Planning and Implementation
Why this is important
Amplify Your Impact focuses on leadership and communication for the purpose of advancing community wellbeing. By providing our students with training and experience in public messaging as producers of knowledge, TWU will foster thought leaders who can help build public understanding and trust on topics that are critical for our collective wellbeing. Our graduate students are future scholars, practitioners, teachers, and leaders in their respective fields. Whether their studies are grounded in health, social equity, education, and/or community change, this initiative will help them learn communication skills critical to educating communities and engaging in informed advocacy.
Acknowledging that community wellbeing is multidimensional, interconnected, and nuanced across academic disciplines, Amplify Your Impact builds its framework off of the Okanagan Charter, an international charter for health promoting universities and colleges, that charges higher education to advance community wellbeing by being relevant to real-world outcomes (2015). While academic publication is an important mechanism for advancing knowledge, this QEP initiative focuses on more public-facing methods of communication, such as op-eds, podcasts, public lectures/workshops, videos, blogs/ essays, or policy document development. By fostering the communication techniques and strategies of our students, Amplify Your Impact aspires to develop equitable and thriving communities through the advancement of evidence-based, publicly-available information.
Building opportunities
Public scholars are those people in communities and organizations that others turn to for their expertise. They inspire and influence others with their grounded knowledge and innovative thinking.
Amplify Your Impact will create a bridge between scholarly/creative work, public understanding, and public trust on topics that are critical to our collective wellbeing. Public facing methods of communication include op-eds, podcasts, public lectures/workshops, videos, blogs/ essays, and/or policy document development.
The QEP will focus on graduate students across all academic disciplines and campuses as our future scholars, practitioners, teachers, and leaders. Faculty, staff, and other graduate students will in turn serve as mentors for undergraduate students, supporting them with training specific to public-facing communication, technology, and student health and wellbeing, answering the call to make higher education relevant to real-world outcomes.
Graduate students represent 37% of Texas Woman’s enrollment. By building public-facing communication skills, these students will be better able to disseminate their knowledge to the public in an effort to build public trust and promote community wellbeing and support undergraduate students in doing the same.
Goals & Student Learning Outcomes
Amplify Your Impact aims to meet two major goals over five years starting in fall 2023:
Student Learning Goal: Improve students’ ability to impact community wellbeing by developing their public communication skills. Student learning will be measured using the following student learning outcomes (SLOs):
- SLO 1: Students will be able to responsibly extend knowledge from academic study to social issues related to community wellbeing.
- SLO 2: Students will be able to apply effective communication strategies appropriate for public engagement.
Institutional Goal: Develop faculty’s abilities in providing effective instruction in public communication skills.
Taking the next steps
TWU has established an Amplify Your Impact Office reporting directly to the Vice Provost for Student Success via a Ph.D. level faculty QEP Director. The director oversees a coordinator, senior secretary, and public scholarship specialist to create and implement programming that supports faculty and students in generating public-facing scholarship and promoting thought leadership across campus.
To support professional development and content creation, technology and equipment hubs will be created on each campus. The TWU community will be able to use these spaces to record and edit podcasts and videos, practice being interviewed on camera, create content for social media, etc. We will take a phased approach and build the first hub on the Denton campus; hubs on the Houston and Dallas campuses will follow. The hubs will each include a permanent install of equipment (sound booth, lighting, green screen, etc.), lending equipment (podcasting kits, cameras, etc.), and portable showcase equipment (screen, projector, power, amp, etc.).
Amplify Your Impact will also commit a significant amount of financial resources to directly support graduate student scholarly activity connected to thought leadership, including, but not limited to:
- The Thought Leadership fellows program provides stipends and support for faculty teaching graduate-level courses to incorporate public-facing communications skills into their courses.
- Grants totalling $50,000/year are available each year for graduate students (and faculty/staff collaborating with them) to support research or professional development related to thought leadership.
- The Thought Leadership mentorship program provides scholarships for students engaging in thought leadership work to mentor their peers in drafting and amplifying public-facing communications projects.
- The QEP will soon take advantage of a new institution-wide micro-credentialing (“badging”) system to recognize the efforts of students, faculty, and staff by offering badges and certificates that can be included on their resumes/CVs.
Page last updated 2:48 PM, April 24, 2025