CALHE

This weekend three fantastic students accompanied me to the Conference on Applied Learning in Higher Education at Missouri Western State University, where we gave a presentation about the Hogan/Rockhurst Diversity Institute from last summer. During this institute, these and other RU students mentored urban High School students from Hogan Prep. The HS students spent one week on our campus taking college classes in science, math and philosophy and living like college students. They took what they learned and in turn prepared and implemented an activity with middle school students from Brookside Frontier Math and Science School. We referred to this series of mentorships, from RU faculty to RU students to Hogan Prep students to BFMASS students, as a cascade of service-learning. Our design, implementation and observations were presented by me and two of the students at the conference this weekend. We also had the opportunity to hear lots of other interesting talks, including the keynote speaker, Dr. Joel Shenker, pictured here.

Honors Lecture Series

Last night we had our most recent installment of the Honors Program's Professor-Scholar Lecture Series, starring our very own Dr. Elizabeth Evans (DVM) and her hedgehog, Peaty. We had a record turnout (around 55 students - I'm sure the pizza and pop helped) and everyone learned a lot about welfare in animal research, about the contributions of such studies to science and medicine, and about hedgehogs! Dr. Evans is a fantastic resource for our students who are interested in Veterinary Medicine, animal behavior, lab animal work, and a plethora of other animal-related topics. So please feel free to stop by the Biology Department anytime to see us, our fish, my snakes, and Peaty the hedgehog! (image from treehugger.com)

The New Evolution Class Blogs are up!

My Evolution class has now completed their first blog posts for their grid-computing service-learning projects! To learn more, please check out their links at the bottom of this page.