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Diversity and Culture in Education
Bryn Mawr College's TIDES Project featured in Association of American Colleges and Universities
Bryn Mawr College's TIDES Project (Teaching to Increase Diversity and Equity in STEM initiative) is featured in the new issue of AAC&U, Diversity & Democracy on Gender Equity in Higher Education, Spring 2015, Vol. 18, No. 2.
"This issue of Diversity & Democracy extends AAC&U's longstanding commitment to addressing gender-based inequities in higher education. Article topics include gender equity among STEM students and faculty, women's leadership in areas such as higher education administration, the role of women's colleges and universities worldwide, and the importance of creating campuses that are safe and inclusive for students of all gender identities."
In Women in Computing: The Imperative of Critical Pedagogical Reform, the "Key to sustaining US global competitiveness is the country's ability to harness the kinds of diverse perspectives that not only are known to fuel better scientific outcomes, but also are associated with the inclusion of underrepresented groups, particularly women and women of color."
Kelly Mack and Melissa Soto, Association of American Colleges and Universities; Lilliam Casillas-Martinez, University of Puerto Rico–Humacao; and Elizabeth F. McCormack, Bryn Mawr College
Bryn Mawr Receives Grant to Improve Diversity and Equity in STEM!
The Association of American Colleges and Universities (AAC&U) has awarded Bryn Mawr College a grant of up to $300,000 to evolve STEM teaching over the next three years to make BMC computer and information science programs more culturally accessible and substantive!
Liz McCormack, chair and professor of the Physics Department at Bryn Mawr College, leads this initiative, assisted by Doug Blank and Mark Matlin. The college will use this funding to develop online computing or programming instructional modules that the physics department can insert throughout curricula. These additions will supply students with exposure to new and innovative computing and information science skills.
These leaders hope this initiative will act as a model for other departments at Bryn Mawr as well as for other schools, especially those interested in increasing computer and information science exposure across the curriculum, in part, to reach a more diverse range of students than those that traditionally enter those fields.
Meet VoiceThread!
VoiceThread is a user-friendly way to share power point presentations, videos, photos, and other media. Students and professors can record video or audio responses, draw on the media to highlight certain points, and comment in text form. This site is useful for discussion outside of the classroom, allowing students to focus on the topic at hand and reflect in a collaborative way.
Want to Learn More?
Read how VoiceThread describes its capabilities.
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Capabilities
Through VoiceThread...
Professors can:
- Upload power points
- Upload question slides for comment
- Comment on students’ writing in video, text, and visual formats
Students can:
What is MediaThread?
MediaThread, a project created by the Columbia Center for New Media Teaching and Learning through the Digital Bridges Initiative is a service that allows you to blend your thoughts with multimedia sources and share them with others. MediaThread supports video, images, metadata, and many content websites listed below. Most compatible with Firefox, MediaThread is currently being used by Columbia, MIT, Wellesley, Dartmouth, The American University in Cairo, and many other institutions of higher education.
Who can do what with MediaThread? Through MediaThread...
Final Web Event - Addressing Inclusiveness at Home at Bryn Mawr: A Seminar
Bryn Mawr is my home.
That one phrase is so much more than the five words it contains. Now more than ever before. To me, a home is much more than four walls or a campus. Bryn Mawr is home to me because of its people, because of its community. It is here that I have become comfortable with who I am - my sexuality, my past, my life.
When I first began to think about this final paper, I knew I wanted it to be about this place that means so much to me. Bryn Mawr. I also wanted to incorporate in parts of my other papers. As I reflected over my work and growth in this course, I realized I left my third paper open ended without a firm direction in terms of education for Wabash. During conversations (usually over food) with my friends, I began to see that Bryn Mawr also needs a new form of education. An education in inclusion. I began to think of my second paper on the inclusiveness/discrimination of the straight community within Bryn Mawr's community. I concluded Bryn Mawr needs an intervention.
Fear of Feminist Indoctrination at All-Men's Colleges
The phrase "feminism unbound" is strange to me. I thought at first I understood it, but when we began to discuss this phrase in class, I got even more confused. So I sat down to think about it on my own. I thought about the rigors of society, the boundaries have set for ourselves and others, the world we have been told should exist. As someone who has chosen to go to an all-women's college I know I follow certain boundaries within the walls of Bryn Mawr College, regulations the college sets for me. I began to think of similar institutions. A friend of mine also goes to a single-sex institution, Wabash College, an all-men's college in Indiana. Wabash sets regulations for its students as well. A potential new regulation is a gender studies graduation requirement. This debate struck a chord with me, especially when I discovered the contorted view of gender studies some members of the institution had created around this issue . . .
"[The] wimpy, neutralized guys that gender feminists are trying to create: men who are not committed to constructive struggle and conflict and fighting for a cause and coming out the winner." (Michaloski and Allman) This statement was made by Dr. David P. Kubiak, a Classics professor at Wabash College in relation to the debate at Wabash over the proposition of a gender studies graduation requirement.
Multicultural Education in Mathematics
My inquiry project looks at how one can incorporate a multicultural/diveristy/social justice perspective in math classrooms.
Inquiry Project
Here is the link to my inquiry project:
http://prezi.com/_5bxmjewqcgt/ebonics-and-spoken-word/?kw=view-_5bxmjewqcgt&rc=ref-1780966
very weak post that I was wondering if I should even post
So this week, in terms of ed placement I've been trying to discover more of Asian culture in relation to America. In my placement I figure out that I knew nothing of the Asian American experience even thought I want to honor everyone's diversity in my classroom someday. I wouldn't have picked up on this if it hadn't been for my suburban placement having only white and asian kids. I was taught to look at majority and minority balances in terms of possible difference and then I thought "Oh no, I want to teach at a suburban school someday, but white culture is easy to adapt to, what do I do with the Asians?" This was really weird for me because I pride myself on being multiculturally sensitive becuase of my backgrounds, and what was even weirder is that my best friend since 3rd grade is Viet, but I still don't feel like I know how her race and culture relate to her experience. For some reason, that racial experience has always been invisible to me, despite my exposure to literature about the Hmong in the US and other groups. I decided to reconsile this dissonace by bugging my asian friends to help me learn more and I hope to take an Asian American history/culture class before I graduate. I can't believe I didn't notice one of the biggest groups in America in my quest to be inclusive. I'm really embarressed about this, but at least now I know and I can work towards making that better.