http://www.umass.edu/loop/talkingpoints/articles/74960.php
13 named General Education Fellows as part of effort to revitalize undergraduate curriculum
Thirteen faculty members have been selected as General Education Fellows, a year-long program based in the Center for Teaching that Provost Charlena Seymour as part of a renewed campus-wide focus on the importance of General Education.
The fellows for the next academic year are: Alexandrina Deschamps, Women’s Studies; Linda Enghagen, Hospitality and Tourism Management; Gerald Friedman, Economics; Dan Gerber, Public Health; John Gerber, Plant, Soil, and Insect Sciences; Lisa Green, Linguistics; John Hird, Political Science; Alice Nash, History; Ellen Pader, Landscape Architecture and Regional Planning; Randall Phillis, Biology; Marios Philippides, Classics; Arunas Rudvalis, Mathematics and Statistics; and Jacqueline Urla, Anthropology.
“This is an impressive group of faculty teaching some of our most demanding courses and this program along with the recommendations from the General Education Task Force will have a big impact on our teaching General Education courses,” said Seymour.
The program was developed in response to the provost’s desire to encourage more faculty to teach General Education courses and to convince students of the courses’ importance to their education while on campus and beyond. As Matt Ouellett, director of the Center for Teaching, said, “Provost Seymour was very clear that she wanted a high quality program based on sound pedagogy to signal her commitment to General Education on our campus.”
The General Education Fellows program features instructional technologies to improve both teaching and learning “as these tools if used well, engage students and enhance learning,” says Richard Rogers, associate provost for Academic Technology.
The program begins June 2 with an event for the entire campus’ General Education faculty to engage in reinvigorating and the retelling the Gen Ed story. The next day, the 13 fellows begin an eight-day “reboot” camp where the staff from the Center for Teaching, OIT Academic Computing, Library, and several invited distinguished teachers will lead them through a series of workshops and activities designed to improve their “General Education Teaching with Instructional Technology” or “GET with IT.”
Each fellow will receive a Tablet PC or a MacBook Pro, an inking pad, and a $4,000 stipend to redesign their General Education course. In addition, each fellow will be assigned a mentor and “work with instructional technology student helpers that OIT Academic Computing recently hired to help support this new program,” said Copper Giloth, director of Academic Computing.
May 9, 2008.