coE-News: July 1, 2011
July 1, 2011 The Friday Post Vol. 7, No. 1
You’re reading coE-News, an electronic newsletter produced several times a year by the College of Education News & Communications Office to keep faculty, staff, students, alumni and friends up-to-date on college news, activities and achievements.
GOT NEWS? We want to hear it. Submit individual or unit news and calendar events of collegewide interest to llansford@coe.ufl.edu for publication consideration. All submissions must be in writing or via e-mail and must include contact information for follow-up questions. (Include full titles and program areas of featured faculty and staff; for featured students, include their program area, degree status and major or concentration area.)
Headlines
Researchers awarded $5.5M in grants to help teachers reduce disruptive classroom behavior
University of Florida researchers in special education and early childhood studies have received two federal grants totaling $5.5 million to conduct studies aimed at reducing significant behavior problems in children that can disrupt the classroom learning environment. Their intervention research targets at-risk children during two of the most critical times of their development—before they enter kindergarten and the transitional middle school years (grades 6 through 8). The grants were awarded by the Institute of Education Sciences, the research arm of the U.S. Department of Education. Maureen Conroy is leading the prekindergarten study, while Stephen Smith and Ann Daunic are developing a lesson series teaching middle school students with significant behavior problems techniques to control their emotions and behavior in social situations. (more)
Businesswoman’s $1M gift creates professorship in early childhood studies
Entrepreneur Anita Zucker, a 1972 UF education graduate, last year challenged fellow alumni who had never contributed to make an annual donation to the College of Education. sweetening the deal by matching such gifts dollar-for-dollar. Today, Zucker is leading by example, pledging $1 million to create a second endowed professorship in early childhood studies at the college. (more)
Re-igniting middle school reform is goal of Shewey Scholars program
Newly appointed Shewey Scholars are, back row: Maureen Shankman, Darby Delane, Colleen Swain, Odalis Manduley, Donna Reid; Front row: advisers Kathy Shewey, Paul George, Nancy Dana. Not pictured: Scholars Phillip Koslowski, Joy Schadkow.
UF’s College of Education has launched a professional scholars program–teaming UF education faculty with Alachua County middle-school teachers and district administrators–to ignite a grassroots movement to reform the nation’s troubled middle-school education system. Three UF education professors and four Alachua County middle school teachers were introduced recently as members of the inaugural class of the Shewey Scholars program. They include COE faculty members Colleen Swain (curriculum and instruction), Darby Delane (university-school partnerships coordinator for the School of Teaching and Learning) and Joy Schackow (STL/Lastinger Center professor-in-residence in Pinellas County schools). (more)
College News & Notices
Course syllabi going online starting fall semester
UF administration now requires that the syllabi for all courses and sections offered each semester must be posted on publicly accessible websites starting this fall. Syllabi must be posted in PDF format at least three days prior to the first day of classes–that’s Aug. 19 for the fall semester. The mandate applies to all courses offered face-to-face, online and in blended formats. The COE has created designated space on the college website for posting the syllabi of all COE courses. For more information, contact your school director or Associate Dean for Academic Affairs Tom Dana.
Submit your scholarly works to UF’s ‘Open Access’ digital archive
UF’s Institutional Repository is soliciting journal articles, grant proposals, dissertations, monographs, podcasts, and other scholarly work from faculty and students to be archived and made publicly available through Open Access, the digital archive for the intellectual output of the University of Florida community. Open Access provides free, permanent, web-based access to to all scholarly publications and academic artifacts submitted. It’s a way to improve visibility for faculty and student scholarship and share scholarly work in the broadest forum possible. Visit the IR@UF site (http://ufdc.ufl.edu/ufirg) for more information and a self-submittal tool, or contact Ben Walker, head of the UF Education Library, at 352-273-2545.
Subscribe to COE’s YouTube account
The College of Education has its own YouTube account on the “educationUF” channel where you can view a number of informative videos about the college and the activities of its faculty, students and alumni. The site also allows visitors to subscribe and receive notification when new COE videos are posted. Seven videos are currently posted, including “EduGator Nation,” an overview of the college, and “Molding Master Teachers,” describing the award-winning Florida Master Teachers Initiative of the college’s Lastinger Center for Learning. Check it out at http://www.youtube.com/educationuf#p/u. Additional videos are planned.
