Dear all,

I hope you have all managed to navigate successfully around the elements of late. Unfortunately, I learned the hard way this month how treacherous icy roads can be and am consequently driving a rental car for a while! I hope too that all of you sitting for finals and defending your dissertations have been able to demonstrate all you have learnt and are satisfied with the results. We certainly are proud of you.

The College has had a very strong final month this calendar year. It started with the very impressive gathering in Forth Worth Texas to recognize the 35th anniversary of our Center for the Study of Reading and to honor the ongoing distinguished career of one of our extraordinarily accomplished colleagues, Professor Richard Anderson and his wife and long time colleague, Jana. Of course many of you know them for their abundant friendship, creative energy and generous spirits. The Advancement Office, in collaboration with Professors Janet Gaffney and Joey Garcia along with a host of others from across the nation, are to be commended for planning a very stimulating set of panel discussions and moving tributes. It was my privilege to share this day with so many scholars (including 30 of our former students and 6 of our distinguished alumni) who have played a part in the work of the Center and collaborated with Richard and Jana in so many influential projects. See http://education.illinois.edu/legacyinliteracy/

Also notable, as we reflect on this last year, is the growing work of our Office of International Programs, begun by Professor Fazal Rizvi and now under the direction of Associate Dean Scott Johnson. The twenty undergraduate education students from Hong Kong Institute of Education that we hosted during the fall semester departed this month very satisfied. The students lived with local homestay families and participated in observational visits to local schools as part of Professor Mark Dressman’s Teaching English in Diverse Contexts course. Each student attended three LAS courses of their choosing and created an ethnographic project about an issue in the Urbana-Champaign community for a seminar taught by Dr. Nicole Lamers. The students also visited Chicago, St. Louis, Springfield, and an Amish community. Thank you to the following graduate students who worked to make this program a success: Maria Cynthia Anderson, Joseph Chen, Huseyin Esen, James Geary, and Lucinda Morgan.

In January 2011, the Office of International Programs will host another semester-length study abroad program for eleven students from the Honours College at the University of Macau. Dr. Lamers will provide an ethnography seminar to the students, and they will also attend courses within their respective majors. The Macau students will live on campus and many of the program’s activities will have a leadership focus. Students will tour Washington D.C. during Spring Break and will visit areas of interest in the Urbana-Champaign community.

Professor Bill Cope and I are also working on a number of projects in Greece – one with the Pedagogical Institute trailing our Learning by Design tools and another with colleagues from the University of Thessaloniki as evaluators on a 2.9 million Euros project focused on providing support and learning opportunities for ROMA children and their families in Northern Greece. We have also been providing advice to the Minister for Education and members of her portfolio on a range of programs associated with a very ambitious school reform agenda in what must be one the most challenging of financial and political circumstances for the nation.

Congratulations also to the following colleagues for their achievements:

• Associate Dean for Research Prof, Jose Mestre who was Named 2010 American Physical Society Fellow. This is very prestigious award in recognition for his ‘for ground-breaking applications of principles and methodologies from cognitive science to physics education research and for elucidating expert-novice performance differences in physics learning and problem solving.’
See http://education.illinois.edu/news/2010/mestre-named-aps-fellow.html

• Associate Professor, Rochelle Gutierrez for being awarded the Association of Mathematics teacher Award for 2011 in recognition for her outstanding scholarly contributions to the field of mathematics teacher education.

• Assistant Professor Russ Korte and his collaborator, received the Helen Plants award at the Frontiers in Education Conference in Washington DC for their work in prompting deeper and more thoughtful understanding of learning for engineering educators.

• Professor Helen Neville and her doctoral student, Valene Whittaker, for their work on the relationship between student’s racial identity and their well being, that was featured in Inside Illinois. See http://news.illinois.edu/news/10/1129_racial_identity.html

• Assistant Professor Jennifer Delaney who featured on the university’s front page commenting on the impact of federal earmarks on higher education. See http://illinois.edu/

• Assistant Professor Karrie Shogren who has been awarded an IES Goal 1 grant of $384,323 over two years to explore the Predictors and Outcomes of Self-Determination for Secondary Students with Disabilities Using NLTS2-2.

