Inside Education and Health Sciences

By Emily Clemenson

Vanessa Winn, professor in the Department of Teacher Education, is one of the faculty members who teach a course that introduces students to the profession of teaching, a requirement that many teacher education majors take during their first year.

Students in this class do a literature review and write a paper, and the students in Winn's sections turn that work into a poster presentation for UD's annual Stander Symposium.

The Stander Symposium at the University of Dayton is an opportunity for undergraduate and graduate students to showcase academic excellence through faculty mentored research, scholarship and artistic accomplishments. 

"It's really important to get young people out in front of an audience, believing that they have something to say," Winn said. 

Winn's students, many of them in their first year at UD, are intimidated at first. Winn helps them each step along the way, from choosing a narrow-enough topic on which to focus their literature review to finding papers that are easy enough to comprehend.

"I just think it's helpful to put people in positions and let them rise to the occasion," Winn said. "And they do."

Kyle Wood is a first year student from Akron, Ohio. He is a teacher education major with a concentration in high school mathematics. He chose a topic — homeschooling in the United States — but he wasn't sure how to turn a lit review into a poster.

"As I was writing my paper and researching my project, I saw a few big ideas start to emerge that reassured me that I would be able to make a poster in a way that would present my findings well," Wood said.

When the Stander Symposium came around, Wood felt prepared to talk about his project with the people in attendance. 

"From this process I was able to learn about how to synthesize a large quantity of research into a few main points that held depth behind them that could be explained if people inquired about it," Wood said. "I am interested in presenting at Stander again in the future with my other interest of math."

Group photo of all students in Dr. Winn's sections of EDT 110 who presented at the 2024 Stander Symposium.