Leading the Way: SBS Celebrates CUES Distinguished Fellows and Challenge Grantees

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. 

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.

Since 2018, SBS has promoted research on bilingual journalism, finding solutions to inter-generational poverty, technology-based mentorship approaches in Navajo language acquisition, and mitigating unintended outcomes of social contextualization in quantitative analysis.

SBS faculty CUES Distinguished Fellows and Spanning Boundaries Challenge Grantees are recognized for finding innovative solutions through groundbreaking work across seven academic units: Government and Public Policy, English, Journalism, American Indian Studies, Human Rights Practice, Middle Eastern and North African Studies, and Sociology.

Alex Braithwaite, School of Government and Public Policy
2023 CUES Distinguished Fellow
Cultivating compassionate and culturally grounded public service: The Asylum Project

"The Asylum Project addresses intersecting challenges faced on and off-campus in our Borderlands region: barriers to student persistence in degree programs and declining levels of empathy in society at a time of growing need for compassionate public service. The project combines culturally responsive pedagogy, critical service-learning, and compassion training. It aims to bolster student understanding of human suffering (empathy) and desire to alleviate it (compassion) centering vulnerable immigrant and refugee communities.” 

— Alex Braithwaite
 

Shelley Rodrigo, Department of English
2022 CUES Distinguished Fellow
Improving Student Agency and Digital Reading for Better Learning and Academic Success

Jessica Retis, School of Journalism
2021 CUES Distinguished Fellow
Bilingual Journalism Education in the United States: Development, Implementation, and Assessment

Aresta Tsosie-Paddock, American Indian Studies and Department of Linguistics
2021 CUES Distinguished Fellow
Shifting Pedagogies for Learning the Navajo Language: Applying a Mentor-Apprentice Paradigm through Technology

“My project contributes to university education by engaging in language diversity, being proactive to address native languages that are considered endangered, and by initiating a pedagogy in learning native language and culture.”   

— Aresta Tsosie-Paddock

William Paul Simmons, Human Rights Practice Program
2020 CUES Distinguished Fellow
Expanding the Campus and Global Reach of Problem-Based Learning Beyond Borders

Shelley Staples, Department of English
2019 CUES Distinguished Fellow
Harnessing Computational Models to Advance Excellence in the Teaching, Learning, and Assessment of Writing

Mahmoud Azaz, Middle Eastern and North African Studies
2018 CUES Distinguished Fellow
Integration of instruction and assessment to build up foreign language proficiency: A standards-based model

Brian Mayer, School of Sociology
2018 CUES Distinguished Fellow
Using Human-Centric Design Thinking to Build Stronger Communities

Anne Boustead, School of Government and Public Policy
2020 CUES Spanning Boundaries Challenge Grantee
Developing Socially-Aware Quantitative Intuition

Victor Braitberg, School of Anthropology
2020 CUES Spanning Boundaries Challenge Grantee
Developing Socially-Aware Quantitative Intuition
 

##