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Monday, February 14, 2011
2011 POD/HBCU Conference: Invitation to Review Proposals
Would you be willing to serve as a proposal reviewer for the 2011 POD/HBCU-FDN Conference in Atlanta? The success of the conference is due in large part to the POD community volunteering its time and energy to diligently, thoughtfully, and fairly review its membership’s work. Because of the important and time-sensitive nature of the review process, please consider carefully the following points before volunteering:
•The proposal review period is roughly two weeks long, running from March 23 to April 5. All reviews must be completed by this deadline.
•Depending on the total number of reviewers, you will be assigned up to 6 proposals. We will take care to assign you only proposals which match your areas of interest and expertise.
To volunteer, please fill out the brief survey found here:
http://www.zoomerang.com/Survey/WEB22AFSBVFFH7/
The questionnaire simply asks you to provide your current contact information and to identify topic areas of interest to you. This information will help us match your strengths and expertise to the most appropriate proposals. If you have any questions about this process, please feel free to contact one of us, Natasha Haugnes (nhaugnes@gmail.com) or Cassandra Horii (chorii@curry.edu).
Thank you very much for your thoughtful consideration!
Natasha & Cassandra
2011 POD Program Co-chairs
Natasha Haugnes
Faculty Developer, Academy of Art University San Francisco, CA
cell phone: 510-593-3047 work phone: 415-618-3824
nhaugnes@gmail.com
Cassandra Volpe Horii, Ph.D.
Dean of Faculty, Curry College, Milton, MA
617-333-2361
chorii@curry.edu
Diverse Issues in Higher Education: The Unending Civil War
February 3, 2011
By Lonnie Bunch
America is a nation in love with its myths. And this is especially true when it comes to the way Americans remember, celebrate and revere the Civil War, a bloody and transformative contest that has been called the "War Between the States," the "Recent Unpleasantness," the "War of Northern Aggression" and the more historically accurate "War of the Rebellion." As a young boy in the 1960s, during the centennial of the war, I remember how myths often trumped truth in the public expression of this national celebration. At the very moment when a movement for civil rights was changing America and a cold war was changing the world, many Americans looked back with nostalgia for a simpler, less complex time when heroic White men fought honorably, found a binding peace and laid the foundation for America's rise to global super power. The hundreds of books, movies, television shows, board games and blue and gray toy soldiers that were created during the centennial all presented an incomp lete picture that obscured as much as it illuminated America's past. Rarely, for example, was the issue of race raised except to confirm that "Lincoln freed the slaves."
As America turns to commemorate the sesquicentennial of this war, it is disappointing that so many of these myths and a-historical distortions still shape the popular understanding of the impact and legacy of the Civil War. Particularly because the past 50 years have seen an impressive and unprecedented outpouring of scholarship that deepened our understanding of Black agency and the intersection of race and war, repositioned women and issues of gender and enhanced our sensitivity to the ambiguities and contradictions that are also part of the meaning and contemporary resonance of the war. Reputable historians continue to debate aspects of this conflict, but now most realize that the Civil War was a watershed that transformed America's notions about education, governmental responsibilities, healthcare, western expansion and the role of technology - not to mention the impact of the emancipation of 4 million enslaved Americans on the nation's sense of self, equality and citizen ship. Yet, in spite of this scholarly creativity there is a legitimate concern that some would prefer to whitewash the sesquicentennial commemorations rather than face the unresolved issues of race, reunion and culpability.
Quite clearly, race and heritage are at the heart of America's inability to find consensus about the Civil War. These issues play out most dramatically over the causation of the war. Many neo-Confederates take great umbrage over the charge that slavery was at the heart of the Civil War. They claim that the war was about states' rights or the South's desire to protect its way of life - its Camelot - from the industrial North. The most zealous Southern apologists protest that slavery itself was such a benign institution that many enslaved African-Americans were willing to defend the Confederacy as members of the rebel army, if the South had so wished. This is wishful thinking at best and ignorance and dishonesty at worst, as historical evidence refutes those claims.
