PUBLICATIONS Inside Illinois Vol. 26, No. 12, Jan. 18, 2007

brief notes

Understanding and enhancing student development
Faculty Retreat on Active Learning will be Feb. 9
The 2007 Annual Faculty Retreat will take place on Feb. 9 at the Illini Union in Rooms A and B. The theme will be on understanding and enhancing student development and learning over the college years.

Marcia B. Baxter Magolda, a nationally recognized author and researcher on student development and learning, will give the keynote address, “Learning Partnerships: Understanding Students’ Development to Enhance Learning.”

Magolda has written five books, including “Knowing and Reasoning in College.” This book reports on a longitudinal study of the intellectual development of students as they progressed through college. Her most recent book, “Making Their Own Way: Narratives for Transforming Higher Education to Promote Self-Development,” is a follow-up of that study. Her work deals with the holistic development of students and with higher education’s responsibility to foster critical thinking and problem-solving skills, citizenship, moral development and leadership.

The event brings faculty members from across campus together to learn about and discuss best practices in teaching at the college level. Following the keynote there will be concurrent sessions featuring UI faculty members sharing practices and insights from their own classrooms. During the lunch hour, the poster presentations will highlight Scholarship of Teaching and Learning research projects and innovative campus initiatives with opportunities for further dialogue with the presenters.

The retreat will begin with a welcome by Provost Linda Katehi, who will present the 2006-07 Distinguished Teacher/Scholars: Bertram “Chip” Bruce, professor in the Graduate School of Library and Information Sciences, and Kim Graber, professor of kinesiology and community health. 

Several Pre-Retreat Faculty Conversation Groups will be held in late January for faculty members who wish to read and discuss materials related to the retreat theme and to meet with Baxter Magolda. To register for the retreat and the faculty conversations, go to www.cte.uiuc.edu/Did/FacultyRetreat/index.htm.

Chronicle of Higher Education
Free access for campus community
Students, and faculty and staff members at the UI now have free access to the online edition of the Chronicle of Higher Education.

Most campus computers will be able to directly access the Chronicle of Higher Education at www.library.uiuc.edu/orr/get.php?instid=275135. Off-campus users and some on-campus users will need to provide their network ID and password for authentication.

“The Chronicle is one of the most highly read education dailies in the country,” said Karen Schmidt, acting university librarian.

“I would imagine that our campus community has hundreds of subscriptions at a current individual cost of $82.50. This new campuswide subscription brings the Chronicle to everyone’s desktop. The benefits in cost savings and ease of access are obvious.”

In addition to reading the online editions of the Chronicle and accessing its archives, campus users can set up their computers to receive Chronicle RSS news feeds.

Saturday Art School
Art classes begin Jan. 27
Registration is now open for the spring semester of Saturday Art School, a community art school taught by art education undergraduate and graduate students and faculty members in the School of Art and Design. Classes are held at the Art and Design Building beginning Jan. 27. Classes will meet 10 Saturdays culminating in the Krannert Art Museum Family Fest for students and families on April 28.

The cost is $75 per student, ages 4-18. Elementary classes meet for two sessions each Saturday morning, from 9-10:30 a.m. or 11 a.m.-12:30 p.m. Seventh through ninth grade students and high school classes meet 9 a.m.-noon each Saturday in a studio format.

For more information, contact Carole Smith, 333-1652 or cssmith2@uiuc.edu.

Weeklong commemoration
Events honor Martin Luther King Jr.
A screening of “After Innocence,” including a discussion with the director of the 2006 film, will be the kick-off event of this year’s UI commemoration of the life of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.

The free public showing will begin at 7 p.m. Jan. 18 at the Virginia Theatre, 203 W. Park St., Champaign. The weeklong commemoration runs through Jan. 24.

Jessica Sanders, who directed the movie that tells the true story of seven men wrongfully imprisoned for decades and then released after DNA evidence proved their innocence, will participate in a question-and-answer session after the movie. UI speech communication professor Stephen Hartnett also will take part in the discussion.

On Jan. 20, a free community event for families, “Justice and Activism: Then and Now,” will take place beginning at 2 p.m. in the lobby of the Krannert Center for the Performing Arts.

“American Blackout,” a film that won a special jury prize at the 2006 Sundance Film Festival, will be shown Jan. 23 beginning at 7 p.m. in the main lounge at Allen Hall. The movie chronicles the recurring patterns of voter disenfranchisement from Florida 2000 to Ohio 2004 while following the story of Cynthia McKinney, a member of Congress from Georgia.

A complete schedule of events is at www.admin.uiuc.edu/mlk/calendar/calendar.html.

National Trial Competition
Volunteer witnesses needed
The UI College of Law is hosting the National Trial Competition for Region 8 (Indiana and Illinois law schools) at the Champaign County Courthouse in Urbana on Feb. 15-17. The time commitment for witness volunteers is 5-8 p.m. on Feb. 15 or 16 and 8:30-11:30 a.m. or 1:30-4:30 p.m. on Feb. 17. Teams of students from the visiting law school will compete against each other in a jury trial setting.

Contact Steve Beckett, director of trial advocacy, at sbeckett@law.uiuc.edu or his assistant, Diana A. Marshall at damarsha@law.uiuc.edu.

University Primary School
Applications due March 16
University Primary School will accept enrollment applications through March 16 for the 2007-2008 academic year. For more information, contact director Nancy B. Hertzog at 333-3996 or visit www.ed.uiuc.edu/ups. Applications are available in Room 98 of the Children’s Research Center or may be downloaded from the Web.

