“A” is for Accessibility: Making Every Interaction Matter for Persons with Disabilities
Jill Flagel, Director of Faculty/Staff Disability Services, , Institutional Equity and Compliance
Ryan Fette, Education & Outreach Coordinator, Institutional Equity and Compliance
Location: Room 010
Would you like to increase your competence in interacting with and providing services for colleagues, students, visitors to campus and other individuals with disabilities? This interactive presentation will provide you with an understanding of basic disability etiquette, insight into inclusive language use, and strategies for appropriately interacting with individuals who have observable and/or hidden disabilities. These concepts will be reinforced through activities and discussion.
Objectives:
- Develop a basic understanding of disability etiquette.
- Gain insight into what language to use and not use when interacting with individuals with disabilities and discussing disability topics.
- Learn strategies to appropriately interact with individuals with disabilities.
Effortless: Make it Easier to Do What Matters Most
Laurie Sampson, Learning & Development Coordinator, Office of Research & Economic Development
Location: Room 018
Getting ahead doesn’t have to be as hard as we make it. Based on the book, “Effortless” by Greg McKeown, we’ll explore ways to:
- change our thinking that the most essential things can be the easiest ones by looking for ways to remove complexity so even the slightest effort can move what matters forward;
- find the easier path to execute by recognizing that past a certain point, more effort doesn’t produce better performance, but instead sabotages our performance;
- get the right results with burning out.
Creative Well-being: Adding this Critical Piece to our Well-Being Model
Connie Boehm, Director of Student Resilience, Big Red Resilience & Well Being
Jackie Mattingly, Interim Assoc Dean, Hixson-Lied Student Affairs, Hixson-Lied College of Fine and Performing Arts
Abbey Ragain, Coordinator, Suicide Prevention Program, Big Red Resilience & Well Being
Location: Room 032
Participants will learn about Nebraska’s ten dimensions of well-being with a focus on the important addition of the creative dimension. According to the American Public Health Association, engagement with artistic activities, either as an observer or a creator, can enhance a person’s mood, emotions, and other positive psychological states or have a salient impact on important health parameters (American Nurse Today, Volume 13). This session supports the conference’s subtheme of participants gaining a better understanding of themselves and exploring how to bring one’s best self to work.
This presentation will present the innovative addition of a creative dimension and how Nebraska gained support across campus among students, faculty, and staff to enhance the well-being model. Participants will take a well-being assessment and receive a specific score in each of the ten dimensions of well-being. Following the assessment participants will share what they currently do to enhance their creative well-being.
Behavioral Patterns which are under our control and can be changed impact all individuals. One out of four individuals have a mental health problem. Presenters will share a number of practices that support individual well-being focused on how creative endeavors can enhance relationships and positive emotions, reduce stress and decrease depressive symptoms. This presentation shows participants how little changes in one dimension can pull other dimensions along in a positive way. By making small, achievable changes especially in the creative dimension individuals can reinforce the foundation of their overall well-being.
Participants will be able to identify:
- Nebraska’s ten dimensions of well-being
- Their own well-being scores through the well-being assessment
- The importance of making small changes in behavior that can lead to big results
- Strategies that they can use to enhance their creative dimension of well-being
Use the Forms, Luke: Creating High-Quality Webforms and Surveys
Markeya Peteranetz, Learning Assessment Coordinator, College of Engineering
Location: Room 040
What’s worse than having to take a survey? Having to take a bad survey! If you’ve ever had to take a survey or complete a webform, chances are you’ve been frustrated by the process. Unclear questions, response options that don’t fit, and a seemingly endless stream of questions can be enough to leave you cursing your computer! Despite the frustrations they can cause, webforms can be a great way to gather information from your colleagues and clients, and they can be used for more than just surveys. Whenever you need to gather similar information from multiple people, a webform can help you be more efficient. In this session, we will go step-by-step through the process of creating a webform that is painless for the users and produces useful and usable data for you. We will cover guidelines for writing good questions, learn about different options within free webform programs, see how the programs enable you to analyze your data, and review options for distributing your webform. You are encouraged to bring your laptop to the session along with an idea for a survey or webform you want to create (but neither are required).
By the end of this session, attendees will be able to:
- Build and distribute high-quality forms and surveys using freely available web-based programs
- Write survey questions that adhere to principles of good item writing
- Design forms and surveys that produce useful, useable data
- Conduct a basic analysis of some of the most common types of survey questions
Humanity and the Staff of the University of Nebraska
Nicole Church, Administrative Coordinator, Chemical & Biomolecular Engineering
Mona Bavarian, Assistant Professor, Chemical & Biomolecular Engineering
Location: Room 138
It is a universally known fact that the University of Nebraska could not exist without their staff. However, over the past few decades as state funding has steadily been reduced, staff benefits and opportunities for advancements have decreased dramatically. Most training sessions offered focus on how staff can be better servants to the university by enhancing their technical competencies. Although technical training can be valuable, opportunities focused on personal growth and creativity are essential for staff to broaden and diversify humanitarian skills. Skills which can help guide departments through challenges such as conflict resolution, bias, discrimination, and challenges associated with the return to the workplace after the pandemic including adjusting to staff reductions/additions, re-orienting to physical encounters with faculty and students, and re-establishing basic trust among our campus communities.
In this session, we introduce ideas centered on enhancing staff visibility and valuing their roles without the standard practice of task compartmentalization. Rather, we will discuss specific options for fostering community cohesiveness between staff, students and faculty in departments, colleges and across campuses. For example, we will talk about writers, artists, athletes, musicians, nature enthusiasts, knitters, dancers, activists and volunteers. Promotion of staff importance is intertwined with the interests of faculty and students in a symbiotic relationship. The possibilities for creative engagement are endless, and they encourage a ‘village’ motif, a sense of belonging and community among groups of people with vastly different backgrounds. We believe this approach can contribute to departments being more productive, intellectually stimulating, and fun. As an adaptation to post-pandemic academia, the ‘village’ motif has the potential for innovation and creativity that would benefit departments, colleges, and the university while strengthening university participation and collaboration with city and state communities.
Song of Ourselves: Exploring How Identity and Creativity Enrich Our Workplace Interactions*
Courtney Santos, Director, National & International Fellowships, Undergraduate Education & Student Success
Location: Room 211
How can employees and teams benefit from bringing a richer sense of self to work? The session will open with two guided, interactive exercises. The first is designed to spark your creativity and express background and identity in the form of a quickly-generated lyric poem. The results can be used to enrich your self-understanding and enhance appreciation of the subtleties and textures of your campus and community relationships. The second exercise will reveal deeper values that motivate your actions and set the tone and rhythm of your goal-setting and relationship-building decisions. Subsequent small group discussion will focus on harmonizing this richer self-understanding with your workplace activities, interactions with colleagues, and professional development ambitions. Participants may be able to use these activities for later team-building or community engagement in their various roles.
*Hybrid presentation