President Abraham Lincoln made clear the central role of slavery in the war when he stated during his second inaugural address that "slaves constituted a peculiar and powerful interest. All know that this interest was, somehow, the cause of the war." The vice president of the Confederacy, Alexander Stephens, stated that "the proper status of the negro in our civilization was the immediate cause of the late rupture." And during the secession convention in South Carolina immediately after the election of Lincoln, numerous delegates called for secession as the only means the South had to defend slavery. It was not until the end of the war, in 1865, that Southern leaders like Jefferson Davis began to separate slavery from the causes of the war. Without decoupling slavery from the coming end of the war, it would have been more difficult for Southerners to create heroic myths about their defeat. And it would make it harder for today's neo-Confederates to romanticize the Confederacy
if it was clear that thousands died principally to keep 4 million African-Americans enslaved.
Many Americans explain their differing interpretations of the Civil War by pointing to their right to embrace their Southern heritage. Recently, there have been an array of "Confederacy Balls" and "Southern Heritage Galas" in anticipation of the sesquicentennial in places like Charleston, S.C., and Manassas, Va. Confederate flags are unfurled and modern men and women remake themselves as Southern officers and Southern belles, replete with gleaming gray uniforms and swirling gowns. And by the spring of 2011, many battlefields will be clogged with Confederate re-enactors perfecting their rebel yells and heroic infantry charges. I do not begrudge them the need to revel in their heritage, their "lost cause." I would just ask that they embrace the totality of that heritage: that they understand that much of that heritage was based on racism, violence and an inherent unfairness. And that the process of remembering involves embracing hard truths and complex issues.
My hope is that, unlike the centennial of my youth, the impending sesquicentennial will help America embrace a richer, more complex and more diverse Civil War that repositions the African-American experience at the heart of the conflict. By the time the celebrations end in 2015, I expect that Americans will once again honor the thousands who bore the brunt of battle. Yet I hope that we also acknowledge and embrace the more than 200,000 African-Americans who served in an Army and Navy that needed but often did not want them. And that we realize that their service and their sacrifice changed attitudes and provided the way for African-Americans to claim their place in America.
I hope that, as we continue to acknowledge the impact and import of Abraham Lincoln, America realizes that freedom was not given to the 4 million held in bondage. They were not passive recipients of government largess. Rather, African-Americans used the Civil War as a means to demand freedom, to fight for liberty and to expect nothing less than the rights of citizenship. I hope that we have put to rest the notion - the lie - that slavery was not the central cause of the Civil War. And that we understand how central slavery was to the economic, cultural, political and religious identity of America. I hope that as we celebrate the reunion of the North and South that America remembers that many of the issues of that conflict are still unresolved. As the great historian Dr. John Hope Franklin often said, "America must learn to tell the unvarnished truth." Let us all hope that with the sesquicentennial of the Civil War comes an America better able to accept and learn from a more t ruthful history.
- Lonnie Bunch is the founding director of the Smithsonian's National Museum of African American History and Culture. His most recent book, Call the Lost Dream Back: Essays on History, Race and Museums, was published in 2010.
The Teaching Professor: 9 Ways to Use Class Discussion to Promote Transformation
Date: Thursday, 04/07/11
Time: 12:00-1:00 PM CDT
Cost: $249 ($274 after 03/31/11)
Featured Higher Education Presenter: Roben Torosyan, Ph.D.
Classroom discussion–even if it’s online–is a vital part of higher education today, valued as a way to explore course content while promoting critical thinking and effective communication.
Now you can learn how to take your process to the next level with 9 Ways to Use Class Discussion to Promote Transformation, a video online seminar on Thursday, April 7.
Presented by Dr. Roben Torosyan, an authority on faculty development and educational practices, this session will show you how to promote sound thinking and civil communication.
Bypass Resistance with Tested Techniques
If you’ve ever wanted to expand participation, minimize cliques and help students learn how to handle conflict productively, sample techniques from Dr. Torosyan in this 60-minute video online seminar include the following:
•Assign low stress, rapid-fire reading summary reports at random
•Break up clique-based seating with mid-class rearrangements
•Techniques to make sure students can explain positions with which they disagree.
