The John M. Burns Conference
Friday, September 28, 2012
Location: TLPDC Room 151
The Texas Tech University Teaching Academy presents the 11th Annual John M. Burns Conference on the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning featuring Dr. Craig E. Nelson.
Click here to register for the events.
About Dr. Craig Nelson
Named in honor of Professor John M. Burns for his support of the teaching mission at Texas Tech University, the conference will feature plenary speaker Dr. Craig E.Nelson, Ph.D., Professor Emeritus of Biology at Indiana University where he has been since 1966. His biological research (60+ articles) has been on evolution and ecology, most recently on sex-determination in turtles. He has taught biology, intensive freshman seminars, various honors courses, several collaboratively taught interdisciplinary courses (mostly in environmental studies) and a graduate biology course on Alternative Approaches to Teaching College Biology. His teaching papers address critical thinking and mature valuing, diversity, active learning, teaching evolution and the scholarship of teaching and learning. He has presented invited workshops at many national meetings and individual institutions (in 37 states and 8 countries). He has served on the editorial boards of national journals on pedagogy and the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning. He has also served on teaching grant review panels for the National Science Foundation and other national programs. He was co-director (for 10 years) of a set of NSF funded institutes for high school biology teachers on “Evolution and the Nature of Science” (resources for this: www.indiana.edu/~ensiweb/home.html), was founding Director of Environmental Programs in IU's School of Public and Environmental Affairs, was instrumental in the development of IU's award winning Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (SOTL) program http://citl.indiana.edu/programs/sotl/index.php) and was the first President of the International Society for the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (http://www.issotl.org/). He received several awards for distinguished teaching from IU and nationally competitive awards from Vanderbilt and Northwestern. In 2000, he became a Carnegie Scholar and was designated as The Outstanding Research And Doctoral University Professor Of The Year by the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching and the Council for the Advancement and Support of Education (CASE). He received the President's Medal for Excellence, "the highest honor bestowed by Indiana University," in 2001. (Short CV with URLs for several articles: http://mypage.iu.edu/~nelson1/)
Conference Schedule
"FOSTERING CRITICAL THINKING--A QUICK OVERVIEW"Dr. Craig E. Nelson Click here to register for this event.Sophistication in thinking is prerequisite to many of the goals of liberal and professional education including critical thinking, mature valuing, effective communication, a responsible self and collaborative interpersonal interactions. The basic question for faculty is: Why are sophisticated ways of thinking so difficult for students to acquire? We will examine a major framework for fostering critical thinking: |
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LUNCH Provided – Click here to register for this event. |
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"DYSFUNCTIONAL ILLUSIONS OF RIGOR: LESSONS FROM THE SCHOLARSHIP OF TEACHING AND LEARNING"Dr. Craig E. Nelson Click here to register for this event. My initial teaching practices were based on several “Dysfunctional Illusions of Rigor.” Overcoming them required revision of my ideas on the value of “hard" courses; the effectiveness of traditional methods; grade inflation, what students should be able to do initially; the fairness of traditional approaches; the importance of fixed deadlines; the importance of content coverage; and more. I will present some of my initial illusions paired with more realistic views. These more realistic views will be framed in terms of key research findings and some readily accessible models for improved practices. |
For more information on the conference, please contact Tina Sansom at 742-0133.