Five faculty members will devote themselves to special projects in the 2000-2001 academic year as fellows of the UD Center for Advanced Study, Provost Mel Schiavelli has announced.
Senior faculty, who will be released from teaching duties for one year in order to conduct research, include: Sam Gaertner, psychology; George Hadjipanaysis, Richard B. Murray Professor of Physics; James Hiebert, H. Rodney Sharp Professor of Education; and Gibbons Ruark, English. A fellowship for improvement of instruction was awarded to George Watson, physics and astronomy.
Samuel L. Gaertner
Gaertner, a member of the social psychology faculty since 1970, will use his research fellowship to focus on a National Institute of Mental Health-funded project
aimed at reducing bias and prejudice within groups.
The project is in collaboration with the Green Circle Program, a not-for-profit activity sponsored by the Delaware region National Conference of Community and
Justice (formerly the National Conference of Christians and Jews).
"I'm excited about this collaboration because it provides an opportunity to extend our past work in new directions," Gaertner said.
The Green Circle program is a series of workshops primarily for elementary school students where trained instructors go into classrooms, for up to one hour, once a week, usually for four weeks. Through the use of discussions and stories, they attempt to guide children toward developing positive social skills and to increase self-esteem by creating an awareness of individuality, common feelings and an appreciation of human differences.
The Delaware Green Circle sessions that Gaertner's research project will track are confined, primarily, to the first and second grades and will be administered to 1,500
students, in at least 60 classrooms, in 15 different schools, across three or four school districts.
The project has two purposes. First, Gaertner and his graduate students will evaluate the degree to which the regular Green Circle sessions have affected students.
The second outcome is based on the work Gaertner and his graduate students have been doing in the Intergroup Relations Laboratory at UD. After years of examining how a sense of group membership can accommodate acceptance of others, UD researchers have developed behavioral tools designed to facilitate group acceptance. A number of these tools will be incorporated into some Green Circle sessions with the aim of strengthening cohesiveness within that classroom group.
Gaertner will then try to determine if this further increases positive attitudes the children have about themselves and others. "Green Circle provides a unique and timely opportunity for testing our work," he said.
The project is expected to take two or more years to complete.
Gaertner received his Ph.D. from the City University of New York Graduate Center in 1970. His lifelong investigation into how bias and prejudice affect human behavior in individuals and groups has lead to the development of the Common Ingroup Identity Model. In 1985 and 1998, he won the Society for the Psychological Study of Social Issues Gordon Allport Intergroup Relations Prize.
 George C. Hadjipanayis
Hadjipanayis has been examining the properties of magnetic materials for more than 25 years. Many of the magnetic systems Hadjipanayis works with are used in electrical transformers, motors, generators, automobiles, VCRs and computers, and in his 11 years at UD, he has received more than $5 million in research grants.
This fellowship will free Hadjipanayis to focus on completing the fifth and final phase of his latest research into high temperature magnets. He is at a critical juncture
in the development of new high density magnetic recording media for "the next generation" of hard disk computer memory. He plans to increase his collaboration
with industry, including IBM and Seagate, in the area of recording media.
"High-temperature magnets are greatly needed to replace the outdated hydraulic systems, which are bulky and expensive to maintain," he writes. He explained that
currently, hydraulic systems control the motion of the wings of a plane, but these systems are bulky and costly to maintain. Electromagnetic systems could do the job
without the weight or high cost, but these systems must be located close to the plane's engines where they will experience temperatures of between 400 and 600 C. At
these temperatures, Hadjipanayis writes, magnets get weaker and become easier to demagnetize. "During the last three years, we have been able to develop magnets
that still function at these high temperatures," he said.
The other part of his work centers on refining high density recording material used to store data on computers. "The higher the density, the more information can be
stored, even as disks become smaller," Hadjipanayis said. To enhance storage capabilities of the thin-film media used in computer components, he is looking for ways
to manipulate the properties of magnetic nanoparticles (particles under five millionths of an inch) that are thermally stable and capable of storing information. "We are
currently trying to improve the size distribution of these nanoparticles and find ways to deposit them in regular arrays for better performance."
Hadjipanayis said that he also considers this year to be critical for the future of his research on several other smaller projects.
Hadjipanayis is the founder and director of the Consortium for Advanced Magnets and the founder of the Magnetics Lab. A winner of the prestigious Humboldt
Research Award for Senior U.S. Scientists, Hadjipanayis is internationally recognized for his work.
A graduate of the University of Athens in Greece, he received his doctorate from the University of Manitoba in Canada.
 James Hiebert
Hiebert will devote his year to the compilation and analysis of information about the methods U.S. math and science teachers use in the classroom
and how they compare with the methods used by teachers in countries where math and science achievement is high. The information will be gleaned
from videotapes of classroom sessions recorded by the Third International Mathematics and Science Study-R (TIMSS) Video Study of Teaching.
"It is considered the largest and most ambitious international study of mathematics and science teaching ever conducted," Hiebert writes.
As director of the mathematics component of the project, he will guide the analysis of 600 hours of videotape recorded in 100 eighth-grade
mathematics classes in each country that participated during the 1999-2000 school year. Once the tapes are recorded, they are digitized, translated and transcribed. The
transcripts then are linked by time codes to the video.
There are two phases of coding. The first, during 1999-2000, is separating classroom activities into meaningful segments. In 2000-2001, a full coding scheme will be
finalized using multimedia technologies, international experts and new statistical and qualitative analytic tools to full descriptions of teaching techniques. The last step
is to report these findings to the education community.
