NSEC Webinar on Supporting Educators

Tuesday, April 27, 2021

10:00 am PT | 11:00 am MT | 12:00 pm CT | 1:00 pm ET

Centers/Institutes and presenters

Engineering Education Transformations Institute (EETI) at the University of Georgia presented by John Morelock, Associate Director of the EETI
STEM Education Innovation and Research Institute (SERPI) at Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis (IUPUI) presented by Pratibha Varma-Nelson, Professor of Chemistry and the founding Executive Director of SERPI
Tennessee STEM Education Center at Middle Tennessee State University presented by Gregory Rushton, Director, and Mandy Singleton, Director of Outreach and Communications of the Tennessee STEM Education Center
Moderated by Ruthmae Sears, Associate Professorfor Mathematics Education at the University of South Florida

Abstract

Join us on Tuesday, April 27 for a discussion with Centers and Institutes on how centers are supporting educators during the pandemic and via a mostly virtual environment. NSEC is pleased to host short presentations from UGA's Engineering Education Transformations Institute, IUPUI's STEM Education Innovation & Research Institute, and Middle Tennessee State's Tennessee STEM Education Center. We will provide time for the community to share the many ways that you have been supporting your campuses during this time.

Audience

This webinar is designed to support STEM Education Centers and may be of interest to Centers for Teaching and Learning with an emphasis in STEM education. We welcome center directors, associate directors, and all individuals associated with STEM education programming, research, and services that pertain to a college or university center.

Logistics

Event Date: April, 27 2020

Event Start Time: 10:00 AM PT/11:00 AM MT/12:00 PM CT/1:00 PM ET

Event End time: 11:00 AM PT/12:00 PM MT/1:00 PM CT/2:00 PM ET

Duration - 60 minutes

Format: Online web presentation via Zoom web meeting software with questions and discussion. Detailed instructions for joining the webinar will be emailed to registered participants one day prior to the webinar.

Register for the webinar

Speaker Bios

John Morelock is the Associate Director for Educational Innovation and Impact in EETI, where he will be coordinating faculty and graduate student professional development opportunities, including EETI's monthly engineering education Forum, annual travel grant program, and the College of Engineering's graduate TA pedagogy course. He received his doctoral degree in Engineering Education at Virginia Tech, where he was a recipient of the NSF Graduate Research Fellowship. His dissertation studied the teaching practices of engineering instructors during game-based learning activities, and how these practices affected student motivation. His research interests include engineering faculty development, student motivation, game-based teaching and learning, gamified classrooms, and engineering faculty collaborations around the scholarship of teaching and learning.

Greg Rushton is the current Director at the TN STEM Education Center (TSEC) and a professor of chemistry at Middle TN State University, located just south of Nashville in Murfreesboro, TN. He has held previous faculty appointments at SUNY-Stony Brook on Long Island, and at Kennesaw State University, just north of Atlanta. He earned his undergraduate degree in chemistry at the University of Southern California, and his Master's and Ph.D. at the 'other' USC in Columbia, South Carolina. His group has current projects in both K-12 STEM education and in higher education, which are funded by the National Science Foundation, the Institute of Education Sciences, and the Howard Hughes Medical Institute.

Ruthmae Sears is an Associate Professor at the University of South Florida. Her research focuses on curriculum issues, the development of reasoning and proof skills, clinical experiences in secondary mathematics, and the integration of technology in mathematics teaching and learning. She is the principal investigator for the City of St. Petersburg funded grant entitled, "Examination of the historical and modern-day impact of structural racism on the lives of Black people in the City of St. Petersburg, Florida," and the NSF-IUSE funded collaborative grant (#1726362) entitled "Attaining Excellence in Secondary Mathematics Clinical Experiences with a Lens on Equity". Dr. Sears is also a co-principal investigator for the Robert Noyce TeacherScholarship Program and key personnelfor the NSF-funded grant (#1525574) Systemic Transformation of Education throughEvidence-Based Reforms (STEER). At the University of South Florida, Dr. Sears is a member of the Anchin Center STEM Professional Development Leadership Team and is an affiliate of the Coalition for Science Literacy and the NSF funded STEER-Transformation Implementation Leadership Team (TILT).

Pratibha Varma-Nelson is Professor of Chemistry and the founding executive director of the STEM Education Innovation and Research Institute at Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis (IUPUI). Before she joined SEIRI she was the executive director of the Center for Teaching and Learning. She is well known in the STEM community for her pioneering work in the development, implementation and dissemination of the Peer-Led Team Learning (PLTL) model of teaching. She has been a Co-PI of three NSF funded National Dissemination Grants. In addition, she was a founding Co-PI of the first NSF funded Undergraduate Research Center "Center for Authentic Science Practice in Education, (CASPiE)". Her research group is currently working on the development, implementation, evaluation, and dissemination of cyber-PLTL (cPLTL). For the cPLTL project, she has received funding from IUPUI, NSF, and EDUCAUSE, Next Generation Learning Challenges. This work broadly informs the understanding of how students learn chemistry (general and organic) in online environments as well as in face-to-face environments. Dr. Varma-Nelson co-authored the 2011 AAAS report, "Vision and Change in Undergraduate Biology Education: A Call to Action" as well as several other national reports. Varma-Nelson received her Ph.D. from the University of Illinois at Chicago and her B.Sc. from Pune University, India.