Enrich Your Teaching with Proven Practices
This is some of what you’ll learn during the seminar:
•How to have students set and follow ground rules for classroom discussion
•How to use short, ungraded writing assignments to deepen thinking and discussion
•How to slow the flow of classroom discussion, and probe deeper
•How to hear from (nearly) everyone
•How to make tangents a gift
•How to keep discussion on track or re-frame it
•How to use comments to make the group responsible for its own dynamics
•How to summarize what was learned
•How to infuse variety into classroom discussions.
About the Presenter
Dr. Roben Torosyan is a frequent speaker on faculty development for national organizations and institutions, including the Faculty Learning Community Facilitators’ Conference, The Teaching Professor, the POD Network, Harvard, Columbia and NYU. As associate director of the Center for Academic Excellence and assistant professor of curriculum and instruction at Fairfield University, he has extensive experience in the scholarship of teaching and learning.
Who Should Attend
Anyone who uses dialogue and discussion to pursue educational or institutional objectives can benefit from this seminar, including people in the following positions:
•Adjunct and distance education faculty
•College and university professors
•Academic affairs administrators seeking to boost the benefits of meetings
•Graduate student instructors
•Teaching assistants
•Faculty developers and trainers
•Student affairs leaders and staff
Make Enrichment a Campus-Wide Initiative
Improving classroom discussion, promoting critical thinking and encouraging civil communication are goals which resonate across campuses. So why not invite all interested parties, since fees for Magna Online Seminars are assessed on a per site basis? You and all your colleagues can attend for one low fee of $249.
And There’s More
Take part in this video online seminar and you can start taking your classroom discussions to the next level, thanks to these additional materials:
•Sample documents, including an example of an email sent to students who over- or under-participate
•Dos and don’ts
•An article of Torosyan’s on improving classroom discussion
•Questions for further discussion
•The Discussion Guide for Facilitators, designed to help you and your campus community make the most of this seminar.
AACU: Proposals due February 23rd: Network for Academic Renewal: Educating for Personal and Social Responsibility: A Twenty-First-Century Imperative
Educating for Personal and Social Responsibility:
A Twenty-First-Century Imperative
October 13-15, 2011
Westin Long Beach, California
Call for Proposals Deadline: February 23
Educating for Personal and Social Responsibility: A Twenty-First-Century Imperative will highlight campus examples of best practices and bring together faculty, student affairs educators, academic administrators, and others who are working to foster students’ personal and social responsibility—including ethical reasoning and judgment, personal and academic integrity, civic and democratic engagement, global understanding, and perspective-taking and intercultural competency.
The focus of the conference will be on innovative and practical approaches to educating for personal and social responsibility, particularly approaches reflecting academic and student affairs collaboration, campus–community partnerships, and global contexts.
We invite proposals on four key themes:
•Refining and assessing essential personal and social responsibility outcomes
•Innovative models and pedagogies—helping students build principled and purposeful lives
•What the research reveals about educating for personal and social responsibility
•Weaving personal and social responsibility into the fabric of institutions
Learn more about this conference and the call for proposals online.
For more information, please call 202-387-3760 or write to network@aacu.org.
We look forward to reading your proposals.
2011 Network for Academic Renewal Conferences
General Education and Assessment 3.0: Next-Level Practices Now
Chicago, Illinois—March 3-5, 2011
Engaged STEM Learning: From Promising to Pervasive Practices
Miami, Florida—March 24-26, 2011
Educating for Personal and Social Responsibility: A Twenty-First-Century Imperative Long Beach, California—October 13-15, 2011
Toward a Flourishing State? Arts & Humanities, the Cultural Fabric of Society Providence, Rhode Island—November 3-5, 2011
Association of American Colleges & Universities
1818 R Street, NW
Washington, DC 20009
www.aacu.org
Questions about any of AAC&U's meetings? E-mail meetings@aacu.org.
HBCU Faculty Development Network - Call for Proposals - Deadline: March 18th, 2011
Please follow the link www.hbcufdn.org to the Network’s 2011 Call for Proposals. The Call for Proposals and Proposal form links are located at the top of the page. The deadline for submission is March 18, 2011.