In his center application he writes, "The reports will describe the kind of mathematics and science instruction that many American students currently are receiving, how
this compares to instruction in countries with high levels of student achievement and what must be done to improve instruction in U.S. schools."
Hiebert will direct the final design of the coding scheme that will be used to analyze classroom mathematics instruction, then collaborate on the analysis itself and
prepare reports of the results for educational policy experts, teachers and researchers.
Ultimately, a small number of videotapes with interpretation and commentary will be released to the public and to educators and teachers across the nation. "The aim
of this study is to focus attention squarely on the classroom processes that are responsible for students' learning," Hiebert said.
Hiebert joined the UD faculty in 1982 and was named the H. Rodney Sharp Professor of Education in 1995. He received his Ph.D. in curriculum and instruction
from the University of Wisconsin, Madison. He is a member of the Mathematics Study Committee of the National Academy of Sciences National Research Council
and has coauthored two books on teaching mathematics.
 Gibbons Ruark
Over a span of 30 years, Ruark's poetry has been widely published, appearing in The New Yorker, The New Republic and the American Poetry Review, as well as numerous texts and anthologies.
A prolific writer, Ruark has published five collections of poetry, including A Program for Survival, Reeds, Keeping Company, Rescue the Perishing and Passing Through Customs: New and Selected Poems.
He will use his fellowship to research and write his sixth collection, entitled What We Looked at Longest: New Poems, focusing on the art of Ireland.
During the process of selecting and assembling the poems for Passing Through Customs, Ruark realized that, while his work is diverse and based mostly on personal experiences, he tends to return to certain subjects.
In Rescue the Perishing, about two-thirds of the collection is devoted to Ireland and its people. Reviewers, writing about Passing Through Customs, noted that art is a common thread that Ruark uses to reinforce his observations. So, he decided to build on this tendency and center his next creative effort on the art of Ireland.
"Though I remain ready to write about whatever seizes my imagination, in my new poems, I hope, especially, to combine the exploration of paintings with another persistent interest, the landscape and history of Ireland," he said.
While many of the paintings and themes Ruark is interested in are in the U.S., some are in Ireland.
"I am engaged, particularly, by two Irish painters, Jack B. Yeats (1871-1957) and Robert Gregory (1881-1918), the first prominent and the second fugitive and elusive, at least with regard to the accessibility of his paintings. In both cases, my work would involve spending some time in Ireland, looking at, if not actually tracking down, paintings," he wrote.
Yeats, the brother of famous poet William Butler Yeats, is considered one of the leading Irish painters of the 20th century, and his work is on display in many galleries and private homes in Ireland. In contrast, only two or three of Gregory's paintings have been displayed or reproduced in 60 years. Ruark anticipates an involved and difficult search for Gregory's work.
Ruark has been a member of the English faculty since 1968 and has won numerous prizes and awards, including a Pushcart Prize and three poetry fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts.
 George H. Watson
Click to George Watson's home page [http://www.physics. udel.edu/~watson/] and, among other links, there is a list of web sites the physics professor maintains. He
even teaches a course in the physics behind technology and the Internet.
It is his interest in instructional technology and his faith in the power of the web to improve the education of students and colleagues and the general public that
prompted his request for an improvement of instruction fellowship.
In his application, Watson said that he would use the year for expansion of online faculty development materials, creation of an online clearinghouse for problem-based learning (PBL) and enhancement of his physics course web sites to include more interactivity.
"It's the synergy between web-based technology, interactivity and problem-based learning that's made UD internationally recognized in these areas," Watson said. He added that time and effort need to be invested to move to the next level.
He and Barbara Duch, Mathematics and Science Education Resource Center, coordinate the Institute for Transforming Undergraduate Education (ITUE), [http://www.udel.edu/inst/], which has a strong online presence.
The institute was created to promote reform of undergraduate education through faculty development and course design. According to Watson, the web site is a central resource for all ITUE activity. It contains the information faculty--both at UD and around the globe--need to participate in ITUE. There also are pages devoted to problem-based learning [http://www.udel.edu/ pbl/]. The PBL web pages have examples of problems that teachers can use, as well as sample courses and syllabi, links to other PBL sites and articles about PBL.
Each year, the institute conducts two weeklong workshops. Participants receive hands-on experience in active learning strategies and instructional technology, and faculty can apply to become ITUE fellows.
"Currently about one-third of the 50 to 55 participants are from other states and around the world, and many find out about ITUE through our web site," Watson said. "The workshops are free for UD faculty, but visitors pay a hefty registration fee and their own expenses."
Watson, who maintains the ITUE and PBL web sites, said he would like to add to and reorganize the web sites for better use by UD faculty and to accommodate a growing national and international audience. He is also interested in working with the other ITUE leaders to refine and expand the workshop program.
He'll also use the year to help launch a "clearinghouse of peer-reviewed, field-tested problems" for the physical sciences in conjunction with a similar effort at UD in the humanities and social sciences, funded in part by the Pew Charitable Trusts.
Watson received his Ph.D. in physics from UD in 1984. The Carnegie Foundation and the Council for Advancement and Support of Education (CASE) named him the 1998 Delaware Professor of the Year for the Advancement of Teaching.
In 1999, ITUE received the Theodore M. Hesburgh Award for Excellence in faculty development to enhance undergraduate education.
--Barbara Garrison
|