• Professor Bill Cope and his inter-disciplinary team (Sarah McCarthey, Katherine Ryan, Hua Hua Chang, Fouad Abd El Khalick, Johnell Bentz, Nicholas Burbules, Jennifer Greene, Denice Hood, Mary Kalantzis, Mary, Jose Mestre, Lisa Monda-Amaya, Evangeline Pianfetti, George Reese, Joseph Robinson, Thomas Schwandt, Jinming Zhan, Corinan Girju, Dan Roth and Marc Snir.) were awarded another $660,000 to support four post-doctoral fellows for two years under the project title, ‘Assessing Complex Performance: A Postdoctoral Training Program Researching Students Writing and Assessment in Digital Workspaces’. This brings the team’s cluster of IES-funded writing assessment projects to a total of four, amounting to nearly $4m.

• Student Academic Affairs Office Administrator, Kathy Stalter earned a Bachelor of Arts degree in General Studies from the School of Continuing Education at Eastern Illinois University during their December, 2010 Commencement exercises. Kathy graduated summa cum laude with a cumulative grade-point average of 3.95. During her studies, she was inducted into Alpha Sigma Lambda, an honor society for adult students in higher education.

• The Centre for Education in Small Urban Communities’ Student Opportunities for After-School Resources program (SOAR ), led by Lila Moore, has been selected to receive the 2010-2011 campus award for Excellence in Public Engagement. This was ‘in recognition of the extraordinary contributions of faculty staff and students and projects to connect the university with the broader community on issues of critical social important.’ See http://education.illinois.edu/smallurban/SOAR

The Centre’s work was also featured on NPR this week. One of our teacher collaborators, Heany Yoon, was interviewed about the literacy work she is doing at Booker T Washington school with Olga Halpern’s second-language classroom. Very moving account of children transcending language barriers to tell their stories in written and spoken forms. See http://will.illinois.edu/news/story/storycorps101220

• The Illinois New Teacher Collaborative received a mentioned in a Chicago Tribune article regarding education reform and teacher mentoring. The article also highlights positively activities similar to those of teacher collaborators from the Center for Education in Small Urban Communities. See http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/education/ct-met-teacher-coaching-hechinger-20101206,0,1188861.story

• Three CoE members have been selected as members of the search committee for Chancellor – Professors Nick Barbules and James Anderson and Graduate Student, Carey Hawkins Ash. See http://www.news-gazette.com/news/university-illinois/2010-12-14/chancellor-search-committee-begin-work-next-week.html

During this calendar year, the College achieved another milestone by surpassing the $25 million mark in donations during the Brilliant Futures fundraising campaign, set to conclude in December 2011. Among the programs funded this calendar year were the Youth Literature Festival, held in October; the Bagley Scholarship fund and several other named awards, highlighted by the annual Student Recognition Awards Banquet on November 6; a 6-figure deferred gift for undergraduate scholarships; and ongoing significant corporate support from the State Farm Companies Foundation. All gifts, no matter how large or small, are meaningful and deeply appreciated, enabling us to continue to fund key programs and initiatives for faculty and students. I encourage you to make your year end donation through the College’s website at: http://education.illinois.edu/advancement/gifts/, and thank you, as always, for your support.

You can read more about these and other college achievements in our 2010 profile located on the home page of our website, produced by Lori Herber and our Communication team. See http://education.illinois.edu/ You can also collect hard copies from our Advancement Office. The communications team has done a great job accommodating suggestions and is always open to ideas and stories for future publications. Lori is also to be congratulated for her recent publication in, ‘Lebenswelten von Frauen und Maennern’ or ‘Environments of Women and Men in the Ruhr Metropolis’ published in Essen, Germany, and featuring photos and a chapter written in German by Lori called ‘Eine Amerikanerin im Ruhrgebiet,’ about women’s roles in that former industrial region-turned-cultural icon.

Finally, it was an inspiring joy to join the students in our primary school last week when they presented their teachers and parents with a set of multimodal documents as a record of their work and achievements – drawings, taxonomies, iPod presentations, PowerPoint and video documentaries, project books, dioramas – all the communication modes required for the 21st century across a wide range of disciplines.

Sincere thanks to all, students, faculty, staff, clinical instructors, academic professionals, alumni, community partners and the college leadership team for your contributions to our performance this calendar year and for working so creatively and sympathetically together to meet our shared goals. Your support, respect and friendship have made this a very fulfilling year. In particular I want to acknowledge the professionalism, dedication and sensitivity to needs displayed constantly by my assistants Susan Michaels and Betsy Greifenkamp. They deserve much credit for what is achieved in the Dean’s Office.

Members of our family from Australia and New York will be arriving here on 23 December to spend Christmas with us in Champaign. We are really looking forward to sharing the spirit of the season with each other. I do hope that you and your loved ones have a safe and joyous holiday and that the New Year brings all you desire.

All the best,
Dean Mary Kalantzis

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