On Saturday, November 12, 2011 from 9:00am until 4:00pm, a free workshop will be held on the UNC-Chapel Hill campus in room 039 of the Graham Memorial Building. Participants in the workshop will look at Iraq that exists beyond war, and see the tradition, the culture, and the history that defines its people today.

From the first civilizations of Mesopotamia and the rise of majestic Islamic empires to today’s vibrant youth culture, the land that lies between the Tigris and Euphrates will spark your curiosity and redefine your conception of Iraq. The pioneers of modern mathematics, the forerunners of the Renaissance, and the modern symbol of cultural diversity–this is Iraq beyond conflict.

Presenters of the workshop are:

• novelist SinanAntoon, author of I’jaam: An Iraqi Rhapsody
• singer and oudist Saadoun Al-Bayati
• visual artist Lukman Ahmad

K-12 teachers will have the opportunity to earn 1.0 CEU for participation and completion of pre- and post-workshop activities. Resources will include online teaching materials on the art, music, literature, and history of Iraq.

Registration for the workshop is required. Please contact Regina Higgins at regina_higgins@unc.edu.

Sponsored by the Carolina Center for the Study of the Middle East and Muslim Civilizations, Duke-UNC Consortium for Middle East Studies, the UNC Department of History, and the UNC Honors Program.

Start your year by sharpening your skills and earning renewal credit with eLearning for Educators professional development courses! There are many courses to choose from and there is still time to enroll in courses starting in late September and early October. The following are selected examples of course offerings:

Teaching Online Courses

Have you ever thought about taking your teaching into a new realm — the online classroom? This course prepares educators interested in teaching online courses for the virtual classroom. It is also a great overview for administrators interested in implementing online courses into their K-12 or professional development offerings.

American Indians in North Carolina

In this course you’ll explore American Indian history in North Carolina from the earliest evidence of human habitation in the state through first contact with Europeans, the Trail of Tears, the Great Depression, the Civil Rights Movement, and into the present day.

Assessment and Evaluation in Your Online Course

In this course you will take a close look at assessment options, think about how assessment reflects teaching practices, and devise authentic assessment tools. Through discussions and peer reviews, you and your peers will focus on creating quality online assessment activities and assessment tools.

To learn more or to register, please click on one of the course titles above, or visit our Online Courses page.

The Latina/os and Education Project of the UNC Latina/o Studies Program & the UNC Latina/o Cultures Speakers present:

“Desarrollando Nepantler@s: Rethinking the Knowledge Needed to Teach Mathematics”
Rochelle Gutiérrez
6 pm Monday Oct. 3, 2011
University Room, Hyde Hall
Institute for the Arts & Humanities
UNC-Chapel Hill
For directions visit the Institute for Arts and Humanities website.

About the lecture:

As American researchers and policy makers race to close the “achievement gap,” greater emphasis on mathematical knowledge for teaching has taken hold. School districts, concerned that their teachers do not know their mathematics in deep or flexible enough ways, are investing in professional development of teachers. These approaches, however fail to recognize that the achievement gap is a social construction, that equity in mathematics means much more than mere access to a rigorous curriculum, and that teaching is a negotiated practice (with students, parents, and others). Gutiérrez argues that a model of knowledge needed for teaching mathematics and addressing equity involves political knowledge. An important component to developing this political knowledge is being able to recognize multiple realities (Nepantla), developing conocimiento with students, becoming comfortable with uncertainty, and seeing tension as a means to birth new knowledge.

Rochelle Gutiérrez is Professor of Curriculum and Instruction and Latina/Latino Studies at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. She has served as a member of the RAND National Mathematics Study Panel, the National Academy of Sciences’ Committee on Increasing Urban High School Students’ Engagement and Motivation to Learn, and the board of directors of Society for Advancement of Chicanos and Native Americans in Science (SACNAS).

She was awarded a Fulbright fellowship to study secondary mathematics teachers in Zacatecas, México, and is currently serving as editor for a special issue on identity/power for the Journal for Research in Mathematics Education. She is PI on an NSF grant that seeks to understand what it takes to develop high school mathematics teachers who engage their students in rigorous mathematics and are committed to social justice. Before and throughout graduate school, she taught middle and high school mathematics to adolescents in East San José, California.

The lecture is sponsored by the UNC Program in Latina/o Studies, the Institute for the Arts & Humanities, the Carolina Latina/o Collaborative, and the UNC School of Education.

Dr. Cheryl Mason Bolick of UNC-Chapel Hill’s School of Education and Katy Vance, a former high school teacher and graduate research assistant have worked together to develop a wide body of K-12 lesson plans and educational resources centered around the Blue Ridge Parkway. These lesson plans utilize primary source materials made available by “Driving Through Time: the Digital Blue Ridge Parkway in North Carolina,” a virtual trip that allows the visitor to explore the Parkway and learn about its rich history.

By combining research skills like historic map and primary source analysis with student products such as writing memos, letters, and editorials; creating digital stories, community profiles, and digital maps; and giving formal presentations; these resources provide opportunities for connections across the K-12 curriculum. There are both standalone lesson plans and unit plans in the collection, which is also part of UNC Libraries’ Documenting the American South.

The North Carolina Civic Education Consortium, a program of the School of Government at UNC-Chapel Hill, works with schools, governments, and community organizations to prepare North Carolina’s young people to be active, responsible citizens. Each month the Consortium delivers an email newsletter with news and opportunities for civic engagement.

This month’s newsletter features back-to-school lesson plans. For middle grades, there are lessons that will help you develop a safe and cooperative community where students successfully complete interactive lessons, engaging group activities, discussions, ans simulations. High-school lessons provide ideas and activities to help establish classroom expectations, tips for discussing controversial issues, and team building.