Please follow the submission guidelines, however, if you experience any problems feel free to contact me either via e-mail at balbert@dillard.edu or directly at 504-816-4216.
Thank you.
Barbara Albert
Office of Academic Affairs
Dillard University
balbert@dillard.edu
504-816-4216
www.dillard.edu
FeedBlitz: Learning Online Info: Blended Education Bridges Traditional and Online Learning
February 14, 2011 in Distance Learning,Education,Online Courses,e-Learning
Katheryn Rivas, regularly writes on the topics of online universities. She welcomes your comments at her email Id: katherynrivas87@gmail.com.
Online education can be a strange concept to those who are used to viewing learning as a process that involves students sitting in a classroom with a lecturer in front of them. Yet, there is great promise in online programs. In addition, the opportunity to take classes from home at the student’s convenience is a great incentive for full-time workers and those with other pressing responsibilities to go back to school. But for those who are not ready to go fully digital with their education, there is a way to get the best of both worlds with a blended education.
There are several differences between online learning and a traditional education, the most obvious one being that online learning takes place at home while a traditional education takes place on a school campus. With online education, students will have the ability to make their own class schedules and will also save on commute time and expenses. This is especially useful for those who have other time-consuming responsibilities that make driving to or living on a campus impossible. On the other hand, traditional classroom education allows for students to learn alongside their classmates, which can be a great motivator to stay focused and on task. In addition, they have the opportunity to gain immediate interaction with their instructors. However, classroom education is often inconvenient for those with other responsibilities because of scheduling restrictions. Even students who live on campus typically find it a hassle to try to enroll in classes that will fit their work and social schedules.
But now, with a blended education, students can have the classroom and campus experience with online learning convenience. As if that is not enough reason to consider a blended education, consider this: a 2009 study conducted by the U.S. Department of Education found that those who participated in blended learning programs typically outperformed those who participated in exclusively online or classroom learning.
Blended programs differ between schools. For example, the blended programs for campus-based schools typically work by letting students take some of their courses online and some on the campus. This allows students who may not have been able to fit a certain class into their on-campus schedule to sign up to take that particular class online instead. Some campus-based schools, such as the University of Houston, even allow for students to take all of their courses completely online for a semester or two if they are busy at a full-time internship or job. Once that job or internship is complete, students can easily switch back to a full-time campus education if they so desire.
Those who choose to take blended courses from chiefly online schools may have their blended education work in a FlexNet-style class, where students attend the first and last weeks of the class in a classroom, but complete the remainder of the course from home. This allows for students to get to meet their instructors and classmates in person before they switch to an online format, and then to reconvene with their peers once more before the course is completed. This way, students can swap phone numbers and e-mails as well as establish study groups.
Blended programs are a great way for students who wish to take advantage of online learning to earn their education without sacrificing a campus-based experience. It also offers those who are unfamiliar with online education a bridge option to explore online learning without fully throwing themselves into it. Students who desire more flexibility in their education options should consider pursuing a blended education.
USM Women's History Conference, COURT HOUSE, STATE HOUSE, HER HOUSE: SOUTHERN WOMEN AND POLITICS
Welcome to the homepage of our conference, "Court House, State House, Her House: Southern Women and Politics."
The University of Southern Mississippi sponsors this conference, to convene Thursday - Saturday, March 31 -April 2, 2011. Over 35 presenters from universities around the region and the nation will present the best of current scholarship on southern women and politics. With an appropriately broad definition of "politics," drawn to encompass women's efforts to affect public policy via "woman's influence" as well as women's experiences seeking and holding elective office, the conference will highlight aspects of women's experience both before and after the ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment.
All presentations are open to the general public; lunches and receptions by paid registration only.
Plan to join us in Gulfport for "Court House, State House, Her House."
Academic Leader Issue Update February 2011
How to Evaluate Your Faculty Development Services
Faculty development is a nationwide phenomenon that emerged from the academic accountability movement in the early 1970s, yet rarely was there interest in evaluating the effectiveness of this effort—until now.
