Group items tagged

The Faculty Institute for Diversity: Train the Trainer Workshop brings together a community of leaders interested in creating inclusive teaching programming on their campuses. The workshop is designed to prepare new and seasoned trainers in the development of a diversity institute tailored to your institution.

Faculty, staff, and administrators throughout higher education are employing contemplative practices for many reasons. These include sharpening attention; creating environments that enhance the well-being of all; addressing inclusion and access for all in support of the vibrant diversity of our institutions; deepening engagement and learning of subject matter; reflecting on and supporting meaning-making; considering the wider impacts of our actions; and ultimately supporting the development of a more just and compassionate society. Given the breadth and depth of these many intentions, the types of practices used are extremely diverse, and their assessment needs to be approached with great sensitivity. Assessment of practices designed to develop attention, for example, will be different from assessment of those practices designed to increase conceptual understanding or develop compassion and creativity.

"Emergent Dialogues in Assessment"   In the last decade, the higher education sector has been confronted with increasing skepticism about its effectiveness and quality from government agencies and employers, as well as from prospective students and their families. In the face of such criticism, higher education's response has been very weak, as illustrated by the inclusion of assertions that these skeptics should trust us; the production of weak and misleading reports on institutional quality; and accreditation-based assertions of quality based on criteria that miss the point of the skeptics' criticism. While we assert quality in many ways, we rarely do it in a way that answers the central, critical question these skeptics want answered: will graduates be able to function and succeed in the world after graduation?  Colleges and universities can no longer avoid answering that question, nor can they try to answer it with surrogate measures.   The demand answers that are both rigorous and practical is being exacerbated by fundamental changes in student demographics and the way higher education institutions "do business."  Growing adult/returning student populations, more diverse student bodies with more diverse needs, and an increasingly challenging economic environment  will force higher education to be more flexible and accountable, but with fewer resources. In this environment assessment practitioners can play a major role in evaluating and developing response strategies like translating learning into credit (e.g. prior learning assessment), "direct assessment programs" ( e.g. competency-based education), and emergent learning environments (e.g. adaptive learning).  

Educators are searching for tools that can help them assess and evaluate their students' achievement of defined learning outcomes in fields as diverse as engineering, business, health professions, math, science and technology (to name a few). These assessments and evaluations are part of a national trend toward transparency and accountability regarding the value added in education. The RosEvaluation Conference 2012 will bring together those who are developing assessment and evaluation tools to share information and their expertise. The conference will emphasize concrete, effective, and efficient solutions to assessment and evaluation challenges!

The 13th annual learning conference explores how we can design, assess, and facilitate learning that engages every learner, allowing each student to build their own knowledge and contribute their own strengths to their learning and the learning of their classmates and instructors. Together, we'll explore questions that reach through and beyond content and pedagogical content knowledge, like How can one instructor engage every student in a large class? How do instructors recognize and celebrate their students' diversity without risking microaggressions? What can instructors do before, during, and after class, face-to-face and online, to support each student? How does an instructor create and maintain an environment where every student feels welcome to contribute? What critical pedagogies empower each student's unique voice? What technologies enhance a student's ability to engage and contribute? What are the promising practices in your discipline? Can they be adapted to other disciplines? Keynote address by Dr.Sarah L.Eddy, "End of Lecture?  Active learning increases student achievement".

In exploring the conceptions of our profession and how institutional directions shape our practice in diverse landscapes, we invite you to explore the following questions: How do the strategic priorities of our institutions shape our approach to educational development? What are our roles in shaping institutional priorities? What should they be? How do we position ourselves in our institutions to influence strategic decision-making about teaching and learning? On the spectrum of responsibilities from meeting the learning needs of individual teachers to facilitating institutional change, how do we reconcile the tensions that the expanding roles of educational development specialists can create? As institutional directions move to a greater focus on assessment of teaching performance, institutional accountability, e-learning and m-learning, how are the roles of educational developers, instructional designers, and curriculum specialists changing? To what degree to we want to harness these trends to shape how our profession is conceptualized?