University Primary School is an early childhood gifted education program that serves preschool, kindergarten and first-grade children in a project-based curriculum.

An informational meeting about the program will be from 7 to 8 p.m. Feb. 8 in Room 26 of the Children’s Research Center. Childcare will be provided.

Campus forum
Role in educational equity examined
Are public research universities still serving the public interest? Are low-income and minority students losing access? What are the consequences as these schools become more selective and competitive?

Those are among the questions Pennsylvania State University professor Don Heller will address as the featured speaker at the annual Hardie Forum on Jan. 24 at the UI.

The forum, “College Access and Public Research Universities: Does ‘Public’ Still Apply?” will be from 2-4 p.m. in the General Lounge (Room 210) of the Illini Union. A panel discussion involving members of the College of Education faculty will take place afterward.

The event is free and open to the public.

Heller is a professor and senior research associate in the Center for the Study of Higher Education at Penn State. His work has been honored by prominent higher education research associations and been cited numerous times in the national media.

As part of the forum, Heller and the panelists will respond to a recent report from The Education Trust: “Engines of Inequity: Diminishing Equity in the Nation’s Premier Public Universities.”

The event is sponsored by the Charles D. Hardie Forum on Democratic Educational Aims and Evaluation, in collaboration with the Forum for the Future of Public Education, both based in the College of Education.

Online conference
Innovation, technology explored
The fifth Illinois Online Conference for Teaching and Learning, “Innovation, Education, Technology and You,” is scheduled Feb. 14-16. This year, Illinois’ Online Master of Education Program, Curriculum, Technology and Education Reform (CTER), will feature a hybrid conference live from the College of Education and through the IOC community. The conference will be entirely on the Internet.

Topics include issues and concerns of faculty members and related technology support, learning resources, student services and professional development.

To register, go to www.ilonlineconf.org/index.cfm?page=listpre. Special group discounts are available. For more information, contact Steve Garren, IOC coordinator, Lake Land College, 217-234-5459, sgarren@lakeland.cc.il.us.
For information about the live presentations in the College of Education, contact Norma Scagnoli, scagnoli@uiuc.edu.

CAS MillerComm lecture series
Spring topics announced
Two of last year’s hottest topics, immigration and global warming, will get early attention this spring among a series of 14 talks and one symposium sponsored by the UI Center for Advanced Study.

Also among the diverse topics: art history, the Cold War in the Middle East, civil rights history, the forgotten discipline of chronology, Islamic headscarves and gender equality in France, rebuilding communities after natural disasters, the evolutionary origin of religiousness, and designing tools to support creativity.

Most of the spring lectures are part of the CAS MillerComm series, begun in 1973 and supported with funds from the George A. Miller Endowment and several co-sponsoring campus units. The MillerComm lectures provide a forum for discourse on topics spanning the university’s many disciplines.

All CAS talks are free and open to the public.

The first spring lecture, “Librarians and Readers in the South African Anti-Apartheid Struggle,” is  Jan. 30. Archie Dick, a George A. Miller Endowment Professor at Illinois and a professor of information science at the University of Pretoria, South Africa, will discuss the political oppression and state censorship of the 1980s in South Africa, under which reading became a subversive act. (4 p.m., Knight Auditorium, Spurlock Museum)

Subsequent lectures and other events upcoming:

 Jan. 31, “The New Immigrant Work Force: Unions, Community and the American Dream,” by Eliseo Medina, vice president of the Service Employees International Union. As a leader in efforts to unionize recent immigrants, many of whom work in low-paying jobs, Medina will make the case for a more-constructive approach to immigrants and a more-inclusive national immigration policy. His talk is related to the CAS Initiative on Immigration. (7:30 p.m., third floor, Levis Faculty Center)

 Feb. 5, “Solidarities Across Borders: Gender, Race and Class in Post-Disaster Reconstruction,” a daylong symposium looking at how major natural disasters often expose “disasters” of gender, racial and class inequalities, and how solidarities emerge across those inequalities to rebuild communities and hope. The symposium is part of the CAS Initiative on Mega-Disasters. (Third floor, Levis Faculty Center)

The morning session, from 9:30 a.m. to noon, will focus on the reconstructions after the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami and after hurricanes Andrew and Mitch. Speaking during the session will be Fatima Burnad, from the Society for Rural Education and Development, in India; Juanita Mainster, from Centro Campesino Farmworker Center Inc., in Florida, and Yamilet Mejia, from the Women’s Network Against Violence, in Nicaragua.

The afternoon session, from 1:30 to 3 p.m., will focus on Hurricane Katrina reconstruction. Speaking during that session will be Margaret Prescod, from the Crossroads Women’s Center in New Orleans; Curtis Mohammad, from Community Labor United and the People’s Hurricane Fund in New Orleans; Brenda Robineaux, principal chief of the Houma Nation in Louisiana, and Beverly Wright, from the Deep South Center for Environmental Justice at Xavier University of Louisiana. A roundtable discussion will follow at 3 p.m.

For additional information on these and later talks, check the calendar page on the CAS Web site, www.cas.uiuc.edu/calendar1.html. To receive notification on individual events, phone 333-6729 or e-mail cas@uiuc.edu; indicate your preference for postal mail or e-mail.

Also, CAS now is making audio podcasts and streaming video of many of its presentations available on its Web site, generally one to two weeks after the event.

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