Online Format Saves Academic Program
In 2006, New York Institute of Technology’s graduate clinical nutrition program was in trouble: enrollments were way down, and the prospects for attracting more students were not good. Similar programs with lower tuition and in more convenient locations made NYIT’s program less appealing. It seemed that it was just a matter of time before the school pulled the plug on this program. In a last-ditch effort to save the program, the department decided to switch from face-to-face to online delivery to try to reach an untapped student market for the program.
Promoting Research While Advancing Instruction, Part 2
In Part 1, we examined several reasons why it’s important for universities to look at faculty work not in terms of the actions that are taken but rather in terms of the benefits that result. Of course, it’s one thing to say that changing how we view faculty roles can help promote research while advancing teaching; it’s another thing entirely to bring about such a massive change.
The Community Role and Challenges of a College Leader
Strong and innovative leadership collaborations keep the college in the community landscape. Today, the president and the college’s leadership team are invaluable resources to states and to the nation—they educate the many talented people who work in our industries, businesses, and civic sectors. Chief executive officers address the overall balance of education at their institutions by looking at community advisory council input, educational trends, and state needs.
The Four-Year Information Technology Plan: Listen to the Class of 2015
The process started with a casual discussion among my colleagues and was fueled by the ECAR Study of Undergraduate Students and Information Technology, 2010. It continued with conversations with my son, who happens to be a member of the class of 2014, and students in a freshman seminar that I teach on the topic of leadership. Distilled from these conversations are what I believe to be the five technology expectations of the class of 2015.
The Teaching Professor Issue Update February 2011
Making Exams More about Learning
We give exams to assess mastery of material—are students learning the course content? With so much emphasis on scores and grades, it’s easy to forget that the process of preparing for, taking, and getting feedback about an exam can also be learning experiences. The learning that results from these processes can be tacit, or teachers can design activities associated with exam events that can result in better content learning and heightened student awareness of the learning skills associated with demonstrating knowledge. The good news is that these activities don’t have to be all that creative and innovative, as Thomas Smith discovered.
Making the Most of Fieldwork Learning Experiences
Fieldwork refers to any component of the curriculum that involves leaving the classroom and learning through firsthand experience. It includes activities as diverse as measuring trees for an ecology course, interviewing a leader for a religious studies course, or conducting ethnography for a sociology course. The field experience may extend across an entire semester or be the last 10 minutes of the period. Depending on past experiences, the announcement, “OK, let’s head out to the field,” may generate terror or excitement in students. To accomplish the latter, I recommend a set of simple strategies that enhance learning and improve student experiences in the field.
Revisiting the Purpose of PowerPoint
The university teaching/learning center I direct offers to collect midterm student feedback for instructors. We interview the students in a course without the instructor present and create a report describing what students think does and doesn’t help them learn. We also ask them to suggest what might improve instruction in the course. In the majority of these interviews, students comment on the use of PowerPoint slides. And frequently, their opinions are mixed.
Student Entitlement
It’s a term much bandied about—perhaps the best place to start is with a definition. Authors of the study referenced below define it as “an attitude marked by students’ beliefs that they are owed something in the educational experience apart from what they might earn from their effort.” (p. 343) The student cohort to whom the term is most often applied is the “millennial students,” those born between 1982 and 2002. And there’s lots of evidence that the sense of entitlement has grown. One interesting bit included in the article noted that the combined search terms “sense of entitlement” and “students” yielded 16 references in 1996 in the LexisNexis database; the same terms yielded 102 references in 2006.
Teaching Circles: A Low-Cost, High-Benefit Way to Engage Faculty
For the past three years I have directed a small program that has produced big results at Tusculum College. For as little as $3,000 per year, our college has increased its sense of campus community, helped with current faculty development, more quickly integrated new faculty, and modeled scholarly discussions for students. Officially the program goes by the name “The Teaching and Learning Initiative,” but it has acquired the nickname “teaching circles.”
The Power of Questions
Good questions are treasure troves in life as in teaching because they so effectively open new vistas, provide new perspectives, and challenge our most basic assumptions. Good questions are those that the questioner cannot answer. They are used to initiate a dialogue where answers, even short and partial ones, begin to crystallize and shape themselves, provoking still other questions and answers, like waves rippling onto waves, interminably. In teaching, the questions raised across a course may say more about it than the answers they elicit.
