Category: Professional Notes

Courtney Clayton, Assistant Professor in the Department of Curriculum and Instruction, presented her research at the annual conference of the American Educational Research Association on “Preparing Social Justice Teachers: Rethinking Action Research Curriculum for Transformation” as part of Division K – Teaching and Teacher Education/Section 5: Preservice Teacher Education Coursework: Practices to Improve Teacher Knowledge, Understanding, and Application of Subject Matter. She also served as discussant for a paper session titled, “Preparing Teachers to Work with English Language Learners and Immigrant Students”.

AERA is concerned with improving the educational process by encouraging scholarly inquiry related to education and evaluation and by promoting the dissemination and practical application of research results.

AERA is the most prominent international professional organization, with the primary goal of advancing educational research and its practical application. Its more than 25,000 members are educators; administrators; directors of research; persons working with testing or evaluation in federal, state and local agencies; counselors; evaluators; graduate students; and behavioral scientists.

Professor of Political Science and Director of the Center for Leadership and Media Studies Stephen Farnsworth’s study “News Coverage of New Presidents in The New York Times, 1981-2009” is referenced in several news articles, including in The New York Times and the Wall Street Journal.

Statistics and information from the study, co-authored by Farnsworth and George Mason University’s S. Robert Lichter, appear in the Sunday, April 22 article “A Hard Look at the President” in the New York Times and in the Monday, April 23 article “The 2012 Dogfight” in the Wall Street Journal.

Professor of Mathematics Suzanne Sumner was elected President of the Beta Eta Chapter of Delta Kappa Gamma, an international honorary society for female educators.  Delta Kappa Gamma supports women teachers at the elementary through university levels by providing scholarships to education students and grants for teaching supplies, developing high ideals in the teaching profession, conferring distinction upon women educators and providing leadership development.

The Beta Eta Chapter includes members from the City of Fredericksburg and the counties of Caroline, King George, Spotsylvania, and Stafford.  Beta Eta’s projects include the Virginia Scholars Program, Schools for Africa, and the Beta Eta Scholarship.  In the last two years the Beta Eta Scholarship Committee has made donations to Gloucester County schools for tornado relief and Louisa County schools for earthquake relief.

Seven College of Business faculty members will present their work at the fourth faculty research colloquium on Friday, April 27. The presentations will take place in the Stafford Campus North Building from 1 to 3 p.m.

John St. Clair and Lou Martinette will present “Change Management for Higher Education Learning Management Systems Transitions,” Christopher Garcia will present “Robust Optimization Models for Volunteer Scheduling” and Bob Greene and Margaret Mi will present “A Systems Model for Teaching Human Resource (People) Management.”

Also, Mukesh Srivastava and Lou Martinette will present “Building a Sustainable Competitive Advantage” and Gladys Gomez will present “WISE Fraud Case.”

For presentation abstracts and information about the colloquium, read the full program.

Alan Levine, new instructional technology specialist in Teaching and Learning Technology, presented an online keynote for the Flat Classroom Project, an international collaborative project where middle and high school students explore issues of technology, culture, and society .

In We, Our Digital Selves, and Us, speaking as three different personas, Levine explores questions on how online versus offline identities are blurred and what it may mean for individuals to be proactive in managing their online presence.

The video was filmed and edited by Andy Rush and features student commentary from Martha Burtis’s Identity and Citizenship in a Digital Age class.