2000-2001 Faculty-in-Residence

The Center for the Advancement of Teaching is pleased to welcome three faculty members who will assist the Center in three important initiatives.

Dr. Robert Berman (Philosophy) will facilitate teaching, learning, and technology events,
Dr. Barbara Green (Biology) will lead the Scholarship of Teaching Working Group, and
Dr. David G. Lanoue (English) will lead the Course Portfolio Working Group.

More information about each faculty member follows.

Dr. Robert Berman will serve as a faculty-in-residence in the Center for the Advancement of Teaching during the 2000-2001 academic year. Dr. Berman received his Ph.D. from the Graduate Faculty New School for Social Research. Since joining Xavier in 1988, he has taught Ethics, Philosophy of Law, Law and Humanities, Logic, and 19^th and 20^th Century Philosophy courses. Dr. Berman served as chair of the Philosophy Department from 1992-1999, and was a Center for the Advancement of Teaching Fellow with support from the W. K. Kellogg Foundation.

Dr. Berman will provide opportunities for Xavier faculty members to consider the relationships among technology, teaching, and student learning. The Center has, in recent academic years, provided technology workshops that focused almost exclusively on the technical aspects rather than on the educational or pedagogical aspects of information technology. The Center will continue to provide the technical workshops during the 2000-2001 academic year. Dr. Berman will complement this effort by offering faculty a venue in which to think broadly, deeply, and critically about educational and pedagogical issues related to information technology. With the dizzying pace at which technology changes and the issues that technology creates surface in higher education, it is essential that the Xavier faculty have a venue, or several venues, to think broadly and deeply about teaching, technology, and learning.

A calendar of events will be announced soon.

Dr. Barbara Green obtained a Ph.D. in Molecular Biophysics from Florida State University. She joined the Xavier faculty in August 1995. Barbara is particularly interested in using case studies in her Biology courses. In summer 1999, she attended the NSF-sponsored Case Studies in Science Workshop at SUNY-Buffalo. Workshop speakers presented many different methods and sources for teaching case studies. In addition, Barbara wrote and taught a case study to a group of students and peers to receive feedback. She subsequently taught the case study twice during the 1999-2000 academic year in two different courses. She is currently writing the teacher's notes to accompany her case study. The Case Study Teaching in Science website (http://ublib.buffalo.edu/libraries/projects/cases/case.php) publishes all completed cases and notes.

Barbara also attended the Conference on Scholarship of Teaching and Learning in April 2000, at Indiana University at South Bend. Conference presenters discussed multidisciplinary examples of conducting and documenting classroom research for publishing. Barbara conducted a pilot study of classroom research in one of her courses spring 2000. In addition, she attended a presentation of the online Journal of the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (http://www.iusb.edu/~josotl).

During the 2000-2001 academic year, Barbara will coordinate activities of the Scholarship of Teaching Working Group (SOTWG). She is interested in establishing a multidisciplinary foundation for the scholarship of teaching. This would include compiling a database of resources such as:

peer reviewed journals and websites that publish results
organizations and conferences where results could be presented
colleges and professors that are conducting the scholarship of teaching
colleagues who specialize in designing instruments for data collection and analysis
consultants.

These resources would allow faculty to design and implement classroom research projects. SOTWG will give faculty an opportunity to explore these resources and discuss classroom research ideas.

Dr. David G. Lanoue, Professor of English, born in Omaha, Nebraska (1954), he earned his B.A. at Creighton University (1976) and his M.A. and Ph.D. in English at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln in the area of medieval literature (1977, 1981). He began teaching at Xavier in 1981. In the 1980s he began to study Japanese and delved into the one-breath poetry known as haiku. From 1984 on, he published original haiku, translations, and haiku-related essays in various magazines and anthologies. He conducted research in Japan in 1987 and 1988, and participated in the N.E.H. Literary Translation Institute at the U. of California, Santa Cruz, in 1989. The result of this labor was the book, Issa: Cup-of-Tea Poems; Selected Haiku of Kobayashi Issa (Asian Humanities, 1991). He served two consecutive terms as chairperson of Xavier's English Department (1985-91). In 1993-97 he taught as an associate of Bard College's Writing and Thinking Institute.

Recent projects include an Issa website with a searchable archive of haiku (http://www.xula.edu/~dlanoue/issa/) and the novel, Haiku Guy (Red Moon Press 2000).

In 2000-2001, he is facilitating the Course Portfolio Working Group. More information about this group is found at http://cat.xula.edu/initiatives/cpwg/.

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