Dr. Lynnette Dornak, associate professor of environmental science and society at the University of Wisconsin-Platteville, has been selected for the 2024-2025 Wisconsin Teaching Fellows and Scholars Program. She is one of two UW-Platteville faculty members selected for the Universities of Wisconsin program this year.
Dornak, who started her teaching journey as a graduate teaching assistant at Stephen F. Austin State University in 2000, has taught a variety of biology, natural science and geospatial courses. She has been with UW-Platteville since the fall of 2014.
“I feel honored to have this opportunity to expand and enhance my teaching through scholarship,” said Dornak. “Through this program, I've connected with educators across System that are focused on improving equity in their courses. They are a wonderful group of folks that I would not otherwise have had the opportunity with which to collaborate.”
Throughout the Wisconsin Teaching Fellows and Scholars Program, participants are guided through the process of completing a scholarship of teaching and learning project.
The goal of Dornak’s learning project is to create a more equitable learning experience without lowering the rigor of the course for individual students. Students in Dornak’s Geographic Information Systems (GIS) courses are from various demographic, family, socioeconomic, geographic and academic backgrounds. Given their experiences, Dornak proposes to determine predictors of student abilities to identify and troubleshoot software errors in GIS given their backgrounds and previous experience with computer software and whether mid-intervention activities, such as error reflection and post-assignment error review, create a more equitable learning experience and affect student confidence to troubleshoot GIS software errors. According to Dornak, although there is some scholarship of teaching and learning research regarding computer literacy, there are few studies that specifically address technical software troubleshooting, especially incorporating a geospatial analytical component.
In her GIS-related courses, Dornak employs a hands-on and project-based pedagogy. She prefers that her students are always actively immersed in the material, rather than a traditional lecture-listen environment. Dornak says she uses community-based projects to give the students more meaning to their semester work. She tries to make it interesting by providing students with material that will be useful to them when using GIS in their futures.
“I enjoy the flexibility to design and modify my courses to the needs of the students and the ever-evolving professional field,” said Dornak. “The support I receive from my department and the College of Liberal Arts and Education is amazing.”
The Wisconsin Teaching Fellows and Scholars Program offers UW faculty and teaching academic staff a unique opportunity to collaborate with other exceptional teachers from across the Universities of Wisconsin and from various disciplines, which many have found re-energized their work and transformed their approach to teaching and learning.