Melody Bowdon Archives | �鶹ӳ��ý News

Virtual Reality Improves Social Work Education

Drexler B. James ’13 — Mon, 21 Oct 2019 17:30:00 +0000

Social work students at �鶹ӳ��ý in the future may find a new tool incorporated into the curriculum – virtual reality simulation.

Jasmine Haynes, a graduate student in the social work track who is pursuing a doctorate in public affairs, and social work faculty members Denise Gammonley, ��Ի�� conducted research this summer on the benefits of virtual reality in the classroom.

Their goals were to see if virtual reality could improve students’ feeling of preparedness in working with Alzheimer’s patients, as well as foster empathy for the patients and family members affected by the disease.

“It’s different than having students engage in role-playing or watch videos because one of the challenges with role-playing is that it is only as good as the actor,” Gammonley says. “We needed a better way of exposing students to these situations before we send them out into the field. With virtual reality, students get this experience in a way that feels more real to them.”

Melody Bowdon, interim vice provost of the division of teaching and learning and interim dean of the College of Undergraduate Studies, said the research has helped to convince her of the benefits of virtual reality in the classroom.

“There are some things that can’t be explained or described but that can be experienced through virtual reality.”

“I could see the value of VR for recreational and entertainment purposes before I became aware of the Embodied Labs virtual reality tool, but I didn’t see how it fit into the teaching world,” Bowdon says. “Now, I’m an advocate for it. There are some things that can’t be explained or described but that can be experienced through virtual reality.”

Researchers in the are continuing to explore the use of virtual reality simulation training to enhance students’ preparedness in helping patients with other conditions. This kind of exposure helps standardize the learning experience because students are not exposed to individuals with every condition in their clinical training.

“Clinical training is so important to preparing students for their future as social workers,” Gammonley says. “But we have very little control over what they will be exposed to during that training. Virtual reality allows us to best prepare our students by exposing them to an array of conditions they are likely to see in their careers.”

The subject of Alzheimer’s is personal for Haynes; her grandfather, who suffered from Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s disease, passed away in 2008.

“My grandfather was a pretty quiet individual,” she says, “but as his Alzheimer’s symptoms became more severe, he became more withdrawn and detached.”

That detachment is often an obstacle in treating someone with Alzheimer’s. It’s an uncomfortable territory for the patient, the family and the social worker.

After experiencing life vignettes through the perspective of a virtual Alzheimer’s patient, students feel more comfortable and prepared to work with these patients.

“Learning by experience can help students to connect with the concepts and tools we are teaching them,” Bowdon says. “When we can’t provide the exact experience we are looking to expose our students to in real life, virtual reality can bridge the gap and ignite another dimension of learning.”

Advocating for Children is Everyone’s Responsibility

Melody Bowdon — Thu, 02 Apr 2015 13:05:49 +0000

Florida drew national media attention in 2008 when 2-year-old Caylee Marie Anthony of Orlando was reported missing. In the months and years that followed, her mother, Casey, was charged and ultimately acquitted of Caylee’s murder.

Along the way she became society’s public example of a bad mother. During the months leading up to and after Anthony’s trial, the family’s neighborhood was often overrun by the media, but also by people described as protestors.

Every time I heard the news stories about protestors marching and carrying signs outside the home of this child who could no longer be helped, I was puzzled and angered. What could it mean to protest a person? And if these people were so passionate about protecting children, why weren’t they advocating for the many living children facing peril every day?

According to the national CASA (Court Appointed Special Advocates) website, 1,900 children in the United States become victims of abuse or neglect every day, and on an average day, four of those children die. Communities everywhere need volunteers willing to actively advocate for kids whose parents or guardians are accused of abuse, abandonment or neglect.��

A few years ago, I served as a guardian ad litem in Seminole County. I represented children whose parents struggled with a variety of challenges, including mental and physical illness, extreme poverty, substance addiction, and criminal charges not directly related to the children.�� The 20 or so children I worked with came from a range of socio-economic classes and demographic categories, for no part of our community is immune to this problem. Every month I visited with the children, their parents, other caretakers and family members, teachers, health care professionals, counselors, case workers, and others to gather and report information that helped judges make decisions in the best interests of the children.��

