Here are just a few notes about upcoming events and projects at DCAL and other items of interest to teachers. Navigate the site's resources at the right. For more news, see DCAL News.
Many colleges and universities tend to be reactive, particularly when addressing student accessibility in many dimensions of campus life. As faculty we have an opportunity to aspire to an elevated standard practice far above the baseline expectations and behaviors required by law. Please join us for an interactive workshop designed to inform and expand accessibility practices to enhance student learning at Dartmouth. Presented by Ward Newmeyer, Director of Student Accessibility Service and Gabrielle Lucke, IDE Director of Diversity Training & Education Programs. Register for this workshop.
Problem-based service-learning is a rigorous integration of service-learning with real-life problem-solving in curriculum design and teaching. The Problem-Based approach emphasizes project design, community partner relations, building classroom community, building student capacity and ownership, project management, assessment of learning, and reflection and connection. For more information, please visit the Institute website.
DCAL will sponsor up to 4 attendees and assist with registration fees, transportation, lodging and incidentals. Please contact dcal@dartmouth.edu by November 13th for details.
On July 1, 2009 DCAL turned 5 years old. One of the rites associated with our fifth anniversary was a five-year review of DCAL’s achievements. This review had two parts—a self-study submitted to Provost Barry Scherr on March 29th and a two-day visit by an external review team in early June. Michele Marincovich of Stanford, Rebecca More of Brown, and Ken Bain of Vanderbilt, Northwestern, NYU, and Montclair served as the visiting committee. The three of them share a total of 95 years experience founding and directing centers like DCAL. Dartmouth professors Lisa Baldez and Rob McClung assisted their review. Their overall assessment concluded “DCAL’s success in reaching faculty with helpful ideas and advice places it among the top ranks of Centers in the United States.”
Please visit DCAL’s celebratory exhibit currently on Main Street of Baker-Berry Library. Thanks to Laura Barrett, Karen Gocsik, Cindy Tobery and Dennis Grady for such a wonderful display!
DCAL will make grants of up to $1000 to support attendance at conferences and programs devoted to teaching and learning. These may be special panels organized by your professional organizations at their annual meeting, or by the Educause Learning Initiative or Tomorrow's Professor, or similar events. If you want to attend such a meeting or present on such a panel, DCAL will help you pay for it; we may be able to cover the entire expense! These funds are for travel, lodging, registration and other costs of participation. Direct your inquiries to Elaine Livingston.
We have a diversely talented teaching faculty at Dartmouth and we can learn a great deal from each other. DCAL started this informal network by setting up a system for visiting colleagues' classes, not for evaluation of course, but for sharing and learning from each other. Comments and suggestions are shared only with each other, not with the larger group and certainly not with any chairs, supervisors or deans. This is often referred to as formative, rather than summative, evaluation. DCAL helps the process by hosting the initial meeting of those interested in joining the network, supplying guidelines and helpful forms, and finally by hosting a de-briefing at the end of term. For more details see the Class Visits page of this website. Please sign up on our workshops and events sign-up page or with Elaine Livingston.
The Dartmouth Centers Forum is pleased to announce that the theme for 2009-2010 will continue on Conflict and Reconciliation. Conflict is seemingly endemic to society and rightly deserves our attention. Yet often efforts to resolve conflict focus on causes, the mitigation of conflict impact upon its victims and place great emphasis on the prevention of future conflicts through structural or policy change. The focus of the Dartmouth Center's Forum theme is to emphasize the role of reconciliation as a method to resolve conflicts no matter what their causes. Conflicts permeate our personal and social relations, and may be internal, local, national or international. Reconciliation, viewed as a process of coming to terms with what is, accepting, forgiving and compromising, and encompasses all the fields of human endeavor. As such it is fertile ground for discussions such as, what makes reconciliation a successful conclusion to conflict? Are there universal processes of reconciliation? Is there a distinction between disputes and conflicts? Are there conflicts within which parties cannot be reconciled? What methods might be employed in the promotion of reconciliation for conflicts, be they personal, societal and global?
A syllabus template is now available on the DCAL website. We hope that this template will give you some ideas and make developing a syllabus for your course a bit easier. Please modify the template as needed to make your own personal syllabus and let us know if you have comments/additions.
This new DCAL seminar formed in 2007 as an ongoing forum for informed discussion of teaching and learning languages and cultural competencies. Anyone at Dartmouth interested in these topics is welcome to join us; simply e-mail Tom Luxon, Doug Moody or Nancy Canepa. Our inaugural discussion focused on the May 2007 MLA report entitled "Foreign Languages and Higher Education: New Structures for a Changed World." Future plans include invited speakers, discussion of literature on the subject of language learning and cultural competency and discussion of possible innovations at Dartmouth.
Please e-mail Doug Moody and Nancy Canepa with suggestions for future meetings!
Reducingstereotypethreat.org was created by two social psychologists and professors who sought to offer a resource for faculty, staff, and students regarding stereotype threat. This website offers summaries of research on this topic and discusses unresolved issues and controversies in the research literature on the phenomenon. Included are some research-based suggestions for ameliorating negative consequences of stereotyping, particularly in academic settings.
An excerpt from "Using the 'Beauties of Physics' to Conquer Science Illiteracy": A Conversation with Professor Eric Mazur of Harvard University (New York Times July 17).
Q. When you teach Physics 1b, do you give "fantastic performances?"
A. You know I've come to think of professional charisma as dangerous. I used to get fantastic evaluations because of charisma, not understanding. I'd have students give me high marks, but then say, "physics sucks." Today, by having the students work out the physics problems with each other, the learning gets done. I've moved from being "the sage on the stage" to "the guide on the side."
