Pintar named University of Illinois Distinguished Teacher-Scholar

Judith Pintar
Judith Pintar, Teaching Associate Professor

Teaching Associate Professor and Acting BS/IS Program Director Judith Pintar has been selected by the Office of the Provost and the Vice Chancellor for Academic Affairs as the University of Illinois Distinguished Teacher-Scholar for the 2020-2021 academic year. The program offers faculty members an opportunity to engage in an in-depth analysis of the craft and art of teaching, consider new approaches, and put their insights to work in ways that will benefit their students and the campus community. Pintar will receive $7,500 for her project and an additional $7,500 for a research assistant.

Pintar's award will support her project, "Gameful Pedagogy: Instructional Design for Student Well-Being." As part of the project, faculty who serve as undergraduate program directors will be invited to attend a series of discussions, facilitated by the Center for Innovation in Teaching and Learning (CITL), in order to identify specific factors in course design that foster student wellness and encourage their incorporation into undergraduate syllabi across campus. Student focus groups will be held in the fall semester to provide the program directors with insights to inform the instructional design process. Students will be asked to outline a Students’ Bill of Rights—similar to the Gamers' Bill of Rights—which emphasizes course design factors that have the greatest impact on their well-being.

"By viewing class design through a new vantage, assessing elements of syllabi as one would assess fairness in rules of play, faculty participants may empathize with how students feel about their courses, which we hope will lead to a recognition of the connection between teaching practices and students' well-being," Pintar said.

"The work that I do as a Teacher-Scholar will become part of the suite of resources that CITL offers to improve instructional design and transform teaching practice across our campus. Because my proposed work is also part of the pedagogical vision associated with Games@Illinois, it will be incorporated into that initiative as well."

Pintar serves as director of Games @ Illinois: Playful Design for Transformative Education, a project funded by the Provost's Investment for Growth program. Her research interests include digital storytelling, game studies, and the development of interactive and narrative AI. She earned her PhD in sociology from Illinois.

Updated on
Backto the news archive

Related News

McDowell to present keynote on data storytelling

Associate Professor Kate McDowell will present the closing keynote of the Measures of Success Educator Impact Series at Western Michigan University (WMU) on March 21. The virtual series, which is sponsored by the WMUx Office of Faculty Development, focuses on equity and educator impact.

Kate McDowell

Dahlen selected as judge for National Book Awards

Associate Professor Sarah Park Dahlen has been selected by the National Book Foundation to serve as a judge for the 74th National Book Awards. The foundation chose 25 judges for this year's awards, which are given in the categories of fiction, nonfiction, poetry, translated literature, and young people’s literature.

Sarah Park Dahlen

Downie to present keynote at CHIIR 2023

Professor and Associate Dean For Research J. Stephen Downie will be the keynote speaker for the 2023 ACM SIGIR Conference on Human Information Interaction and Retrieval (CHIIR 2023), which will be held on March 19-23 in Austin, Texas. In addition to information interaction and retrieval, the multidisciplinary conference explores topics such as human-human information interaction, novel interaction paradigms, new evaluation methods, and related research from various fields.

Stephen Downie

Lawrence Auld, former faculty member, passes away

Lawrence W.S. Auld (PhD '75) passed away on March 2, 2023. He returned to school to earn a PhD in library and information science from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign and served on the faculty at UIUC and then at East Carolina University until his retirement in 2003.

Lawrence Auld

iSchool participation in iConference 2023

The following iSchool faculty, staff, and students will participate in iConference 2023, which will be held virtually from March 13-17 and physically from March 27-29 in Barcelona, Spain.