Being a guardian is challenging and rewarding, but you don’t have to necessarily take on such a large role to make a difference. After a standard background check, you can volunteer at a Boys & Girls Club, serve as Big Brother or Big Sister, or spend time working with and mentoring kids at a local religious organization, school or hospital. Supporting parents is critical, too. Even something as simple as lending a hand to a mom or dad struggling to manage the parenting load in a tough moment can make a profound difference in the welfare of a child.��

I reached out to my network of friends and family who work directly with children in crisis to capture the advice below for people interesting in helping.��

When you encounter a child in crisis (and actually this advice works for people of any age in crisis) let them feel and express their emotions. Shannon, a judge, noted that he works every day with children who are caught in custody battles or have been severely abused, and says that allowing kids to vent about their feelings can sometimes help.�� Lisa, a teacher, wrote: “I have seen middle school students plow through the death of a loved one with the stoic demeanor of a battle-hardened soldier, but fall apart emotionally at the imagined slight of their peer group…Telling a child to ‘cheer up’ is not only unhelpful, it tells them that there is something wrong with them, at a time when they are already very vulnerable.”

Terri, a longtime volunteer guardian, noted the importance of “learning the system and speaking up if something doesn’t look or feel right.” Reaching out to a teacher or other authority in a child’s life to mention concerns is a perfectly appropriate thing to do, though it’s important to remember that not all differences in families constitute a danger to children.��

Do what you can to stabilize the child’s situation. Aimee, who has worked professionally with children in crisis, wrote: “Help to limit the trauma. Offer support to the entire family in a variety of ways. By limiting stressors and helping to improve their family dynamic, you can help the child. This can be world changing.”

Encourage the children in your influence to be kind to their peers who are having a hard time. Amy wrote: “In our experience, friends who didn’t disappear when my girls were going through their father’s death and some other hard stuff were their best support.”

Practice empathy. Arthur, a long-time child advocate who works with children and teens in crisis, underscored “the power of empathy as a means of bridging the gaps of understanding.” He noted that this process “takes practice, intention and focus.”

You can learn more about opportunities to help kids at http://www.casaforchildren.org/ or . These organizations report a number of ways in which children benefit from working with adult volunteers. They are more likely to find stable homes, get supportive services, minimize their time in foster care, and do better in school. They are likely to be more socially stable, optimistic, and focused on the future.

If people focused more on taking positive action for children than on sensational coverage of family tragedies, the world would be safer for children in jeopardy.��

Melody Bowdon is executive director of �鶹ӳ��ý’s Karen L. Smith Faculty Center for Teaching and Learning and is a professor of writing and rhetoric.��She can be reached at melody@ucf.edu.��

Saying Thanks Isn’t Always Simple

Melody Bowdon — Wed, 26 Nov 2014 14:53:37 +0000

Tomorrow is Thanksgiving, and people all over the country will gather around tables with loved ones to express thanks for time together, getting through another year, and green bean casserole.

Of course the holiday is rife with baggage (literal and figurative), and many people will boycott it entirely or will visibly or invisibly limit their participation, whether because of the problematic history of the events it represents, because of their own personal associations with the holiday, or because of work schedules, travel limitations, or distance from friends and family. Whatever we’re doing, most of us will have thanks on the brain for at least a few minutes this week, and that’s a good thing. But gratitude can be a sticky wicket.

In the long-running TV cop series “The Closer,” Kyra Sedgwick’s title character, Brenda Leigh Johnson, was constantly saying “thank you” in a deep Southern drawl to everyone around her, including employees, strangers, and even the criminals she was famous for driving to confess. Though many scenarios called her sincerity into question, and often her gratitude was met with a significant eye roll from those around her, I loved this aspect of her character because it vividly showed the power of saying thanks.

Brenda packed apology, intimidation, and a firm change of topic into every drawn-out “thank yoooou,” leaving those around her speechless, for there is no established negative retort to an expression of appreciation, sincere or not.

