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CUES serves as a model for change and improvement in university education, by fostering exceptional scholarly experiences for faculty and staff — primarily through financial grants that fund fellowships, project-based challenges, and workshops.

The 2024 CUES Distinguished Fellows and Spanning Boundaries Challenge Grantees recognize SBS faculty from the Department of English and School of Anthropology for their work in integrating place-based learning in Southwest Studies curricula, developing linguistically responsive teaching assistant training models, and fostering teaching teams to support student belonging and self-efficacy. 

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“Any book or knowledge source remains relevant longer when it’s dynamic, or embracing of continuous change.”

These words appear in the introduction of the most recent edition of Humans R Social Media, a cutting edge, open access “living book” on new media penned by information scholar Diana Daly and several contributors, including her students.

Presenting a compelling vision for what’s possible with openly-licensed learning materials, Humans R Social Media has seen almost constant evolution since it was first published in 2017. Daly, then a newly appointed faculty member at the University of Arizona’s School of Information, set out to create a textbook that would address the dynamic needs of modern students exploring media studies.

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The Center for University Education Scholarship has announced its 2024 Distinguished Fellows and Spanning Boundaries awardee teams.

CUES Distinguished Fellowships support independent faculty research, while the Spanning Boundaries program encourages cross-disciplinary collaborations based on a theme. Awarded projects for both programs must contribute to educational scholarship and address innovation or grand challenges in university education.

Distinguished Fellows receive up to $20,000 annually for up to three years. Both 2024 Distinguished Fellowship projects are being funded for three years. Each Spanning Boundaries team receives up to $100,000 over two years.

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A five-year grant for $1.7 million from the Department of Education began funding the new West Region Native American Language Resource Center in the fall. 

Aresta Tsosie-Paddock, assistant professor of American Indian studies and linguistics, is co-principal investigator for the center. As part of the university’s Center for University Education Scholarship fellowship program, Tsosie-Paddock has created a mentor-apprentice language project that pairs U of A students taking a beginner's course in Navajo with fluent Navajo speakers through Zoom in hopes of increasing Navajo language proficiency and cultural knowledge. Under the new center, the basic idea of Tsosie-Paddock's CUES project will be expanded to other Native languages.

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“Social media and humans exist in a world of mutual influence, and humans play central roles in how this influence is mediated and transferred,” says Diana Daly, a University of Arizona School of Information associate professor of practice.

The newest edition of Daly’s acclaimed, open-access textbook on social media, new media and participatory culture, Humans R Social Media (HSRM), explores that coexistence in a unique way: by welcoming additional authors and featuring contributions by students to help readers understand how we as humans shape social media, and how social media in turn shapes our world.

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Using simulation and augmented and extended reality, the center designed strictly for nursing students builds confidence as graduates enter the workforce.

Janine Hinton, Ph.D., an associate clinical professor and director of the [UArizona] Steele Innovative Learning Center as well as a member of BIO5, is in charge of simulation-based education for the College [of Nursing] in both Gilbert and Tucson. 

Hinton's development of mixed reality training for nursing students was made possible in part through funding from UArizona's Center for University Education Scholarship.

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The College of Social and Behavioral Sciences has been a university leader in contributing scholarship to the advancement of educational innovation and exploration in teaching and learning through the Center for University Education Scholarship, or CUES, at the University of Arizona. 

SBS faculty CUES Distinguished Fellows and Spanning Boundaries Challenge Grantees are recognized for finding innovative solutions through groundbreaking work across seven academic units.

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Dr. Guadalupe (Guada) Lozano has been designated as the inaugural Endowed Chair for the Center for University Education and Scholarship (CUES). The center, established in 2016 through a $3M endowment from an anonymous donor, fosters faculty engagement with the scholarship of teaching and learning through competitively awarded distinguished fellowships, as well as other grants and events.

“I am thankful to hear and witness first-hand how CUES inspires and helps faculty blossom, amplifying their perspectives and enriching their pursuits on research in teaching and learning,” said Lozano. “This is at the core of what CUES was created to do. Seeing it unfold illuminates where we are and where we are going.”

