Wofford
College Summer Workshops 2002
Wofford College faculty members, administrators
and students gathered together for a series of workshops held the last week
of May and first week of June, 2002. These workshops were developed as part
of a project funded by NSF (DUE grant #0126788).
President Dunlap and Dean Maultsby added
further support by providing encouragement and nominal financial incentives
for all Wofford faculty members (beyond those funded through the NSF grant)
and senior administrators to participate in the first week of workshops. It's
exciting that in addition to eight invited students, over half of the faculty
and most of our top administrators participated.
Week One
(May 28 - 31, 2002)
(follow the links below for more pictures
and information)
May 28, 2002 "Creating
Learning Communities"
Dr. Karen K. Oates from George Mason
University (biography)
May 29, 2002 "Critical
Thinking for Learning and Life"
Dr. Peter Facione, Provost of Loyola
University Chicago (biography)
May 30, 2002 "In house" Educational
Technology Workshops
Concurrent Session A:
Dr. Dave Whisnant (Vice President of Information Technology) facilitated
a workshop on web page design and the educational advantages of Wofford's
brand new information system.
Concurrent Session B:
Drs. Nancy Mandlove and Dennis Wiseman (Department of Foreign Languages)
demonstrated how multimedia projects can deepen student engagement and learning
(e.g., Hyperstudio).
May 31, 2002 "Classroom assessment"
Lorin
Anderson, a "Carolina Distinguished Professor" within the
Department of Educational Leadership and Policies at the University of South
Carolina, facilitated a workshop in which he helped us analyze the efficacy
of our current assessment procedures (including various final exams and
student projects voluntarily provided by participating faculty members)
and establish goals and objectives of our new curricular initiatives.
Week Two (June 2 - 7,
2002)
Here's the crew of faculty and students
(plus President Dunlap on the left) that worked together during the second week
of workshops. These 16 individuals represent the faculty members and undergraduate
preceptors that developed the first four interdisciplinary (Sciences and Humanities)
learning communities offered in the 2002/2003 academic year.
The objectives of the second week were
to:
1. Foster understanding of the different
modes of thinking and inquiry across the Sciences and the Humanities.
We began with discussions of C.P. Snow's
"Two Cultures" and how our academic "upbringing" has differed
among the workshop participants. These discussions were facilitated by two
external guest experts, Dr. Trace Jordan of New York University (who is also
serving as external reviewer of our NSF-funded program), and Ian Marshall
of Penn State University - Altoona. Dr. Jordan (fourth from left below), an
environmental chemist, has extensive experience developing interdisciplinary
programs (within science, math and technology) for non-science majors, whereas
Dr. Marshall (second from left below), an English professor interested in
environmental writing and interdisciplinary studies, drew upon his experiences
of teaching with a biologist.
2. Develop mutual trust and respect
between faculty members and student preceptors on each teaching team.
We broke into our teaching teams to
begin work on the Science/Humanities learning communities. Each team developed
a concept map for their learning community and presented the map to the entire
group for discussion and suggestions. We encouraged the student preceptors
to be equal partners in this process to begin to establish the type of rapport
that would be sustained throughout the summer and the semester in which the
learning community was offered.
3. Develop pre-semester, mid-semester
and post-semester evaluation forms to be used by all students enrolled in
the learning communities.
Only the pre-semester and post-semester
forms were required to be used by each learning community. You are welcome
to view and/or use the forms we created or modify them for your own purposes.
They are available below as PDF files.
pre-semester.pdf
post-semester.pdf
4. Consider the ultimate sustainability
of the program (even though we'd just begun the funding cycle).
We've been aware, from the start, that
this project is labor intensive -- both in terms of man-hours for preparation
and for implementation. Therefore, we invited Wofford's Development Officers
and other funding experts to discuss our program and to begin to consider
how we might find funding to continue the program (if it is deemed successful)
once the NSF funding cycle is ended.
 |
Here retired Wofford Vice President BG Stephens
discusses with us philanthropic organizations that may be interested in
supporting our new program. |
Each teaching team then spent six weeks
working together during the remainder of the summer preparing their LC!
