PROJECT PROFILES

Millersville University

by Eric Hofmann

Located near Lancaster, Pennsylvania, and named one of "The Top Regional Public Schools" in last year's U.S. News and World Report survey, Millersville is a "teaching school," where even the students are concerned with best practices. But with most faculty members carrying a 4/4 teaching load, folks there say it can be difficult to find proper time to reflect on student learning. VKP Campus Coordinator Tracey Weis (History) calls the opportunity for a small group of faculty to meet regularly for deep and substantive discussions about teaching, "Phenomenal!" As Elizabeth Masciale-Walmer (English) notes, "At Millersville we're really good at having conversations. But this is sustained conversation."

The local VKP team builds their bi-weekly, lunch-hour conversations around the questions asked in the VKP online modules. Using a model adapted from the AAHE Peer Review of Teaching Initiative:

http://www.aahe.org/teaching/Exercise_1.htm

The core group has started thinking of their courses as scholarly arguments; therefore, they focus on the choices and rationale that underlie their syllabi. The faculty investigators modified the process a bit: instead of focusing on solely their own courses, Millersville's team took turns presenting another's courses. Weis reports that "the review of the course designs gave us an opportunity to slow down." That's one of the goals behind the VKP. Now team members look at their courses to determine if the learning activities effectively direct students toward the implicit and explicit course goals.

The scholarship of teaching is not new to the local group, nor is the integration of technology and course content. For example, John Ward, in the Department of Educational Foundations, worked with colleagues at Millersville, the University of North London, and two elementary schools in Lancaster County to develop Harmony Elementary School.

http://harmony.millersville.edu

A web-based virtual elementary school, Harmony encourages teacher educators, pre-service teachers, and in-service teachers to collaborate in the design and assessment of learning activities centered on the emerging Pennsylvania standards for K-5 classroom.

Since all Millersville faculty instruct pre-service teachers--either in General Education courses, courses taken to fulfill major requirements, or professional education courses--effective preparation of prospective teachers was a common concern that animated Millersville's VKP seminar members. In a VKP core meeting in March, Weis presented Masciale-Walmer's ENGL 487 course:
"Seminar in Teaching Writing "

http://muweb.millersville.edu/~emascial/engl487/487.html

An upper level writing seminar, this required course for prospective teachers is organized around the Writing Partners Project in which each student mentors a developing student writer for ten weeks.

http://muweb.millersville.edu/~emascial/wpartner.html

This project, conducted as teacher research, culminates in a final case study. Two VKP investigators--Masciale -Walmer and Ward--shared students with a colleague teaching a third course in the professional education block, and they devised a shared assignment on developing a unit plan that draws on Underground Railroad-related resources.

Throughout the semester, they also "shared" a common Speakeasy studio (student management courseware) that Ward organized and maintained as part of his course "Instructional Technology in English Education."

What Masciale-Walmer noticed was a much more complicated reading of juvenile fiction and testimony. At the same time, Ward felt the novels that the pre-service teachers read and the units they planned around the Underground Railroad in the other junior block classes provided substance to the work done on projects for his own course: "Students started their projects with important questions that were raised first in other classes, [such as] 'How can I integrate historical investigations that are meaningful within an English class?'"

While the intersection among the three courses in the junior block enhanced student learning, the reflective use of technology contributed as well. Masciale-Walmer says that the teaching units designed by the students "seemed so very successful in making use of significant, thoughtful Web information."

Masciale-Walmer's teaching partner, Kim McCollum-Smith (English) also teaches in Millersville's teacher education program. However, the course that she elected to present to the VKP seminar was ENGL 110.

Intent on deepening student understanding of the communal nature of the reading/writing process, McCollum-Clark revised a foundational exercise--the community paper--and invited students to conduct the forum discussions of these essays via WebCT. Using online threaded discussions to launch oral presentations of the essays, students engaged in more substantive and more sustained examinations of these expository and argumentative papers than when they simply "presented" their papers in a face-to-face class discussion.

Like the other MU faculty in Millersville's Visible Knowledge Project seminar, Christine Gaudry-Hudson (Foreign Languages) teaches pre-service teachers. While Gaudry-Hudson has conducted several distance courses in French language and culture using WebCT and CD-ROMS that she created, the course she chose to present in the seminar was "Francais 333: Modern French Civilization," a face-to-face course that required extensive reading of online French newspapers and magazines. She is currently employing these pioneering techniques in "The Geography of France," a five-week distance learning course offered this summer as part of the university's graduate programs in French, German and Spanish for those seeking the MA and the MED.

The faculty at MU recognize that students who receive instruction involving technology in their disciplinary courses-not only their professional courses-are more likely to use new media in their own teaching than those who encounter technology only in the professional training courses. This knowledge has implications for graduate student training in universities, especially as the Visible Knowledge Project expands to include the preparation of future faculty.

July 2001

July 2001 Home
Emerging Issues
Project Profiles
Website News
Resources