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Located 250 miles south of the University of Arizona, the city of Hermosillo in Sonora, Mexico, has the opportunity to become a hub for sustainable design. Thanks to a 2022 Center for University Education Scholarship Spanning Boundaries Challenge Grant, landscape architecture and architecture students from UArizona and the University of Sonora (UNISON) came together last semester to further explore green infrastructure in the capital city of Sonora.

The grant was awarded with the goal of embedding civic engagement and service learning into existing courses by engaging students, faculty and borderland communities in community-driven research around sustainable food and water solutions.

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[Jessica] Retis finds the possibility of leading groups of teachers interesting since it can facilitate and coordinate a pedagogical perspective that she prefers to think of as “understanding of reality” rather than as critical.  This explains why she has not only sought out bicultural teaching, but also undertaken a transition towards the digital world of a career that was designed for the press. 

To do this, she sought subsidies, such as CUES, the acronym for Center for University Education Scholarship, that would allow her to implement a master's program as well as research projects such as her work on the pedagogy of bilingual journalism in the United States, in which she is preparing a report entitled Bilingual Journalism Education in the United States: Development, Implementation and Assessment. 

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The Center for University Education Scholarship has announced its sixth cohort of distinguished fellows. This year's fellows will focus on topics including public service in the borderlands region, quantitative environmental science and using cybersecurity datasets in course design.

"The 2023 fellows have raised the bar on what scholarship of teaching and learning can be on our campus and for our community," said Guadalupe Lozano, CUES director and endowed chair. "Their projects reflect genuine commitment to students and to research on teaching and learning, validating the promise of CUES' newest effort, our SOTL signature workshop series."

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Guadalupe Lozano, CUES Director and Endowed Chair, was quoted in the second edition of James Lang's book, Small Teaching: Everyday Lessons from the Science of Learning.

Dr. Lozano's quote (pg. 175), which comes from an essay written for The Conversation, highlights the value and importance of viewing incoming students from an asset-based perspective:

“there are two views to take with incoming students—a deficit view or an asset view. The first sees students’ weaknesses: what they lack. An asset view sees their strengths: what students bring to the table in terms of their culture, identity and knowledge.” (Lozano 2020)

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The Center for University Education Scholarship has announced this year's distinguished fellows. The three members of the fellowship program's fifth cohort will take on topics including personalized adaptive learning, the impact of personalized reading formats and how video production might improve student engagement.

The center also announced its second Spanning Boundaries Challenge team. The theme for this year's challenge is civic engagement and service learning. The grant funds multidisciplinary collaborations addressing educational grand challenges for up to $100,000 over two years. This year's project will be funded for two years.

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W.A. Franke Honors College Assistant Professor of Practice, Dr. Caitlyn Hall, is an environmental engineer with a passion for interdisciplinary thinking and community-focused science.  She and her team of faculty and staff from across the University of Arizona were recently awarded the 2022 CUES Spanning Boundaries grant for their project, Community Stories of Sustainability and Resilience: Sonoran Desert and Baja Regions. 

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School of Art’s Nicole Antebi has been selected for the Center for University Education Scholarship (CUES) 2022 Spanning Boundaries Team.  Faculty and staff from Biosphere 2, CAPLA and the W.A. Franke Honors College will engage students, faculty and Borderland communities in community-driven research around sustainable food and water solutions.

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Professor Jessica Retis, a globally recognized scholar in Latinx media and bilingual journalism, has been appointed director of the University of Arizona School of Journalism, the College of Social and Behavioral Sciences announced today.  Retis, director of the school’s Bilingual Journalism master’s program, will take over duties from Interim Director Michael McKisson on July 1.

“I want to thank Dr. Retis for her willingness to take on this role,” College of SBS Dean JP Jones said in a statement to faculty and staff. “I'm pleased that the School of Journalism will continue to be in excellent hands moving forward.”

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This award recognizes superior and innovative teaching in lower-division undergraduate courses.

Diana Daly teaches the popular general education course ESOC 150B1: “Social Media and Ourselves.” In the course, students construct and share their stories of identity and technology.

With support from the Center for University Education and Scholarship (CUES), Diana launched the iVoices Media Lab in 2020 with the goal of channeling student narratives into curricula around technology.  She is also executive producer of the podcast Social Media and Ourselves, which records students’ own experiences and reflections to supplement and disrupt current scholarly understanding of social media.

