Contributions to Teaching, Leadership, and Access

Below are some of my materials prepared for introductory college and university upper-division teaching, and recent contributions to social justice in STEM. I have taught laboratory components of oceanography, mineralogy, petrology, and general geology classes.

Teaching

Rocks have never been self-explanatory, yet the pace of undergraduate geology courses seem to suggest they are. When teaching, especially in laboratory sections, I create opportunities for students to practice “seeing” and recognizing patterns, while being sensitive to disability and strategies to incorporate universal design.

Optical Mineralogy Concepts in Video Format

Description

This screenshot shows a view from an instructional video I created for undergraduate optical mineralogy students to distinguish between two minerals, clinopyroxene and orthopyroxene, in thin section under two types of light (plane polarized light, also referred to as PPL and cross polarized light, referred to as XPL). In this video, the same view for each mineral to demonstrate differences in extinction. Difference are also noted in annotations. Watch video on YouTube.

Sample narrative for teaching

This video shows how one might use cleavage traces of two unknown pyroxene minerals for identification. Set up the view of the mineral in plane polarized light.

1. Locate cleavage traces (dark lines) and align them so they are vertically aligned up/down with crosshairs. This will be the starting angle to test for parallel extinction.
2. Switch to cross-polarized light and observe if extinction occurs while remaining in this view.
3. If the mineral remains extinct without rotating the stage, then the extinction angle is 0 degrees That means this has parallel extinction and is likely orthopyroxene¹.
4. If I must rotate the stage to see extinction, then this means the extinction angle is greater than 0. This indicates inclined extinction, and the mineral is clinopyroxene

Leadership

Unpacking Diversity Keynote Event, 2021

“Transforming the culture of geosciences” in 2021 with Dr. Aradhna Tripati was a multi-year effort at the institutional and community level.

Watch on YouTube

Key Details

I coordinated multiple aspects of a 2021 keynote event with Dr. Aradhna Tripati (UCLA, CDLS). Planned initial conception of in-person event in October 2019 to execution of virtual event in May 2021. The first year’s planning efforts resulted in an original date, late May 2020.

After much uncertainty amidst the pandemic, we successfully held the event during a 2-day “virtual” keynote visit, with ~$1,000 more support than the previous year, thanks to co-sponsorship by additional campus and off-campus stakeholders. To ensure audience engagement during the virtual event, the budget included accommodations for the keynote event and undergraduate student participation in a workshop.

This event reflects continued efforts and success in delivering relevant and timely educational events, whether they are in-person, hybrid, or virtual.

Contributions

1. Created and maintained project planning document and timelines. Led communication with speaker, vendors, on-campus and external stakeholders, and revised plans and timelines as needed throughout the process
2. Prioritized accommodations in the budget, communicated with OSU DAS to coordinate appropriate vendors for captioning/ASL interpreters. Prepared event glossary and introduction script
3. Ran keynote event with Zoom Webinar500 platform, set up registration page and backend settings for webinar, wrote scripts, prepared run-of-show documents, tested event with captioners and interpreters and test users, set up livestreaming options.

Outcomes

• Acquired $6,000 funding from eight sponsors, including on-campus and state organizations.
• Over 163 attended the Zoom Webinar, representing 22 institutions/organizations outside of Oregon State University, and from 5 countries.
• 18 additional viewers joined the YouTube livestream
• The 2-day virtual visit included a technical talk for the Geology & Geophysics departmental seminar, an undergraduate student workshop, a Women of Color discussion panel with 3 invited guest scientists, and a number of meetings with community members and organizations

For more information, visit Unpacking Diversity Keynote 2021, which lists other events hosted as part of the 2-day event.

Compiling and presenting NSF demographic data in the geosciences

Motivation

Inspired by Dr. Rachel Bernard’s paper, titled No progress in geoscience for 40 years, and Dr. Bernard’s blog post during her PhD years, where data from 1973-2016 pointed to a worse outcomes for Black and Indigineous students in geoscience.

When new data from the NSF Survey of Earned Doctorates was released in 2020, I was motivated to see if two years of additional data (2017, 2018) would show the same trends that Dr. Bernard found. I compiled the new data and created these plots to assess if progress had occurred since 2016. These were shared on the Unpacking Diversity Twitter.

Outcomes

The line plot shows the number of U.S. Doctorates in Earth Sciences, by ethnicity between 2008 to 2018. Lines correspond to values for the following ethnicities: Total, White, Hispanic or Latino, Black or African-American, Asian, Native Hawaiian or Other Pacific Islander, More than one race, American Indian or Alaska Native.

View full size image

View the full set of plots in the Twitter thread.

Results have been featured in a number of presentations:

• June 2020 in NSF Ocean Sciences “Frontiers of Ocean Sciences” virtual symposium, presented by Dr. Hilary Palevsky. Watch on Youtube.
• Oct 2021 in “Nuances of Asian American experiences in ecology and evolutionary biology”, presented by Andy Lee and Erin de Leon Sanchez.

Suggested credit for images: “Thi Truong, on behalf of @UnpkngDIVERSITY at OSU (2020)”.

E-mail me to request full-size images for presentation or other use.