Guest Speakers: Nathan Grawe and John Weber

Wednesday, May 21, 11:15 am-12:15 pm                                        
WORKSHOP: Infusing Quantitative Literacy Throughout the Curriculum
NATHAN GRAWE, Director of the Quantitative Inquiry, Reasoning, and Knowledge (QuIRK) Initiative at Carleton College

In “The Case for Quantitative Literacy” the National Council on Education and the Disciplines warns, “The world of the twenty-first century is a world awash in numbers....Unfortunately, despite years of study and life experience in an environment immersed in data, many educated adults remain functionally innumerate.”  While many of our students can succeed without extensive statistical training, the nature of our world now demands that all of our students—regardless of major— become comfortable using numerical evidence in written argument.   What does it mean to be quantitatively literate and how can we know if our students are achieving this important goal?   

The workshop will explore four facets of quantitative reasoning (QR), emphasizing the importance of student encounters with QR in traditionally non-quantitative disciplines.  We will then apply a QR assessment rubric to examples of student writing to see how students are (and are not!) using QR effectively in existing assignments.  The workshop will conclude with a discussion of how faculty may revise existing courses and assignments to foster better QR practice.

Wednesday, May 21,12:15-1:00 pm                                                    
LUNCH (Please RSVP when you register online)

Wednesday, May 21, 1:00-3:15 pm                                       
WORKSHOP: Infusing Quantitative Literacy Throughout the Curriculum
NATHAN GRAWE, Carleton College (continued)

ABOUT OUR MAY COLLEGE GUEST NATHAN GRAWE
Nathan D. Grawe is Associate Professor of Economics and Director of the Quantitative Inquiry, Reasoning, and Knowledge (QuIRK) initiative at Carleton College.  He is the principal investigator (PI) on an NSF-funded project to  disseminate a QuIRK-developed rubric for assessing quantitative reasoning (QR) in student writing.  Grawe also is PI on a WM Keck Foundation-funded effort to foster QR teaching in non-science and math departments at Carleton.  In a Teagle-supported consortium (including St. Olaf, Grinnell, and Macalester Colleges) to study alternative assessment strategies for cross-cutting liberal arts learning outcomes, Grawe leads Carleton's quantitative reasoning team.  Nathan earned his BS from St. Olaf College and his MA and PhD in Economics from the University of Chicago.

Thursday, May 22,  8:30-9:00 am
COFFEE AND TEA IN EBEN HOLDEN LOBBY

Thursday, May 22, 9:00-10:00am                                                 
PLENARY: Literacy, Vision, and College Learning in a Networked Era
JOHN WEBER, Director, Tang Museum and Art Gallery at Skidmore College 

Discussions of literacy, visual literacy, new literacy, and information literacy are increasingly common in American higher education, and images as well as visually represented data are routinely utilized in college teaching and learning across a wide range of disciplines rarely thought of as “visual.”  The advent of the networked computer as a primary source of information and a locus of communication, research, publication, and data storage has transformed the capacity of non-specialists to create, edit, and publish visual and audio information of all sorts, moving as well as still.  Yet few colleges and universities have yet attempted to address the visual or, for that matter, the audiovisual in their core curricula or requirements.  Is this a problem, and if so, what precisely is the nature of the problem?  Should we be worrying about it at all, or is everything actually fine as it stands, and slowly evolves?  In this talk I will explore notions of visual literacy and illiteracy while reflecting at times on the internet and the world wide web, computers, museums, college education today, and how some recent work done at the Tang Museum at Skidmore has attempted to harness visual experience to promote learning in new and playful ways. 

ABOUT OUR MAY COLLEGE GUEST JOHN WEBER
John Weber is the Dayton Director of the Frances Young Tang Teaching Museum and Art Gallery at Skidmore College, an interdisciplinary museum opened in 2000 to create links between contemporary art and other disciplines as part of the teaching effort at Skidmore.  As director of the museum he supervises the Tang’s staff and oversees exhibitions, programs, collections, and the Tang website, as well as curating and writing for museum publications.  Weber is also a member of the Skidmore faculty and teaches in the art history program. Before coming to Skidmore in 2004, he was the curator of education and public programs at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art from 1993 to 2004, where he spearheaded the design of the Koret Education Center and founded the museum’s interactive educational technologies program.  From 1987 to 1993 Weber served as curator of contemporary art at the Portland Art Museum in Oregon.  He is a board member of the New Media Consortium, an international not-for-profit consortium of nearly 200 leading colleges, universities, museums, corporations, and other learning-focused organizations dedicated to the exploration and use of new media in educational environments.