Faculty News
Four members of the Education Department presented at the 92nd Annual National Meeting of the Association of Teacher Educators (ATE) February 11-15, 2012. All four members offered single paper sessions.Deb Bracke and Chuck Hyser, in their presentation Re-Forming Norms: Navigating the Newlands of Parent Involvement, shared how they implemented ten workshops for Longfellow Elementary parents that redefined non-English speaking parents' initial conceptions of involvement in their children's education and re-conceptualized the parent role as "teachers."
Mike Schroeder and Sohyun An of Kennesaw State University (former Augustana assistant professor) invited participants to consider methods used in a capstone course to challenge teacher candidates to "live" factors associated with poverty and race in K-12 students in their session, What It's Like: Challenging Middle Class Teacher Candidates to Understand Poverty, Race and Privilege.
Pat Shea presented Reflective Conversations: Engaging a Diverse Faculty Group as a Reflective Practitioner Community which addressed the challenges and rewards of establishing consistent collegial gatherings to explore and share frameworks and understandings of the knowledge of teaching and learning in higher education.
Two "micro fictions" by Kelly Daniels (English Dept.) have appeared or are forthcoming in The Journal of Microliterature, "an online and print journal of critically acclaimed fiction and nonfiction between 1-1000 words in length." You can find the online version of "Almost Spring" here. "That Buzzing Sound Below" will be published on June 3. Kelly is particularly proud of these pieces because he wrote them following his own prompts while leading sessions of After Hours: Poetry and Prose, Augustana's creative writing club. He wonders how many faculty members will recognize the setting of "Almost Spring."
The Faculty Research Committee is pleased to announce the recipients of the 2012 Faculty Research Awards:
| Jennifer Burnham | Geography | Migration patterns of Arctic terns and black-legged kittiwakes |
| Kelly Daniels | English | Potential residency at the Virginia Center of Creative Arts |
| Catherine Goebel | Art History | Research on Whistler criticism |
| Ellen Hay | Communication Studies | Student-to-student interaction and its effects on learning and class climate |
| Rick Jaeschke | Music | Arrangement of Philip Glass's Heroes Symphony for the concert band |
| Jason Koontz | Biology | Taxonomic research on Delphinium |
| Kimberly Murphy | Biology | Amphibian populations in restored wet praries |
| Molly Todd | History | Book: Movement for Peace: Displacement and the Rebuilding of Nations in Twentieth Century Latin America |
| Peter Xiao | Art | Autobiographical work related to memories during China's turmoil |