2012 2013 Uncg Graduate School Bulletin

While Active Learning Classrooms, or ALCs, offer rich new environments for learning, they present many new challenges to faculty because, among other things, they eliminate the room’s central focal point and disrupt the conventional seating plan to which faculty and students have become accustomed.The importance of learning how to use these classrooms well and to capitalize on their special features is paramount. The potential they represent can be realized only when they facilitate improved learning outcomes and engage students in the learning process in a manner different from traditional classrooms and lecture halls.This book provides an introduction to ALCs, briefly covering their history and then synthesizing the research on these spaces to provide faculty with empirically based, practical guidance on how to use these unfamiliar spaces effectively. Among the questions this book addresses are:• How can instructors mitigate the apparent lack of a central focal point in the space?• What types of learning activities work well in the ALCs and take advantage of the affordances of the room?• How can teachers address familiar classroom-management challenges in these unfamiliar spaces?• If assessment and rapid feedback are critical in active learning, how do they work in a room filled with circular tables and no central focus point?• How do instructors balance group learning with the needs of the larger class?• How can students be held accountable when many will necessarily have their backs facing the instructor?• How can instructors evaluate the effectiveness of their teaching in these spaces?This book is intended for faculty preparing to teach in or already working in this new classroom environment; for administrators planning to create ALCs or experimenting with provisionally designed rooms; and for faculty developers helping teachers transition to using these new spaces.

With a firm foundation on best practices drawn from a variety of institutions, this book maps out a partnership between academic librarians and instructional designers that will lead to improved outcomes.

The purpose of the work/life balance series is to highlight particular challenges that higher education faculty face as they participate in the demands of the academy and try to prevent those demands from invading their personal lives. On The High Wire looks at a specific subset of university faculty, education faculty with school-aged children, and the specific professional/personal balance these faculty need to find. The title On the High Wire suggests the precarious nature of the “walk” for education faculty who are parents of school-aged children. We know that our identities are central to how we experience the world and how the world reacts to us. This reality is clearly visible in this book. These multiple identities and roles come into conflict at multiple points and in different ways. This book explores these identities and roles through autoethnographic accounts written by varied education faculty in order to make these tensions visible for the field to address.

In this step-by-step guide to writing autoethnography, the author describes and illustrates the essential features and practices of this qualitative research method.

Creative Cross-Disciplinary Entrepreneurship responds to educational demands created through dramatic changes in the nature of business, by describing how to develop a cross-disciplinary curriculum in Entrepreneurship that further increases students' knowledge base in specific areas of interest and the development of an 'entrepreneurial mindset.'