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Two English faculty awarded grants to improve undergraduate teaching, learning

October 11, 2013

Two of 10 new grants to develop innovative undergraduate teaching strategies have been awarded to CAS faculty in the Department of English. Irom Bimbisar, clinical assistant professor, and Patricia Freitag Ericsson, associate professor and director of composition, submitted winning proposals for the WSU Samuel H. and Patricia W. Smith Teaching and Learning grants.

Bimbisar and Ericsson’s respective projects titled, “Multimodality or Learning from Unfamiliar Sources” and “Teacher Feedback on Student Composing through Recorded Voice Commentary,” are designed to address one of three issues: promoting active learning in large classes, documenting student achievement of intended learning outcomes in lower-division university common requirements (UCORE) courses, and integrating sustainability issues into curriculum.

Biodegradable hydraulic fluid shown at WSU innovation fair

October 10, 2013

A vegetable oil-based hydraulic fluid in development at the WSU Applied Sciences Laboratory was one of half a dozen research projects on display at the first “WSU i3” innovation fair held in Seattle in late September.

Historian: Cross-dressing was common in the “Old” West

October 9, 2013

The American West was a man’s world in the 19th century, so it wasn’t unusual for some women to dress like men, says Peter Boag, professor of history, and author of Re-Dressing America’s Frontier Past. (University of California Press, 2011)

“(W)hen I started uncovering all these female-to-male cross dressers, I also started to uncover hundreds of stories of men who dressed as women.”

WSU-led Hanford history project reveals hardships in workers’ lives

October 8, 2013

Monte Stratton. Photo by Tri-City Herald.

Ask early Hanford workers what they remember about the 1940s, and you’re likely to hear a story about the wind and the dust it whipped up from a desert being scraped bare for new construction. Their stories are among several collected in recent months as part of the oral history project of the Hanford History Partnership, a community collaboration led by WSU Tri-Cities.

“There was a terminator wind, and there was probably 3 to 4 inches of sand blew into our front lawn,” remembered Harold Copeland, who started working at Hanford in 1947 and lived in worker housing in the government town of Richland. “The way they took care of it was the fire department came out with their tanker trucks and hoses and hosed it off our lawns.”

Sociologist part of new NSF-funded project to evaluate partner accommodation policies

October 3, 2013

WSU sociologist Julie Kmec is part of a research team recently awarded a three-year, $449,000 grant from the National Science Foundation to study the effects of partner accommodation policies (PAPs), including their implications for increasing the number of female faculty teaching science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM).

Working with faculty in the WSU School of Economics, she will help provide theoretical and empirical evaluations of PAPs, as well as a description of their presence and scope in major U.S. universities.