The newsletter also includes civic education news and opportunities for educators. Read Matt Damon’s speech given at the “Save Our Schools” teachers rally in July. Also, find an update on the new Common Core and Essential Standards from the North Carolina Department of Public Instruction.

For students, there are two civics education competitions. The first is a scholarship for the United States Senate Youth Program (USSYP) for high school juniors and seniors. The second is the First Freedom Student Competition, a national essay and video contest for high school students.

There are several great seminars for educators coming up in October: The Freedom Riders and the American Civil Rights Movement, Poverty and the Challenge of Equality in America, and Making Cents: Youth Innovation in a Troubled Economy,

In addition, there is information about grant awards and scholarships offered by the North Carolina Council for the Social Studies. These are available for pre-service and current social studies teachers. The deadline for these opportunities is December 31, 2011.

To read the newsletter, visit the Consortium’s website. To receive the newsletter via email, contact Anita Buie.

LEARN NC is now hiring an Executive Director. The official description follows:

Executive Director, LEARN NC
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
School of Education
EPA Non-Faculty Position

The Executive Director will collaborate with the School of Education’s Director of Research and Professional Development for Outreach to provide vision, planning, and leadership and for the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill’s B-12 outreach endeavors as well as manage all operations for LEARN NC.

Responsibilities include:

50% Operations and Project Management: Exercise creativity and initiative in designing strategies to increase effectiveness in operations continuously improving the quality of LEARN resources and services based on valid and reliable data; Maintain a system to ensure all LEARN NC resources are easily accessible, relevant, and current.

25% Personnel Management: Supervise the day-to-day activities of the LEARN NC staff and consultants and ensuring the integrity of the technical infrastructure and business processes. Promote the continuing professional development of the LEARN staff.

25% Outreach: Establish and maintain collaborative relationships with key educational partners across the state, including P-12 school and district personnel, higher education, and state agencies; Develop and implement curriculum and oversee the online professional development programs offered through e-Learning for Educators in line with state and national content standards. Make available to P-12 educators the results of current educational research; and remain current on the latest research on topics related to online learning and content delivery and communicate this knowledge to staff, faculty, and students

A graduate degree in education or related field is required. Successful experience in leadership position with excellent management supervisory and project management skills; exceptional interpersonal and team-building skills; and demonstrated success in using technology to facilitate student learning and professional development.

Click on the Direct Link URL at http://jobs.unc.edu/2501689 from any internet browser to apply for the position and attach the following; a letter of interest; a curriculum vitae; and a list of at least four references including their name, addresses, and telephone numbers/email addresses. Review of applications will begin on or after October 1, 2011. For more information, email Professor Cheryl Bolick, cbolick@email.unc.edu.

THE UNIVERSITY OF NORTH CAROLINA AT CHAPEL HILL IS AN EQUAL OPPORTUNITY EMPLOYER.

We hope you and your students are off to a great start of the new school year. As always, we’re hard at work on a number of projects designed to support your teaching, including:

• Standards alignment. Throughout the school year, we’ll be aligning our collection of hundreds of lesson plans to the new state standards.
• Digital NC history for fourth grade. We’re developing an educator’s guide to facilitate fourth-grade teachers’ use of our North Carolina digital history textbook.
• Online courses. Check out the full slate of over fifty new online courses for the fall.

And we’ve got more in the works! We’ll be providing updates here as these projects progress, so please stay tuned. As always, we welcome your feedback and suggestions.

The Outreach Center of Harvard University’s Center for Middle Eastern Studies is offering a free webinar for teachers, featuring educator-created resources and lessons plans for teaching about September 11 in 5th- through 12th-grade classrooms.

The one-hour webinar, entitled “Responding to the 10th Anniversary of 9/11 in the Classroom,” is scheduled for August 25th and will begin at 7 pm EDT. Presentations and discussions will take place entirely online, using an Elluminate virtual classroom. This platform runs through Java, and does not require any downloading of additional software.

For more information and to register, see the webinar description on the Harvard University Center for Middle Eastern Studies website.

Teaching contemporary history can pose a variety of challenges, particularly when teaching the history of a traumatic event like the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001.

In preparation for the tenth anniversary of the attacks, the National Museum of American History, National September 11 Memorial & Museum, Pentagon Memorial Fund, and Flight 93 National Memorial recently offered an online conference for K-12 teachers. The conference included roundtable discussions with content experts and six workshop sessions that shared strategies, ideas, and resources, and encouraged conversations on how to document, preserve, and interpret recent history and current events.

Teachers can now access archived sessions from the conference, along with K-12 lessons and activities from each organization and background information on September 11.

We’ve just listed over fifty online professional development courses for fall 2011. The fall offerings from North Carolina e-Learning for Educators include courses for our Carolina On-line Teacher (COLT) program as well as Moodle training, content-area courses, and courses designed to help teachers work with special populations. As always, each course was created using a researched model of effective professional development and the online format allows participants to work at a time and place most convenient to them.

About North Carolina E-Learning for Educators

North Carolina’s leaders in online professional development have collaborated on a series of courses that will bolster content knowledge and classroom technology integration at an affordable cost, with the convenience and flexibility only possible online.

North Carolina e-Learning for Educators is a partnership between the North Carolina Department of Public Instruction, UNC-TV, LEARN NC, The Friday Institute for Educational Innovation at North Carolina State University College of Education, and the North Carolina Virtual Public School. This program is based upon work supported by grant funding from the U.S. Department of Education.

For a full list of available courses, please visit our online courses page.