Engaging Difference: Diverse Women in STEM Building Careers, Creating Alliances August 4 & 5, 2011 Charlottesville, VA · Strengthen the Skills You Need to Navigate an Academic Career · Connect with Other Academic Women in STEM Complete workshop descriptions and registration available online: www.virginia.edu/ead/

"We cordially invite you to participate in the 36th Annual POD Conference to be held in Atlanta, Georgia on October 26-30, 2011. This year's conference is a collaborative endeavor between POD and the Historically Black Colleges & Universities Faculty Development Network (HBCUFDN). This partnership-enriched by each organization's long-standing traditions and thoughtful, dedicated members-signifies our commitment to diversity and recognizes its central role in faculty, professional, and organizational development. With this year's conference theme-Create * Collaborate * Engage-we both invite and challenge our POD and HBCUFDN colleagues to work side-by-side to create new ideas and ways of thinking, to collaborate innovatively across traditional boundaries, and to engage each other and the broader higher education community in meaningful and sustainable dialogues and activities. The questions we explore may not be new, but they are questions worth reconsidering through a new, composite lens: How can we rethink our organizational structures so we work smarter in tough economic times, meet the needs of a rapidly changing student body, and keep our faculty colleagues up to speed-all without sacrificing those aspects of the academy we hold most dear? How do we create, assess, and disseminate world-class faculty and organizational development programs? How can we foster collaboration at a nationwide level, as well as in our own departments and across professional organizations? How do we best teach, develop, and support the next generation of faculty and faculty developers? How can we help faculty members engage their students and institutions, and, maybe more importantly, how do we engage with the myriad stakeholders who influence and affect the work we do, including students, faculty, administr"

"October 27 & 28 Diversifying Blended Learning: Diverse learners, needs, and approaches in a cost-effective environment REGISTER NOW! The conference will be hosted by the University of Guelph at: Cambridge Hotel and Conference Centre, 700 Hespeler Rd, Cambridge, ON N3H 5L8 "

The role of the educator is key to fostering learning experiences that support and sustain the development of lifelong learners and leaders in our society. At the 2015 STLHE conference, Achieving Harmony: Tuning into Practice, we will investigate the diversity of issues converging in higher education while acknowledging that the dissonance we can encounter in our work as educators is an opportunity to create transformative learning experiences for us and our students. We invite our higher education colleagues to Canada's West Coast to share their experiences and engage in scholarly inquiry into student learning to enable us to "fine-tune" our practice as educators, educational developers and educational leaders.

Action Research Network of the Americas  We invite you to join us in Knoxville, Tennessee where our conference theme, MAKING A DIFFERENCE: ACTION RESEARCH FOR A CHANGE, will draw inspiration from the history of Highlander Education and Research Center, and the legacy of change that it has spawned. The epigraph from Myles Horton above refers to his founding of the Highlander Folk School, but also speaks to unique contexts and a focus on interaction that are broadly understood elements of the of diverse field of action research. As with Action Research, this will not be your typical conference. This will be a platform for Inter-Action. Dialogue will be our primary form of interaction with skilled facilitators encouraging participants to join the action and to think together collaboratively. Presentations are limited to short time frames so conference attendees can be actively involved in facilitated dialogue in each session. Poster presentations will be displayed during a boxed lunch session so participants will have time to mingle and network with presenters. Also, new this year this year, we will have Pecha Kucha presentations. These presenters will show 20 slides, for 20 seconds each, and talk for a total of approximately 6.5 minutes with 45 minutes allotted for dialogue following. For further information on pecha kucha visitwww.pechakucha.org and examples HERE and HERE. With four conference tracks, there will be something for everyone. Conference tracks are; Action Research for Social Change, Action Research for Pedagogical Change, Action Research for Change in helping Professions, and Action Research for Change… in Action!