Arts-Integration: Resilience and Opportunity Through the Arts
Project Leaders: Erica Halverson, Department of Curriculum and Instruction and Yorel Lashley, Director, Community Arts Collaboratory, School of Education
Duration: Two years
This project seeks to bring the power of innovative research-based arts integration experiences to learners across Wisconsin. The UW Community Arts Collaboratory (Arts Collab) brings together world class research and programs to integrate arts into education, providing under-resourced students, schools, and communities transformative opportunities to build resilience and self-efficacy through dance, theater, music, and visual art. We will build on our strong model of working with urban districts to create new partnerships with artists and educators in small-town and rural communities across Wisconsin.
CARE U: Train the Trainer Program for Direct Caregiver Workshops
Project Leader: Barbara Bowers, School of Nursing
Duration: Two years
Wisconsin’s healthcare workforce for older adults consists primarily of certified nursing assistants and personal care workers who have little training in caring for people with complex needs in later life stages. To fill this gap, UW-Madison School of Nursing faculty and interprofessional colleagues seek to create a network of trainers who will offer professional development workshops for these caregivers across Wisconsin, particularly to those in rural areas. This proposal seeks to create a standardized “CARE U” professional development curriculum for CNAs and personal care workers, based on past faculty work, and prepare a network of 20 health educators from across the state to deliver CARE U workshops to their region’s direct care workers. The proposal also allows time for UW-Madison faculty to mentor trainers in preparation for the trainers’ first solo workshops in their home areas.
Circle of Care: A transformative model for supporting orphans’ wellbeing in Malawi
Project Leaders: Nancy Kendall, Educational Policy Studies, School of Education and Lori DiPrete Brown, Director, 4W Initiative: Women and Wellbeing in Wisconsin and the World, UW-Madison
Duration: Three years
Circle of Care will apply UW-Madison expertise and build on long-standing partnerships with colleagues and communities in Malawi to break the spiral of orphans and grandmother-headed households (GHHs); social and economic deprivation and isolation; and improve the health,
educational, and social outcomes of orphans and GHHs. Circle of Care responds to the harsh realities of Malawi’s 35-year AIDS pandemic. By 2010, 20 percent of Malawian children were orphaned; approximately half live in GHHs. Circle of Care brings together key areas of UW-Madison expertise around orphans and vulnerable children, community-driven participatory development, and quality improvement.
Culturally Relevant Wetland Research and Outreach for Wisconsin Native Nations
Project Leaders: Matthew Ginder-Vogel and Sarah Dance, Civil and Environmental Engineering, College of Engineering
Duration: Two years
Manoomin (Zizania palustris), also known as wild rice, is a profoundly important cultural, spiritual, and economic food resource for the Anishinaabe, Menominee and other Nations in Wisconsin. As the Great Lakes Region’s only annual emergent macrophyte, Manoominoccupies a highly specialized niche in our wetland ecosystems. However, Manoomin populations across state watersheds have dramatically declined in the past decade due to anthropogenic changes in water quality, primarily from climate change, sulfide mining, and waste-water treatment facilities. Ensuring Manoomin survival in Wisconsin waterways will require protecting existing populations and restoring historic locations. There is significant interest in Native communities to protect and restore Manoomin in these impacted waterways. This project seeks to investigate several of the most critical factors that may be inhibiting Manoomin growth and survival in natural waterways.
Engineers Without Borders: Lweza Water Project
Project Leaders: Paul Block and student Keerthana Sreenivasan, Civil and Environmental Engineering, College of Engineering
Duration: One year
The UW-Madison chapter of Engineers Without Borders (EWB-UW) partnered with Lweza, Uganda in 2014 to implement a sustainable clean water system. Currently, the nine free water sources used by the community are heavily contaminated with E. coli, resulting in widespread waterborne illness. EWB-UW works with Lweza and a local NGO to practice and promote community health and the Wisconsin Idea. This project offers students interested in global health initiatives opportunities to collaborate with professional mentors and apply their education beyond the classroom. The Lweza Water Project is geared toward the community’s children and thus is dedicated to providing the primary school with an accessible and affordable water source. Baldwin support will allow EWB-UW to implement a pump, distribution tank, and solar panels that will provide the 600 children of Lweza Primary School with a pure, reliable, and inexpensive source of drinking water.
Surgical Training Through Simulation (STS) in Ethiopia
Project Leaders: Girma Tefera and Molly Vaux, Department of Surgery, School of Medicine and Public Health
Duration: Three years
Over 5 billion people in the world lack access to basic, essential and emergency surgical care. Simulation Based Education provides a unique opportunity to gain surgical and emergency skills without putting patients at risk. In low-income countries, simulation is not widely applied due to inadequate training, cost barriers, and a lack of understanding of the benefits and contribution to patient outcomes. For the past decade, the UW Department of Surgery (UW DOS) has built a partnership in Ethiopia. The UW DOS will use our existing international partnership with Hawassa University, Ethiopia as a platform to expand the reach of UW-Madison and UW Health by training surgeons and nurses in Ethiopia on basic surgical practices. The Aims of this 3-year project are to: 1) Create a “Training of Trainers” simulation curriculum and program for Hawassa University; and 2) Provide a mechanism for Ethiopian surgeons to train on the use of surgical simulators and skills training. The anticipated results of this investment will provide opportunities for UW DOS faculty to improve and broaden their teaching, training, and education skills to include a global perspective, and will create increased local surgical capacity through the training of Ethiopian surgeons and other providers, thus serving the local population and improving health in Ethiopia.
Wisconsin StoryBridges
Project Leaders: Maggie Hawkins, Curriculum and Instruction and Stacy Lee, Educational Policy Studies, School of Education
Duration: Two years
In hyperpolarized times, with pervasive notions of “us vs. them,” culturally, linguistically, and socioeconomically diverse Wisconsin youth live in divisive and divided communities. Through collaboration with eight school districts across Wisconsin, Wisconsin StoryBridges supports secondary school youth to explore their and others’ communities and identities, fostering the formation of civic identities and belongings and relational understandings across diversity. While social studies (and other) educators call for supporting learning about community, place, civics and diversity, opportunities rarely exist for students to participate in collaborative explorations of place-based civic identities or to dialogue across difference and environs. This multi-phase project starts by bringing youth together within their communities to explore their own social and civic identities, experiences and communities. They then represent their learning through creation of digital stories which they share and discuss with diverse youth in other communities across the state via a dedicated website. Through their participation, we aspire to foster respectful dialogue among diverse groups of youth that strengthens positive understandings across difference, forges new relationships, and supports civic belonging and engagement.
Wood Identification and Screening with the XyloTron (WISC-XyloTron) for Timbers of Mozambique
Project Leaders: Prabu Ravindran and Alex Wiedenhoeft, Botany, College of Letters & Science
Duration: Two years
Illegal logging depresses the market value of US forest products by more than $1B USD, costs the global market some $130B USD or more per year, contributes to deforestation and environmental degradation, and its proceeds support organized crime and transnational trafficking of wildlife, illegal drugs, weapons, and human beings. Field identification of wood (screening) is the first step in the forensic workflow to combat illegal logging, and at present this depends on humans trained in wood anatomy. Our project delivers technology developed in Wisconsin on an international stage to combat a global threat at the intersection of law enforcement, forensic science, and machine learning by developing and implementing a computer vision-based wood identification system for the common commercial timbers of Mozambique.