Complicated thank-yous are everywhere. In the past couple of decades, a secular cult of gratitude has emerged around us. During her high-profile years, Oprah Winfrey wove together tenets of pop psychology and world religions to present gratitude as a path to a centered and positive life, encouraging viewers and readers to focus on blessings over challenges.

A contemporary offshoot is the frequent social media trend in which friends ask each other to post things for which they are grateful. Taggees then share appreciation for beautiful sunsets, great families, good health, and steady jobs, occasionally teetering on the brink of publically sanctioned bragging.

But despite the cynicism that may come through in these observations, I believe that gratitude is incredibly powerful and important for a variety of reasons.

Gratitude helps us keep things in perspective. Even the most seasoned pessimist can think of ways in which most situations could be worse. Feeling and expressing gratitude for the positive things around us can shift our focus from what’s working against us to what’s working for us, and, in my opinion, a positive attitude can materially impact the outcome of many situations.

Sincerely accepting gratitude connects us with other people. Many of us are better at thanking others and even doing things for others than we are at receiving thanks. I’m thinking not of the ritualistic thanks we receive in daily life but of those moments when we have had a real impact. Engaging with another person and openly accepting their acknowledgment that something we have done for them has shaped their life in a positive way can be a humbling experience. It sometimes requires us to accept praise for something that we did because we knew it was the right thing to do. It sometimes causes us to reflect on what more we could have done. But it almost always requires us to see ourselves and our actions, momentarily, through the eyes of another, which can be an intimidating but gratifying act.

Expressing gratitude also helps us to feel it.

In preparation for writing this column, I crowdsourced what I called “compulsory gratitude” with my social media friends. I asked the value of, for example, requiring children to write thank-you notes for gifts. While a couple of friends expressed concern about the idea of forcing children to lie about their feelings, most suggested that gratitude is a process that requires practice. One friend suggested that expressing thanks is a critical element of being part of a community and compared requiring students to learn the practice to what she called “compulsory clothing in public.”

A cousin who works in social services pointed out that there are developmental reasons to require children to engage in rituals of gratitude. Faculty colleagues noted the positive experiences they’ve had with asking students to write thank-you notes to guest speakers, suggesting that people enjoy the opportunity to express appreciation even in those contexts when they might not have thought of it on their own, and that everyone appreciates receiving a handwritten thank-you.

Friends cited theorists and religious figures to suggest the same basic concept: The experience of gratitude is learned through practice and socialization.

And it’s good for you—like your green bean casserole.

Give Someone a Break

Melody Bowdon — Wed, 23 Jul 2014 14:18:47 +0000

About 20 years ago, when I was a graduate student in Tucson, Arizona, I befriended two neighbors who worked as traveling nurses taking short-term jobs at hospitals in interesting places around the country. John and Sue had met a few years earlier when they served together in a busy metropolitan hospital, an often stressful environment.

They dealt with patients and family members who were pushed to their physical, mental, and emotional limitations; fairly frequently this reality erupted in unpleasant behavior toward nurses, the frontline caregivers. My friends described experiences of being yelled at, punched, and more while working in this setting. As you might imagine of people willing to move to a new hospital every few months, these two are adventurous, optimistic, compassionate, and tough, so they found positive ways to deal with their challenges.

When I met them, they had a long-standing shorthand for talking about unpleasant people. They explained the history of their catchphrase to me, but also helped me understand that over time they’d come to apply this analysis to people outside the hospital. If someone cut them off in traffic, acted like a jerk in a public place, or otherwise behaved obnoxiously, they’d look at each other and say, “She’s in pain,” or “He’s in pain,” chuckle a bit, and move on without taking the incident personally.

While pain doesn’t explain or justify every negative experience we have with our fellow humans, I do think that John and Sue were onto something here.

Despite the arguably substantial number of what psychologist Martha Stout calls “the sociopath(s) next door,” I would argue that many of the people we encounter in daily life are struggling with something painful, though our frequent phatic questions like “How are you?” and “Are you having a good summer?” rarely elicit the details of those challenges.

