Author: Brynn Boyer

More than 100 faculty and staff came together for the 17th annual Faculty Academy at UMW’s Fredericksburg campus on Wednesday, May 16 and Thursday, May 17. For the participants, Faculty Academy was an opportunity to share efforts and accomplishments in the classroom, especially in the area of teaching and learning technologies.

The program, “Under Disruption,” featured presentations and panel discussions by dozens of UMW faculty and staff members, as well as keynote speeches by David Darts, Giulia Forsythe and Grant Potter. Topics ranged from 3-D printing to digital history to technology in the classroom.

UMW’s Division of Teaching and Learning Technologies hosted the event, with sponsorship from the Center for Advancing Teaching and Learning and the Department of Information Technology.

For more information about Faculty Academy, visit http://blog12.facultyacademy.org/.

Holly Schiffrin presented during a four-hour workshop at the annual meeting of the American Institute of Architects National Convention and Design Exposition in Washington, D.C. on Wednesday, May 16. The workshop, “Happiness and Architecture: Linking Design to Positive Psychology,” also featured Charles First, an architect with HEERY that has been working on the Dahlgren campus. Other co-presenters included Tim Bachman and Connie Hom of Buckingham Greenery.

Anand Rao, associate professor of communication and director of the speaking intensive program, will be a presenter next week in Shanghai, China, at a debate training workshop for high school English teachers.

The “Training Workshop on the Harvard Debate-National Forensic League Curriculum” will be held from Wednesday, May 23 through Monday, May 28. Rao will be one of four presenters at the workshop, along with Stefan Bauschard (Harvard Debate), Adam Jacobi (National Forensic League), and Ryan Galloway (Samford University). The workshop will be attended by 100 English teachers from 50 of the top magnet high schools across China.

The workshop is sponsored by two government agencies, “The Society of Cultivating Innovators” and “Innovation Method Society,” which are supervised by the Ministries of Education and Technology. The agencies are considered the highest ranking non-profits in China organized by the central government. Harvard Debate and the National Forensic League, the leading organizations for high school debate in the United States, are working with the Chinese agencies to develop a high school debate program for the top students across the country. The workshop is the first presentation of a debate curriculum that is in development by Harvard Debate and the National Forensic League for use in Chinese high schools this coming fall.

Psychology faculty members Mindy Erchull, Miriam Liss, Virginia Mackintosh, Christine McBride, David Rettinger, Holly Schiffrin and Hilary Stebbins will present research at the 2012 Association for Psychological Science Annual Convention from Thursday, May 24 through Sunday, May 27 in Chicago.

Liss and Schiffrin, along with 2012 graduate Kathryn Rizzo, will present “The Impact of Intensive Parenting on the Well-Being of Mothers.” Liss and Schiffrin are the faculty sponsors of “Mother, father, or parent? College students’ intensive parenting beliefs differ by referent,” presented by students Katherine Geary, Taryn Tashner, Haley Miles-McLean,  Kathryn Rizzo and Charlotte Hagerman.

Schiffrin, Liss, Mackintosh, Erchull and student Haley Miles McLean will present “Development and Validation of a Quantitative Measure of Intensive Parenting Attitudes.”

McBride will present “The Impact of Cognitive Stress, Social Stress, and Appraisals on Eating Behavior” with student Janet Greider. Students Erin Burdwood and Amy Newcomb also were part of the research team.

Rettinger will present “Guilt-Proneness and Fear of Being Caught Deter Cheating” with students Caitlin Brady, Megan Hess, Frank Knizner and Caroline Lupsha.

Stebbins will present “The Interaction Between Emotional Expressions of Face Targets in the Attentional Blink” with students Alyssa Dembrowski, David Levin and Chelsea Mageland.

Debra Harber, director of financial aid, held a live chat on Fredericksburg.com on Tuesday, May 15. She answered questions from the public about student loans, including the difference between federal and private loans, how to handle student loan debt and ways to save for college. The full text of the chat is available at http://www.fredericksburg.com/News/chat3/Archive?chat_id=147.