Staff dedicates lounge to dean
The college staff recently dedicated Norman Hall’s staff lounge to Dean Catherine Emihovich (pictured, right, at ceremony holding framed photo). Emihovich, who is stepping down from the college’s top executive post in August but will remain a tenured faculty member, said she recognized the need for a staff lounge immediately upon her arrival at UF in 2002 and made it one of her priorities. The lounge, which opened in 2010 as part of extensive renovations in Old Norman, features a kitchen, microwave oven, refrigerator, sofa, chairs, table and a full bookshelf.
Did you know . . . about UF and Google?
The University of Florida heads the current list of the top 20 most googled colleges and universities in the United States,according to CampusSplash, a blog on college life and admissions hosted by the Huffington Post news website. Campus Splash staff took it upon themselves to compile the list based on stats provided by Google’s traffic estimator.
Honors & Appointments
Faculty
Ponjuan draws widespread attention to education barriers facing Latino males
Ponjuan
A report written by COE Assistant Professor Luis Ponjuan on “The Vanishing Latino Male in Higher Education” was the most downloaded article in 2010 in the Journal of Hispanic Higher Education. Ponjuan, director of the college’s Institute of Higher Education, continues to draw attention to the academic plight of Hispanic-Latino males in America’s education system. On June 16, he presented his research findings on the topic at the headquarters of the National Education Association in Washington, D.C. His audience of NEA governance leaders, executive managers, staff and invited guests heard his 90-minute report on the overwhelming barriers that Latino boys face on their educational journeys towards higher education. (See news media coverage generated by his reports at end of this e-newsletter under “In The News.”)
Students
Doctoral student featured in TV news report on iPads as teaching tool
Jon Munford, a Collier County fifth-grade teacher and a doctoral student in the COE’s online Ed.D. Professional Practice degree program, was featured recently in a television news report by WBBH-TV (Ft. Myers/Naples NBC affiliate) on the use of iPads as a teaching tool. That happens to be a topic covered in one of Munford’s distance-learning courses the previous semester by UF education professor Nancy Dana.
In the News
Below is a sampling of recent news media reports featuring the College of Education and its faculty, students and alumni.
June 30, 2011
Gainesville Sun / Independent Florida Alligator: M. Conroy, S. Smith, A. Daunic (Spec. Ed)
Conroy
The Gainesville Sun and the Florida Alligator (UF’s campus newspaper) both published front-page stories on two grants from the U.S. Department of Education, worth a combined $5.5 million, awarded to UF researchers in special education and early childhood studies to pursue interventions aimed at reducing significant behavior problems in children that can disrupt the classroom learning environment. The UF researchers were Maureen Conroy, Stephen Smith and Ann Daunic.
June 26, 2011
The Chronicle of Higher Education: Luis Ponjuan (UF Institute of Higher Education)
The Chronicle covered Luis Ponjuan’s presentation June 24 at the Latino Male Symposium, in Austin, Tex., in which he declared that Latino men are “vanishing from the higher-education pipeline, a trend that could spell serious trouble given current demographic trends.”
June 26, 2011
St. Petersburg Times: Lastinger Center for Learning
Pinellas County superintendent Julie Janssen told School Board members last week that Melrose Elementary School will proceed with plans to create a partnership with UF’s Lastinger Center for Learning to transform Melrose into the district’s first professional learning school. The Times reported the story in an article published June 26. An earlier story, June 7, in Gradebook, the Times’ education blog, had reported the temporary postponement of the partnership.
June 21, 2011
Gainesville Sun: Anita Zucker (distinguished alumna/donor)
An article in the Sun reported on 1972 education alumna Anita Zucker’s $1 million pledge to create an endowed professorship in the college’s early childhood studies program.
May 2, 2011
Hispanic Outlook magazine: Luis Ponjuan (Institute of Higher Education)
Ponjuan was quoted in a 3-page article about how Hispanic males lagged substantially behind Hispanic females and other minorities of both genders at nearly every critical juncture of the higher education pipeline. The article also mentioned two upcoming symposiums on the topic, June 13 at UF and June 24 at UT-Austin, organized by Ponjuan and co-researchers Mary Ann Clark (UF counselor education) and Victor Saenz (UT-Austin).
April 28, 2011
Education Daily: Lastinger Center for Learning
With $5 million from the U.S. Education Department’s Investing in Innovation (i3) Fund, UF’s Lastinger Center will expand its Master Teacher Initiative, which gives K-12 teachers working in high-poverty schools job-embedded, classroom-oriented training to include pre-K educators. This news report also appeared on the website of the American Association of Colleges for Teacher Education (AACTE).