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The Center for University Education Scholarship is accepting pre-proposals from interdisciplinary faculty teams for a new program designed to address challenges impacting University education.

The Spanning Boundaries Challenge is the newest program within CUES, whose mission is to support scholarship and innovation in University teaching and learning practices. The winning team will receive up to $100,000 for two years starting in the fall of 2020.

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A nationally recognized scholar on teaching and learning gave UA faculty advice on stoking students' curiosity, fostering community in the classroom, building patterns and structure in teaching routines and more during presentations on campus last week.

James Lang, a professor of English and director of the D'Amour Center for Teaching Excellence at Assumption College in Worcester, Massachusetts, was brought to campus by the Center for University Education Scholarship. His presentations, given Thursday and Friday, were designed to help faculty start the semester off right and gain skills to be more effective teachers, especially with distracted students.

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Three professors – a scientist, a sociologist and a humanist – walk into the same classroom…

That may sound like the start of a joke, but it isn’t. It is exactly what is happening in a new general education course being test-driven at the University of Arizona.

The project is part of the university-wide CUES (Center for University Education Scholarship)  project in the honors college that will inform the UA Strategic Initiative 1.2A Design a new Gen Ed curriculum. Three professors – one each from the sciences, the social sciences and the humanities – are cooperatively teaching a diverse group of mainly freshmen students who, like their professors, come from across the intellectual spectrum.

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The Center for University Education Scholarship has welcomed a new class of Distinguished Fellows – and a new director.

This cohort, the center's second, is the first under CUES' new director, Guadalupe Lozano, who took the position about a year ago. Debra Tomanek, professor emerita of molecular and cellular biology, led the center after it was established in late 2016.

Lozano has been on the faculty in the Department of Mathematics since 2009, and is an associate research scientist and associate research professor. She is also director of external relations and evaluation for the School of Mathematical Sciences.

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Six UA faculty members will explore ways to revolutionize teaching and learning across an array of disciplines as the inaugural cohort of the Center for University Education Scholarship's Distinguished Fellows.

The fellows, and their projects, were announced in late January.

The center, known as CUES, was established in late 2016 with a $3 million gift from a donor who asked not to be identified. The center aims to provide resources for all faculty to explore evidence-based teaching and learning.

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The Center for University Education Scholarship (CUES), the UA Learning Initiative, and the Department of Physics are pleased to invite you to attend "Using Research to Improve University Science Teaching," featuring Dr. Carl Wieman, Nobel Laureate, Professor of Physics and Education at Stanford University, and author of "Improving How Universities Teach Science."

In the past few decades, there has been great progress in research on teaching and learning. When the findings from this research have been applied in university classrooms, dramatic improvements in learning have been seen compared to traditional lecture instruction, particularly on tests that capture how well the student is able to make decisions like an expert in the subject. In this seminar, the Science Education Initiative will be highlighted to show how to achieve widespread adoption of these improved teaching methods in science departments at major research universities.

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The Center for University Education Scholarship (CUES) presents an interactive workshop titled "Get Students to Focus on Learning Instead of Grades: Metacognition is the Key!" by Saundra McGuire.

Description: 21st Century students come to college with widely varying academic skills, approaches to learning and motivation levels. Faculty often lament that students are focused on achieving high grades, but are not willing to invest much time or effort in learning. This session will focus on the importance of helping students acquire simple, but effective learning strategies based on cognitive science principles. We will engage in interactive reflection activities that will allow attendees to experience strategies that significantly improve learning while transforming student attitudes about the meaning of learning.

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The University of Arizona has established the Center for University Education Scholarship, which will create and advance knowledge related to innovative teaching and effective student learning.

The center, known as CUES, was created with a gift of more than $3 million from a donor who wanted to see real change in how teaching and learning "happen on the ground," said Provost Andrew Comrie. The donor has asked not to be identified.

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Improving student learning doesn't require a dramatic overhaul, and some tactics can be immediately applied in any undergraduate course, an expert on memory and learning said during a symposium held by the University of Arizona on Friday.

Mark McDaniel, professor of psychology and director of the Center for Integrative Research on Cognition, Learning and Education at Washington University in St. Louis, was the keynote speaker at "Learning Better," which was held by the newly created UA Center for University Education Scholarship.