Keynote Speakers »
IUT is proud to present the finest speakers available to enhance your conference experience.
Dr. James Wilkinson, Harvard University
Nurturing a Natural Resource: Educating Students as Critics and Collaborators.
The implementation of innovative pedagogy and improving the quality of student assessments of teaching require new efforts to educate students in the scholarship of teaching and learning. What do our students really know about concepts such as deep learning and metacognition? What do we know about student assumptions, and what areas call for further research? In this session, we will explore the pitfalls and advantages of broadening student roles in higher education, from critics to collaborators, and investigate some avenues for further inquiry.
Using campus resources more effectively means tapping into the potential that all groups on campus have for contributing to the joint tasks of research, teaching, and learning. Students have gained a major role in evaluating faculty on many campuses, yet studies have shown a remarkable gap between student understanding and expectation of research and teaching in higher education, and the beliefs and practices of the faculty. Students are often unaware of the pedagogical principles behind moves to introduce more active learning on campus, and can actively resist efforts to involve them more in their own courses.
James Wilkinson was Director of the Derek Bok Center for Teaching and Learning at Harvard University from 1988 until 2009, and Founding Director of the Boston University Teaching Center from 1985 until 1988. After receiving his doctorate from Harvard in history in 1974, he taught European history at Boston University and Harvard for 35 years until his retirement in 2009. Dr. Wilkinson has received Guggenheim and National Endowment for the Humanities fellowships and a Japan Government Fellowship for the Promotion of Scientific Research. He was awarded the Harvard Phi Beta Kappa Teaching Prize in 2003. His publications include a textbook on 20th-century European history, now in its tenth edition, Voices of Experience: Reflections from a Harvard Teaching Seminar, co-edited with Mary Ann Winkelmes, and numerous articles on history, teaching, and learning. Dr. Wilkinson is currently Senior Associate of the Derek Bok Center and Co-Director of IUT.
Dr. Mary-Ann Winkelmes, University of Illinois
Making the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning Transparent: The Illinois Initiative
For the past year, the Illinois Initiative on Transparency in Learning and Teaching has begun engaging faculty and students at institutions of higher education in the US and abroad in explicit dialogue about learning processes and teaching methods. The initiative addresses two important challenges in higher education:
1) For college and university students, learning how to learn has become as important as learning course content. Yet many courses and students continue to focus exclusively on what has traditionally been at the center of post-secondary instruction-- content knowledge—thus depriving students of essential cognitive tools.
2) At the same time, any barriers prevent faculty in higher education from conducting serious research on students’ learning. Faculty who do manage to conduct research on students’ learning rarely have the opportunity to connect their findings with data about larger student populations or national developments in higher education.
This session will review findings from the pilot year of the Transparency Initiative, aid participants in considering the implications, and invite them to define additional ways to promote transparent learning and teaching practices in higher education.
Mary-Ann Winkelmes joined the Provost’s Office at the University of Illinois as the Campus Coordinator for Teaching and Learning Programs and Administrative Provost Fellow in March, 2009. She is an educational consultant for the Lilly Endowment and has facilitated pedagogy workshops for faculty at colleges, universities and seminaries in the United States and Europe. Recently, she was elected to a three-year term on the Core Committee of the Professional and Organizational Development Network in Higher Education, and appointed Chair of the Research Committee and Chair of the Menges Award for Outstanding Research in Educational Development. She served for four years as Associate Director of the Center for Teaching and Learning at the University of Chicago, where she continues to offer a pedagogy seminar for junior faculty, and has received numerous prizes for her teaching. Trained as an art historian with a special focus on Italian Renaissance art and architecture, her current pedagogical research is a project that promotes transparency between teachers and students about methods of teaching and learning.