From harelb Sun May  4 10:44 EDT 1997
To: rishel
To: allgrads
Subject: Monday talk
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			      White 328
			Monday May 5, 3:30 PM
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TITLE: Beyond Research and Teaching: Graduate Student Involvement in
	Curricular Reform (a job-market asset)

ABSTRACT: Over the past three years, substantial curricular and
pedagogical reform was successfully introduced into sections of
Cornell's mainline first year calculus sequence. This was done through
the initiative of a small group of graduate students who drafted the
original proposal, selected course materials, and working with
faculty, designed the new course -- and has since been continued by
other graduate students.

In addition to giving a history of how this came to pass, we will
describe the specifics of the reforms, and raise also some questions
such as: How do you balance an interest in meaningful and substantial
reform, with the need to "proceed with caution" when taking the first
steps, and balance external source materials with "home-grown" ones?
How do you balance inclusiveness in the design stage of the reform,
with not imposing on other instructors that they must be involved? How
does this work in the context of a research university?  How is
innovative student work reconciled with content acquisition? What are
some of the issues raised by cooperative learning and the use of group
evaluations? And how does one teach active, engaging courses for the
students, while keeping the work-load manageable for the instructors?

Although this is a talk about the reforms, not about the job market,
there is no question that this kind of professional development is
quite a big asset. My hope is to generate interest in these matters
for their own sake, so that long after Lisa Orlandi, myself, and other
grads have left, these innovative programs can continue.

General Math 111-112 reform page:

http://math.cornell.edu/~harelb/calc-reform.html

HyperText Syllabus for projects-based Math 112:

http://math.cornell.edu/~harelb/112-syllabus.html

Preprint of _Graduate Student Initiated Calculus Reform_:

http://math.cornell.edu/~harelb/grad-init-calc-ref.html