil War, is this is one of the United States’ young nation moments. It (the Civil War) wasn’t necessarily inevitable, but it was fought because the founding fathers continued to kick the issue of slavery down the road.

It’s important to understand why this nation, in this tragic moment in U.S. history, must grapple with its failures. It must solve the problem that’s existed since its founding, which is the American paradox articulated by the historian Edmund Morgan—that it’s a nation founded on the concept of “freedom” while enslaving at that its founding hundreds of thousands of Black people."

It could have been solved definitively when the nation was founded; Instead, there is a buildup over the first half of the 19^th century—the compromises, all of the laws dictating slavery’s expansion as the nation expands Westward, and everything around the issue of slavery just kept getting more and more violent (including in the halls of Congress itself).

It’s important to understand why this nation, in this tragic moment in U.S. history, must grapple with its failures. It must solve the problem that’s existed since its founding, which is the American paradox articulated by the historian Edmund Morgan—that it’s a nation founded on the concept of “freedom” while enslaving at that its founding hundreds of thousands of Black people.

It’s an important time in U.S. history. It’s one of the most important times; this is a crucial moment where again the U.S. decides what kind of country it’s going to be. After the Civil War, the U.S. emerges as a changed nation, 4 million people are now free and are now citizens … but it does not solve the fundamental issue of what to do with these now ‘free’ people, which for Black Americans sets the tone for what happens in the next hundred-plus years, and what kind of country it wants to be with people who are not fully free. So, I always tell my students that the Civil War is important to understand on its own as a military and political conflict but also for what it reveals also about the country before and after the War.

Question: What’s the best thing about being a professor at CU �鶹ӰԺ?

Lawrence-Sanders: I’ve had great experiences with my students. This is my fourth semester teaching here and every semester I’ve had great classes of students and I keep in contact with some of them, which has been very nice.

Students often tell me at the end of my class how much they’ve appreciated learning the things that they weren’t able to learn in high school. I love hearing that. I’m excited to teach them things they don’t know or expand on their knowledge. …

I think some students fear taking history and they shouldn’t. I’ve had students take my class and are worried that they don’t know anything about African American history, or they don’t have a history background. Some are worried about taking an upper-level course in history. I always tell students the first week that I do not expect any level of expertise in my courses; I just expect students to come in ready to be engaged learners.

The other thing I like about CU is being in a great department around so many faculty who model how to be both great teachers and r researchers. There are several people in the department who have won this fellowship before and many other prestigious fellowships as well. We have a collegial atmosphere, too, that I think is really conducive to producing great scholarship.

And it is just gorgeous on campus.

Question: Is there anything else you would want to let people know about your upcoming book?

Lawrence-Sanders: Only that I hope that it becomes a book that helps people understand why the Civil War is such an enduring part of Black Americans’ lives.

I think that we do understand quite a bit of why it’s so enduring in white Southerners’ lives, but I think we don’t quite get as much into why, for Black Americans, there’s elements of the Civil War that have endured, because it’s not as well highlighted in mainstream culture or history the way it should be.

The history I write is both a narrative of the ways Black memory has been used as a political instrument throughout Black freedom struggles as well and how important it was for various groups of Black people over time to assert what they would claim was “Black Civil War memory.” But while doing so, they have an additional burden many memory workers do not have, they also must counter the Lost Cause (or white Southerners’ dominant memory).

By the time we get to the 2020s, Confederate monuments are coming down rapidly, but it’s not a spontaneous thing. It’s the result of a very long history of Black counter-memory of the war manifesting in the public sphere. I hope my book can explain, at least partly, how we got to that moment.

Scholar to use award to finish book project on how African Americans have retained Black Civil War memories.

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Innovation Incubator helping transform teaching, learning

Anonymous — Mon, 06 Mar 2023 21:32:51 +0000

Innovation Incubator helping transform teaching, learning Anonymous (not verified) Mon, 03/06/2023 - 14:32

Bradley Worrell

After a successful three-year trial run, the program is being made permanent with the goal of further innovating cross-discipline teaching in the College of Arts and Sciences

Collaborative scholarship that spans academic disciplines has proved to be a difficult goal—until now. A relatively new program at the �鶹ӰԺ, called the Innovation Incubator, is working to tear down traditional siloes between the arts and humanities, natural sciences and social sciences with the goal of transforming teaching and improving undergraduate education.

The Innovation Incubator is hosted by CU �鶹ӰԺ’s Arts and Sciences Support of Education Through Technology (ASSETT), which works with faculty and students to develop innovative ways to use technology in teaching and learning.

“The idea for the Innovation Incubator dates back about four years ago. The project was instigated by the question: How might we improve the undergraduate learning experience by engaging students in active learning with technology?” says Blair Young, who serves as the innovation catalyst with ASSETT.

Blair Young serves as the innovation catalyst with CU �鶹ӰԺ’s Arts and Sciences Support of Education Through Technology (ASSETT), which oversees the Innovation Incubator.

In a nutshell, Young describes the incubator as a “safe, resourced space to grow new ideas.”

