Frances Gage, assistant professor of fine arts, published her article “Baroque Art and Architecture in Italy” in the Oxford Bibliographies Renaissance and Reformation (Margaret King, ed.; Oxford University Press, April 2014).
Sherri Weber, Jing Zhang, Jevon Hunter, and Chris Shively, all assistant professors of elementary education and reading, presented "How Teacher Preparation Is Being Transformed by Digital Technologies at an Urban Comprehensive College" at the American Educational Research Association’s 2014 annual conference in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, April 3–7. Their talk focused on four distinct Internet technologies:
Weber investigated how blogs facilitated the reflections of preservice teachers who experienced an international professional development school. She found that blogs enabled preservice teachers to share reflections with one another, with their professor, and most importantly, with future preservice teachers, because the blogging software enables posts to transcend time.
Zhang examined her use of a collaborative writing tool called Storybird with her graduate students. Her research indicated that her students thought Storybird improved their interest and engagement in her course. They felt it was a useful tool for teaching writing and believed that 3- and 4-year-old children could benefit from this web-based application.
Hunter looked at Twitter as an instructional and learning tool with his graduate students. His students believed that this social networking tool could be used by teachers and students to accomplish English language arts learning objectives. Despite Twitter's pedagogical potential, Hunter’s students also became frustrated with their ability to use this online tool. He attributed their frustration to the ongoing debate among American educators regarding the effectiveness of emerging pedagogies, such as Twitter.
Shively demonstrated the pedagogical potential of using a wiki to facilitate the co-construction, by graduate students and their professor, of technological pedagogical content knowledge (known as TPaCK) (Mishra and Koehler, 2006) in an online course. Lesson plans, reflections, and feedback data revealed that graduate students were able to identify many affordances and constraints of the technologies they used, which led to their development of technological pedagogical knowledge but not their technological, pedagogical, and content knowledge. This might have been caused by their lack of teaching experience and/or their observations of inadequate teaching with technology. Data suggested that they did not understand what made the concepts they were teaching difficult or easy for the grade level designated for their lesson.
During their presentations, each researcher established the pedagogical potential of using these free online pedagogies as "cognitive partners" (Angeli et al., 2008, p.14) with graduate students. With each of these technologies, the computer facilitated the exchange of ideas between a classroom full of students that transcended traditional school-based time frames. The results of their research are important to education professors because technology has the potential to transform content learning for diverse learners (Rose and Meyer, 2002; Angeli and Valanides, 2008). As the surrounding educational landscape becomes more diverse, teacher educators need to provide their teacher candidates with learning experiences that develop their pedagogical knowledge, a knowledge base that should include online tools.
Questions and feedback can be sent to Chris Shively.
Wendell Rivera, senior counselor in the Buffalo State Counseling Center, received the 2014 Delbert Mullens Thinking Outside the Box Award at the University at Buffalo's Graduate School of Education commencement exercises on May 16. The award is given to graduates who are committed to making a corner of the world better and who have shown creativity in their studies and exceptional flexibility in balancing the demands of school, family, and the community.
Jeffrey Hirschberg's short film, Why Can't They All Be Like Johnny Depp? was named an official selection at the NY Shorts Fest (the New York International Short Film Festival). The film, which will screen in New York City on Tuesday, May 27, at 7:30 p.m., was the result of a scholarship Hirschberg received last summer from NYC-based Killer Films and Southampton Arts. Tickets and info are available on the Shorts Fest website.
Bridget María Chesterton's article "Historians Working Collaboratively?" has been accepted for the fall edition of Perspectives on History. The article considers the benefits of collaborative writing in history, a field that has always privileged single-author works.
Jason Knight, assistant professor in the Geography and Planning Department, was an invited panelist at the American Planning Association National Conference, held in Atlanta, Georgia, April 26–30. The panel session, "Land Banks: Successful Policy Programs in Addressing Vacant and Foreclosed Properties," focused on explaining the benefits of creating a land bank to repurpose vacant and foreclosed residential and commercial properties.
Nancy Weekly, head of collections and Charles Cary Rumsey curator at the Burchfield Penney Art Center, presented "Charles E. Burchfield: Inventive Virtuoso" at the Detroit Institute of Arts in Detroit, Michigan, on Friday, April 11, as part of the Arts + Minds lecture series. Weekly was invited to speak about Burchfield, who was the primary artist featured in the exhibition Let Me Show You What I Saw: American Views on City and Country, 1912–1963, organized by Nancy Sojka, curator and department head of the Forum for Prints, Drawings & Photographs.
Weekly, who also serves as an instructor in the History and Social Studies Education Department's museum studies program, presented her research on Burchfield’s paintings in the DIA's collection, illustrating her presentation with these as well as works from the Burchfield Penney and prominent national collections. She argued that Burchfield has been identified as a naturalist, realist, modernist, romantic, synesthete, and transcendentalist—all with equal validity. He pioneered unique watercolor techniques and invented symbols to convey emotions and sensations. Burchfield’s range of interests, passionate devotion to nature, and cyclical interpretation of subjects keeps his work fascinating to audiences today.
Sue McMillen, professor of mathematics, with Ellen Friedland and Pixita del Prado Hill, both associate professors of Elementary Education and Reading, presented “Supporting the Common Core through Mathematics-Literacy Checklists” at the annual conference of the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics, held in New Orleans, Louisiana, April 9–12. In the session, participants explored two mathematics-literacy checklists designed to help teachers meet the Common Core. The checklists were developed with teacher input to serve as cognitive “safety nets” that ensure effective integration of appropriate strategies before, during, and after instruction.
Sue McMillen, professor of mathematics, presented a gallery workshop, “Combining Math, Art, and Poetry to Support the Common Core,” at the 2014 annual conference of the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics, held in New Orleans, Louisiana, April 9–12. Participants discussed and created short illustrated poems based on math content ranging from basic operations to linear equations.
A review of Ed Taylor's latest novel, Theo, ran in the Guardian on April 18. The book will be released this month (Old Street Publishing). His story "Cinderella" will be published in the next issue of Great Lakes Review, and his poem "Adultery" will appear in the next issue of Slipstream. Taylor is the former executive director of Just Buffalo Literary Center and the author of the poetry collections Idiogest (BlazeVOX, 2010) and The Rubaiyat of Hazmat (BlazeVOX, 2004). His work has appeared in a variety of U.S. and U.K. publications and anthologies.