Lecture location: 19 Washington Square North, Events Space
To attend, please RVSP to 19wsn.rsvp@nyu.edu
Higher education is rapidly changing. Technology, international partnerships, and increasingly diverse student bodies, to name only three factors, are transforming how faculty teach and how students learn. It therefore is essential that institutions of higher learning reassess their analyses of university curricula, planning, policy development, and decision making. This workshop series will discuss new pedagogies, different assessment measures and institutional studies, where universities need improvement, and how they can achieve that goal.
Spring 2012 Events
Girls' Education in Afghanistan: 7 Million Reasons for Optimism and Hope
February 15, 2012 | 6:30-8:00 PM
Anita Anastacio Senior Education Advisor, International Rescue Committee
Zama Coursen-Neff Deputy Director, Children's Rights, Human Rights Watch
Wagma Battoor Program Quality, Development, and Learning Coordinator, CARE Afghanistan
Dana Burde Assistant Professor, International Education, NYUNY
Moderated by Amy Goodman Host of Democracy Now!
What is the status of girls' education in Afghanistan today? How do Afghan parents educate their daughters? What are the options available to them? What works and how do we know? Most Afghan parents are eager to send their girls to school. Yet given the distances they must travel and the barriers posed by the conflict and lawlessness across the country, many parents struggle to get their children into school. These obstacles typically affect girls more than boys. This panel explores the current challenges to girls' education such as attacks on schools and students, and scarcity of school buildings and personnel. It also highlights successful interventions such as community-based education and other efforts to address these dilemmas. Despite more than 30 years of war, this panel shows how education for Afghan girls offers promise for the country's future.
Empowering Women and Developing the Nation: Social Reform and Education in the Middle East
March 8, 2012 | 6:00-7:30 PM
Leila Ahmed Victor S. Thomas Professor of Divinity, Harvard Divinity School
Sherine Hafez Assistant Professor of Women's Studies, University of California, Riverside
To this day, women's access to education still faces substantial stumbling blocks, as two-thirds of the world's illiterates are women from rural areas. In the Middle Eastern and North African regions, concentrated efforts in the last two decades have improved women's educational opportunities, yet the gap between the genders remains daunting. This discussion will focus on the evolution of women's education, specifically Egypt and the UAE, over the course of the past 40 years. Taking her memories of her own education in Egypt and England (and her work at the UAE) as her starting point, Leila Ahmed reflects on the theme of cross-cultural education and multiculturalism. Ahmed's remarks will be compared to Sherine Hafez's recent work on the affects that women's Islamic organizations have made in promoting an Islamic education among women in rural Middle Egypt. This will shed light on some aspects of education overlooked by international development organizations that deal with issues of illiteracy.
Fall 2011 Events
"Tuning Your Ears:" Listening for and Learning from Students' Ways of Making Meaning
October 18, 2011 | 12:30-2:30 PM
Patricia M. King Professor, Center for the Study of Higher and Postsecondary Education, School of Education, University of Michigan
Liberal arts education is typically associated with the development of "habits of mind" — such as thinking critically about everyday problems, applying methods of inquiry associated with a discipline, analyzing intercultural issues from multiple perspectives, and making discerning judgments about ethical issues. These ways of approaching and making choices are associated with a set of capacities that appear to be related to whether and how students achieve the goals associated with liberal arts education, and can be observed through listening to students reflect on their learning and other collegiate experiences. This workshop will approach the topic of assessment from the perspective of learning as meaning making, and share strategies educators can use to identify the underlying assumptions that guide students' learning.
Workshop by Invitation Only
Seeking the Story Behind the Story: An Important Component of Cultural Competence
December 6, 2011 | 12:00-2:00 PM
Xiaodong Lin, Associate Professor of Technology & Education, Teachers College, Columbia University
Xiaodong Lin will discuss two studies that illustrate that contact with other culture, without knowing why and how people do what they do, is often counterproductive. The first study finds that shallow knowledge of people in other cultures leads to frequent misunderstanding that blocks our energy for learning. In the second, research suggests that successful learning and teaching requires an ability to seek story behind the story, rather than jumping at the conclusions and actions. The workshop will end with a demonstration of a technology tool under development that will help reduce misunderstandings between teachers and students coming from different cultures or even within the same culture.
Workshop by Invitation Only