And while MIT professor Sherry Turkle, who has long studied human/computer interaction, argues that we find ourselves “alone together” on social media, I had to look no further than my Facebook account to find evidence of these struggles.

This week a close friend of mine is recovering (fantastically, bravely, but painfully) from a bilateral mastectomy. My classmate from junior high is mourning the sudden death of her father, and at least three of my contacts are worrying over pets with serious illnesses. One close friend is requesting prayer for her daughter, who is on a mission trip in an area hit hard by a recent typhoon. And everyone who teaches college (a big chunk of my social circle) is beginning to fret over the impending end of another too-short summer and the beginning of another crazy fall.

Meanwhile, more than one of my admittedly middle-aged network is in physical pain with an abscessed tooth or injured back. Of course, like anyone else’s, my news feed is also full of joyful announcements of pregnancies, pictures from once-in-a-lifetime vacations, news about exciting new jobs and relationships, and, just now, the victorious end to the search for the perfect burrito.

So the humble point of this column is not to bring us all down and suggest that we’re constantly surrounded by secret misery. It’s just to remind others and myself to give people a break when we can.

Having taught college for almost 25 years, I have heard lots of classroom excuses, such as grandmothers who mysteriously manage to die twice in one year to every make and model of computer and transportation problem. A good number of them have been true; a smaller but not inconsequential portion have been dubious at best, but I do not regret a single time when I have given a grieving or stressed-out person a kind response, a bit of perspective, a little break. And I can think of some instances where I wish I’d been more compassionate, patient, and engaged.

But if I’m going to buy into the “people are in pain; give them a break” mindset, and encourage others to do so, I have to apply it to myself and recognize that there are good reasons from my own life why I’ve been unable to be my ideal self in many situations.

A few days ago I was short-tempered with a seemingly disorganized host at a local restaurant.��When I stopped to think about it, I realized I was being unnecessarily grouchy because I was in pain. Not emergency room pain, of course—not physical pain or even emotional anguish—but discomfort and disappointment, however mild, along with underlying worries that I needed to release.

I thought in that moment, as I often do, of my friends John and Sue, and about the importance of letting things go, laughing things off, and moving on.��

That awareness (along with the perfect burrito) is my wish for everyone.

STEM Lesson Developed at �鶹ӳ��ý Earns National Recognition

Kevin Craig — Thu, 05 Sep 2013 21:05:13 +0000

An innovative learning module that paired young students with STEM majors at �鶹ӳ��ý to study water quality has earned a team of �鶹ӳ��ý educators recognition from the journal Science.

“An Inquiry into the Water around Us,” was published in the August issue of Science and earned the Science Prize for Inquiry-Based Instruction. It was authored by Erin Saitta, assistant director of �鶹ӳ��ý’s Faculty Center for Teaching and Learning; Tamra Legron-Rodriguez, a �鶹ӳ��ý alumna and faculty member at Rollins College; and Melody Bowdon, director of the FCTL.

The learning module and its supporting materials are intended to provide science instructors across the nation with a valuable teaching model that will develop students’ abilities to think critically in the scientific process and become more civically engaged.

The team’s module matched STEM majors from �鶹ӳ��ý with middle and high school students to study the issue of local water quality.�� Teams were assigned key questions regarding water quality and tasked with designing the necessary methods to experiment and make claims in response to the questions.

Collaboration and communication between the students was a critical element of the project. After class, students continued to analyze experimental results; delve deeper into the chemistry content and its civic and political implications; and focus on communicating the information to a non-scientific audience.

The �鶹ӳ��ý team hopes that the interactive nature of the module will encourage more middle and high schoolers to pursue degrees and careers in STEM and more STEM professionals to consider the value of civic engagement.

“I am proud to have our �鶹ӳ��ý students, who have demonstrated a commitment to excellence and civic engagement, featured in such a prominent journal,” Saitta said. “One of the most rewarding aspects for me is that with the publication of the supplemental materials, the module will able to be utilized and adapted by educators around the world, hopefully inspiring the next generation of inquisitive and engaged scientists.”