Archive for the ‘University of Michigan’ Category
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Annemarie Palincsar
Annemarie Palincsar is giving a talk entitled “Navigating Confluence: Programs of Research at the Intersection of Science and Literacy.”
She gave a very thoughtful discussion of the issues that come up in attempting to support development of science lessons that will encourage students to think as scientists. The relative value of firsthand vs. secondhand investigations varies according to a number of factors, including the ease/likelihood of collecting reliable data.
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Tabbye Chavous
Tabbye Chavous, my CPEP colleague, is giving a talk entitled “Conceptual and Practical Considerations for Education School in Addressing Racial Achievement Disparities: The Interface of Social Science and Education.” Her emphasis is on the variability in the ways in which racial identity can affect African-American students’ educational experience.Variability and context are not features that either psychology or education have dealt with well, although this is changing for both theoretical and statistical reasons.
The talk itself is very interesting but hard to sum up. There was an interesting discussion of how to incorporate issues of diversity into teaching and training, with a strong plea for integrating these issues throughout the curriculum. A curriculum where these issues are dealt with separately is likely to increase the chance that minority students will be dealt with through a racialized lens. She cited data that classes with larger proportions ofAfrican-American students are more likely to be taught via direct instruction, which may be the result of teachers defaulting to more didactic methods with students with whom they are less comfortable.
Diversity as a value (because it’s the right thing to do) or tenet (fundamental belief).
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Stephen Mucher
.Stephen Mucher, from Eastern Michigan University, is giving the first talk, entitled: “Each Subject Has Its Own Technique”: Academic Subject Matter and Professional Teacher Preparation, 1879-1927.”
Why was the U of M the first university in the U.S. to set up a chair in The Science and Art of Teaching? In the 1870s, Michigan switched from admitting students based on individual exams to admitting all graduates of high schools approved by the faculty. This in turn meant that faculty had to visit high schools and approve them. The initial focus was on teachers, who were often graduates of the U of M, so the question of how those students were prepared to teach effectively then emerged.
Interestingly, the initial version of this under Payne focused on teaching, teachers, and content, all issues of interest to the Literature, Science, and Arts school. Alan Whitney, who took over the school inspection job in 1903, pushed hard for a separation from LS&A and a focus on issues of pedagogy over content.
It’s fair to say that Whitney comes off as the villain of the story, at least if you believe that a separation of content and pedagogy is a bad thing.
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Movin on up
As of May 1, I’m the chair of the Combined Program in Education & Psychology, which is one of the oldest interdisciplinary programs at the University of Michigan (next year will be its 50th anniversary). Last Tuesday we held a daylong retreat to make plans for the future of the program, which was a very exciting, exhausting affair. It will be a challenge to try to keep this program together during some tough times at the university, while continuing to set up my own lab and life here.
Courtesy of the sporadically fascinating but always obscene website, www.gapingvoid.com, comes a typically cynical depiction of organizational hierarchies. I’m not sure whether I’m moving to the “clueless” or the “sociopathic” level. Perhaps I can find a way to combine them.
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Mobile Eye
I haven’t had a chance to play with this yet, but here’s a nice picture of the Mobile Eye system that Yan Ming took.
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Singapore math
I have a bad habit of trying to insert a chengyu (成语; cheng2 yu3) in my talks wherever I can. The one for today is: 不耻下问 (bu4 chi3 xia4 wen4), from Confucius, who described someone as unafraid of learning from subordinates (asking those below you, literally). I brought that in after putting up a data table from the TIMSS-R results that show Singapore at the top in Math and seocnd in Science at 8th grade, with the U.S. somewhere below. A very sharp group of people…hope I have more chances to interact with them.
This is also an experiment to see how Chinese characters work in WordPress. Now that I am officially a member of the Center for Chinese Studies at the University of Michigan, I’d better work on my Chinese. They, by the way, have the coolest letterhead ever, with a huge seal carved in ancient characters (the one shown on the first page of their website).
UPDATE: Xiaobin told me about this site, where you can enter a character and get all the 成语 containing it.
