Faculty Center Newsletter

Fall 2006 has been a productive semester for students and community partners involved in a number of service-learning partnerships. Therese Buchmiller and Chris Butler’s students collaborated on an ongoing project with local farmers, now in its third year. Writing students interviewed farmers and wrote profiles about their work in the community, and photography students toured and photographed the farms. Photos are given to farmers for their own promotional materials and are also displayed throughout the community to educate the public about the benefits of purchasing locally grown foods...read more

This past fall, the Academic Assistance Center teamed up with the Advising, Registrar's, Disability and Counseling offices to create a comprehensive, one-stop-shop workshop for students on academic probation. The workshops were designed to provide a holistic, problem solving approach to poor academic performance, as opposed to a punitive one. It is common knowledge that students will struggle if they have poor reading skills, or don't realize that college classes require more sophisticated study strategies than they used in high school. However, students can also struggle because they have an undiagnosed learning or psychiatric disability...read more

Recently the UMM community approved submission of the UMM Strategic Positioning document and plan. One important aspect to this plan is the goal for UMM to produce “interculturally competent” graduates. The campus commitment to educate a diverse student body and build a respectful inclusive culture is rooted in our public liberal arts mission. The faculty of UMM will play an important role in enabling students to reach this goal. Likewise, the Faculty Center for Learning and Teaching will support faculty in continuing to become interculturally competent citizens themselves. Under the leadership of the Strategic Positioning Task Force...read more

For many of you the idea of 'sustainability' has been a part of your personal and professional life for years; for others, it may be a new term that you would like explained, both for its meaning and relevance. Stealing language from the 1987 United Nations Brundtland report commissioned to examine this topic- sustainable development is: development that meets the needs of the present generation without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs . Sustainability is connected to familiar ideas of economic, social and environmental stewardship, the three together designated as the 'triple-bottom...read more

This video was created for use at the UMM Fall 2006 Faculty Retreat to illustrate the tools that today's college students are using for social interaction and academic work. In preparation for creating this video, we visited with a group of UMM students to find out what a typical homework session is like for them. We found that they use multiple tools simultaneously; including chat, email, word processing, multiple web browser windows, iTunes, Facebook, and quite a few others...read more

GenEdWeb PROGRAM

Since 1997, the GenEdWeb (General Education on the Web) program at UMM has served academically talented high school students through the Minnesota Post-Secondary Enrollment Options program, non traditional students, and UMM students with online instruction in the liberal arts.

GenEdWeb currently offers twelve different courses online that meet general education requirements (GER) at UMM, some of which are not offered on-campus...read more

INTER-CAMPUS CONVERSATIONS ON INNOVATIVE TEACHING

The third Inter-Campus Conversations on Innovative Teaching was presented on November 7 from the Morris campus using Breeze.

The one-hour meeting included five presentations, topics derived from faculty involved in the Bush Grant during the past two years. Presentations from Morris included the video "Today's College Student" which was created to illustrate the tools that students are using for social interaction and academic work; Nancy Carpenter and Ted Pappenfus presented "Technology for the Interactive Chemistry Classroom;" and Duane Millslagle (UMD), Ken Meyers (UMC), and Sehoya Cotner (UMTC) shared information about each of their projects.

Please check out the Breeze presentation to listen to the meeting in its entirety.