ASSETT took an unconventional approach to garner those ideas. Instead of asking faculty for highly detailed research grant proposals, it instead asked them for simple, one- or two-page pitches outlining their overall objectives.

Once the ideas were submitted, ASSETT once again took an unconventional approach. Rather than simply approving a few of the 48 submitted proposals and rejecting the rest, ASSETT staff combed through each submission looking for commonalities among the proposals.

“As we spent time going through proposals, we started to see what we call affinity groups. We were seeing people who didn’t even know about each other, but they were submitting ideas that were really focused on some of the same things,” Young says.

From the submitted ideas, ASSETT staff concentrated on four core areas: focused and inclusive data science, multi-modal participatory publishing, metacognition and wellbeing, and the broad category of student success (see the short article, Learn more about the 2019-2022 ASSETT Innovation Incubator teams, for more details).

Ultimately, about 30 faculty members participated in the three-year trial run of the Innovation Incubator initiative, which kicked off in 2019 and wrapped up in the fall of 2022, according to Young.

Breaking down barriers

CU �鶹ӰԺ English Professor David Glimp was one of several faculty members from across disciplines who joined the Inclusive Data Science team, which worked together to develop a new introduction to data science course incorporating humanistic perspectives.

“Most of the people in this collaboration I had not met before,” he says. “The Interdisciplinary Data Science team gave me the opportunity to meet colleagues from applied math, ecology and evolutionary biology, geological sciences, and writing and rhetoric, who all had shared interests, so it was a remarkable experience—really an unprecedented opportunity to work with colleagues across divisions where we don’t normally work together.”

Partly because the group was diverse—but mostly because the endeavor was brand new—it did take a bit of time for team members to formalize a plan, according to Glimp.

CU English Professor David Glimp volunteered to participate in the trial run of the Innovation Incubator. He taught the inclusive data science courses in collaboration with faculty from other academic disciplines.

“We probably spent six months or so just brainstorming, trying to identify shared interests and campus needs and how to capitalize on the growing interest in data sciences while recognizing the ongoing importance of the humanities,” he says. “So, there were a lot of meetings in the beginning where progress was not apparent, but with the assistance of ASSETT, things came together in terms of what our project could be.”

Glimp, who has been teaching English at CU �鶹ӰԺ for 17 years, describes his experience of working with the Inclusive Data Science team as “transformative.”

“It’s provided me with a new set of collaborators, and it’s helped me develop my own research and my teaching skills,” he says.

In addition to providing $200,000 in funding that was split among the four initiatives, ASSETT provided human resource support and guidance for the teams.

“Each team was co-facilitated by me, and one other ASSETT staff member who had expertise in the particular focus of each team,” says Young. “We worked with them early on regarding the idea conception and what success would look like over the three-year arc of the initiatives.”

In addition to physical resources, Young says one of the most valuable assets for the four teams was the time afforded by multi-year funding to refine their ideas and make adjustments as they rolled out their initiatives.

“It’s really hard to launch an innovative idea and implement that idea in one year. So, I think our teams really benefitted from a three-year cycle, especially in higher ed, when you are asking folks who are often teaching and researching largely on their own to break out of their typical way of work,” she says.

Bringing inclusivity to data science

Young gives high marks to the inclusive data science endeavor.

“They (team members) set out with really big aspirations—to really transform the culture of data science on our campus, which they saw as very siloed,” she says. “They wanted to create an inclusive environment for data science and to really bring a lot of disparate data science initiatives on campus together.”

The ASSETT Innovation Incubator is designed to promote interdisciplinary teaching in the College of Arts & Sciences and making use of technology with the goal of transforming teaching and improving undergraduate education.

Specifically, Young says there was a desire to offer a program making use of data science for students who are historically underserved in the areas of science and technology, such as first-generation college students, students of color, women, and students focused on the humanities.

“The course Interdisciplinary Data Science for All has succeeded on several fronts," according to Young, who notes the program attracted 67 students its first year and more than twice that number its second year. Interdisciplinary Data Science for All also has received funding from the National Science Foundation for its continued development. The team also joined forces with other faculty on campus to develop new interdisciplinary coursework that combines the humanities and data science; this latter initiative received funding from the National Endowment for the Humanities.

Glimp says the increased student interest in interdisciplinary data science courses and the additional funding are positive developments, while adding that it’s important to evaluate success on several criteria.

“I think the incubator should have many metrics of success—and the primary metric should be its impact upon students and new student opportunities for learning,” he says. “Another metric should be the project’s success in encouraging faculty interest in pedagogy and pedagogical innovation, which it did in my case.”

Meanwhile, the other Innovation Incubator initiatives funded by ASSETT also achieved success by their own metrics and will continue, thanks in part to bridge funding ASSETT is able to provide, according to Young.

Innovation incubator’s mission is continuing

What’s more, after performing a detailed evaluation of the Innovation Incubator, Young says the decision was made to adopt it as a permanent ASSETT program. Plans call for a fresh cycle of incubator awards every three years, providing opportunities for new interdisciplinary teams of faculty, staff and students to grow innovative ideas for teaching with technology to improve the undergraduate experience in the College of Arts and Sciences.