HBCU Faculty Development Network Board of Directors Elections
HBCU Faculty Development Network Members:
It is time to elect new members to the Board of Directors of the HBCU Faculty Development Network. Voting for these new members ensures that you will be represented at meetings of the Board of Directors.
First go to the HBCU FDN website: www.hbcufdn.org
There is a link on the left sidebar to that leads to information on HBCU FDN Board Nominees’ qualifications, experience, and statements. There are five nominees.
Then go to the HBCUFDN Board Election voting site: https://www.surveymonkey.com/s/JQ2V3WM
You can vote for three (3) of the five nominees at this site. The deadline is Friday, February 25, 2011.
Thank you,
HBCU FDN Board of Directors
Magna Online Seminars: Redesigning Learning Spaces: Q&A with Dr. Saunders
Date: Wednesday, 03/02/11
Time: 12:00 AM -11:59 PM CST (You can log on to the seminar anytime, all day long, on Wednesday, March 2 - whenever it's most convenient for you!)
Cost: $179 ($204 after 02/23/11)
Featured Higher Education Presenter: Dr. Peter M. Saunders
An audience favorite returns–and with a BONUS! Magna Online Seminars is bringing this popular program back for our audience members who missed it the first time around. To help you take advantage of this fact-filled seminar and explore trends in college classroom renovations, we're offering it with expanded connection options. You can log on to the seminar anytime, all day long, on Wednesday, March 2–whenever it's most convenient for you!
In Redesigning Learning Spaces to Improve Teaching and Learning, a Magna Online Seminar led by Peter Saunders, director of Oregon State University’s Center for Teaching and Learning. In an interview with Academic Leader, Saunders discussed how to determine redesign priorities, the effects redesign can have, and how to coordinate redesigned learning spaces with the curriculum.
AL: How do you know when a redesign is needed?
Saunders: If faculty are beginning to try [new teaching techniques] and it’s not working, or if they request rooms somewhere else on campus, it may be time to consider a redesign. Look at the faces of students sitting in class. Do they look bored or engaged? How many students typically skip class? How are your retention rates? Can the faculty actually achieve the outcomes that the accrediting associations are telling them to achieve? If it says to get students to work collaboratively but all 400 are in fixed seating, do you write back to the accrediting agency, “I’m sorry; they can’t do that because the seats don’t move”?
AL: How might institutions prioritize their redesign plans?
Saunders: Let’s start with how much is lost in the classroom when you start to put in seats that spin and turn and so forth. In a tiered classroom you can lose anywhere from 10 to 20 percent of the seats that were there before. I’ve talked to registrars at a number of schools and they say, “That’s a lot of students to lose. I can no longer put 200 students in that room. You’ve taken away 20 seats. That’s going to cost me.” But on the other side of this the number of students who drop out is much more serious than the 10, 15, or 20 percent of the seats lost [in a redesigned classroom]. You could lose 15 percent of your students in that particular room, but the students show up in another classroom. But if those students drop out completely, we lose them from every class they would have been in.
Most likely this means smaller classrooms, but you can start using the hallways and other spaces where the students can go. You can simply have chairs that roll. You can start small by putting in whiteboards and interactive whiteboards.
AL: How might you coordinate instruction and classroom redesign? What recommendations do you have for getting the most out of the new space?
Saunders: It’s not unusual to build a beautiful classroom and then have a faculty member say, “I won’t teach in that classroom because I can’t find the front of the room,” or “I’m uncomfortable with all these changes.” If you’re going to renovate the room to do these kinds of things, you need to have a training budget as part of the budget for that room. Training is essential to show faculty how they can start small using the room’s features. The key to classroom redesign is curriculum and course redesign. They go together. It’s not just learning a new trick or two, but actually thinking about how you can redesign your course so that it runs hand in hand with the kind of space you’re in.
Invite a group for one affordable fee
The registration cost for this seminar is just $179, no matter how many attend from a single site. Simply log on from a classroom or conference area to include multiple participants and receive extra value from your training investment.
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