I returned to the Institute Français de l’Education for September and October of 2012. IFE is one part of the Ecole Normale Supérieure de Lyon. My primary project here is to document College for Kids, a program found across the United States, for the French. I have several other projects as a result of prior connections with scholars here, and will add notes about my progress over the next few months to this page…
… I’ve been so busy I haven’t had time to add much in the way of notes about what I’m doing. Most of my time the first month was spent reviewing book proofs for the book I was working on while at IFE last year, Learning Matters: The Transformation of US Higher Education. It’s co-authored with a former UW-Parkside colleague, Peter Hoff, who went on to become President of the University of Maine… It was published at the end of October, with a description, quotes, and further details provided here.
September 24, 2012: I participated in a meeting of the Comité Scientifique, La pédagogie universitaire à l’heure du numérique: Questionnement et éclairages et recherche [Scientific Committee, University pedagogy in the digital age: Questions and research clarifications], at IFE.
September 27, 2012: I participated in the colloquium launching the new Michel Serres Institute for Resources and Public Goods. I’m one of the Founding members by virtue of sporadically helping them think about how to manage interdisciplinary, international and intercultural conversations.
October 2, 2012: I gave a talk about my project at IFE this year, entitled “Iterations: An Examination of Learning within a College for Kids course,” to the ICAR lab here, which stands for Interactions, Corpus, Apprentissages, Représentations. Very receptive group with lots of good questions after.
October 15, 2012: I gave a talk entitled “College for Kids = Hands-on Activities for Students, Professional Development for Teachers” for the Fondation La main à la pâte, in Paris, France, described in further detail here.
October 17-19, 2012: I participated in Journées ViSA [Vidéos des situations d’enseignement et d’apprentissage, or Videotapes of teaching and learning contexts], as a member of the Conseil Scientifique [Scientific Council], which was held at the Université Bordeaux Segalen, in Bordeaux, France. This is a research team I’ve been connected to for the past 4 years, and this was my 5th (and last) meeting with them. It has been a pleasure working with all of you!
October 25, 2012: I presented “Best practices: How the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning solves the problems offered by today’s students” as part of the Colloque “Le métier d’enseignant aujourd’hui et demain” [Colloquium on the Teaching Profession Today and Tomorrow] at the Ecole Normale Supérieure de Lyon.
Wendy Leeds-Hurwitz
Director, Center for Intercultural Dialogue
Center for Intercultural Dialogue 