The Innovation Incubator kicked off in 2019 with faculty brainstorming ideas for cross-disciplinary education. ASSETT took those ideas to come up with four core areas: focused and inclusive data science, multi-modal participatory publishing, metacognition and wellbeing, and the broad category of student success.

ASSETT is seeking ideas for the Innovation Incubator 2023-2026 idea submission process. A total of $200,000 is available to award up to four interdisciplinary teams over the three-year funding period. ASSETT is encouraging interested parties to submit their ideas by this Thursday (March 9) so that others can add comments to the idea or make a bid to join their team.

Final idea submissions, which are expected to run about 1,000 words, should be submitted by Tuesday, April 11.

There is a notable change in the coming innovation incubator cycle.

“For the next cycle, we’ve actually put out the call to faculty and students. So, students can be the lead submitters on ideas for the new cycle of the incubator,” Young says. “We are really emphasizing students as partners in the framework for the next cycle.”

Additionally, while the lead people for any incubator projects must be representatives of the College of Arts and Sciences, Young says those A&S college representatives can elect to bring in someone from a different CU college—the College of Engineering, for example—if they believe it would help their project.

Young says ASSETT will judge projects using four criteria: 1) Is the idea student centered? 2) Does it break down disciplinary barriers within the college? 3) Is it actionable? 4) And is it scale-able?

Young says she is not aware of any other university supporting an incubator or lab with the same focus as the one at ASSETT, which she says reflects the innovative nature of CU’s program.

Glimp says the College of Arts and Sciences deserves credit for supporting the efforts of the Innovation Incubator.

“It’s to the college’s credit that they’re funding this kind of investment and making it possible for colleagues to engage in such collaborations,” he says. “It’s a unique approach to funding faculty efforts and I think it’s visionary.”

Learn more about the 2019-22 ASSETT Innovation Incubator teams

• The CAMPP team investigated opportunities to establish a peer-to-peer support environment for faculty and students by creating a multimodal publishing collective (aka, CAMPP) that produces projects that meet academic standards and are open and accessible to the community at large. Click here to listen their recorded accounts of this work.

• The Metacognition & Wellbeing team developed resources and learning objects that encourage students’ awareness and understanding of their thought processes and learning strategies, as well as their mental, emotional, and physical well-being —(including mindfulness and contemplative practices). Click here to listen to their podcast recording on student metacognition.

• The Student Success team worked broadly to create an understanding about gamification pedagogy among faculty. Their specific focus is on a role-playing pedagogy called Reacting to the Past (RTTP). Click here to listen to a podcast about how RTTP invigorates the classroom at CU �鶹ӰԺ.

• The Inclusive Data Science team integrated data science methods and tools across the curriculum via a new team-taught introduction to data science, “Inclusive Interdisciplinary Data Science for All,” that weaves together the teaching of statistical reasoning, basic coding, and humanistic forms of inquiry. Click here to explore a student facing website about the course.

After a successful three-year trial run, the program is being made permanent with the goal of further innovating cross-discipline teaching in the College of Arts and Sciences.

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CU Arts & Sciences seeks input on deans of divisions postings

Anonymous — Thu, 09 Feb 2023 18:47:48 +0000

CU Arts & Sciences seeks input on deans of divisions postings Anonymous (not verified) Thu, 02/09/2023 - 11:47

The College of Arts and Sciences has posted job announcements for its deans of division for arts and humanities, natural sciences and social sciences

The positions are being advertised as a further implementation of the college reorganization. These three dean positions are now official officers of the university, as defined by the CU regents, and as such, require formal searches to fill the positions.

Those job announcements are now posted online:

The job posting for the dean of division for natural sciences is at this link.
The job posting for the dean of division for social sciences is at this link.
The job posting for the dean of division for arts and humanities, which is open to internal candidates only, can be found this way:
Log in to the MyCUInfo portal
Select CU Resources > Business Tools > CU �鶹ӰԺ Jobs Internal Job Board
Use the Keyword Search to find this posting number: 45916

Also, with respect to arts and humanities, the college will hold a second “listening session” with the community to solicit your views about the attributes most desired in this key leadership position, as well as gather feedback on the structure of the upcoming interviews.

This listening session, led by Robert McDonald, chair of the search committee and dean of university libraries, is set for 11 a.m. to noon on Thursday, Feb. 16. The meeting will be held via Zoom, at this link.

Participants’ feedback will be guided by a survey at this link. The college encourages people to come to the listening session, but in addition to or instead of going to the session, people can submit feedback or nominations for candidate via the survey.

“Please share this information widely and encourage anyone who fits the descriptions to apply,” said Glen Krutz, dean of the College of Arts and Sciences, adding, “As we move to the next stages of the process, I will report back to you on our progress.”

The College of Arts and Sciences has posted job announcements for its deans of division for arts and humanities, natural sciences and social sciences.

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