Elon will host the Innovation in Instruction Conference on Thursday, August 20, for North Carolina educators from Elon and the surrounding area who are interested in broadening their knowledge and fine-tuning methods in challenging and unknown areas of teaching. Innovation in Instruction is Elon’s sixth annual summer conference, a free, all-day workshop with sessions covering a wide range of topics.
Therese Huston, author of “Teaching What You Don’t Know,” will conduct the plenary workshop, “Enjoying the Adventure (and Managing Chaos): Teaching What you Don’t Know.” Huston is an expert in teaching and learning as a national and international consultant, and the Director of the Center in Excellence in Teaching and Learning at Seattle University.
“I’m really excited about the plenary session by Dr. Huston,” said Peter Felten, director of Elon’s Center for the Advancement of Teaching and Learning. “I’ve read her book in advance, which comes out next week and it is fantastic. Her plenary will be based on the research she did for that book.”
Other conference speakers include faculty from Elon, The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Furman University, Columbia College, North Carolina Central University, Winston-Salem State University and Roanoke College.
As faculty and staff at institutions of higher education, many educators find themselves teaching outside of their fields of expertise.
“As graduate students, we are trained in narrow specialties so that we really are experts in something,” said Felten who explained that faculty members often teach introductory and research methods courses, which require them to teach material they may not be familiar with. “Huston is not talking about a chemistry teacher teaching history. [An example] is a historian who studied and has written extensively about a 30-year slice of one country’s history and must then teach about the country’s history in its entirety.”
The workshop will focus on offering advice for educators, preparing them for new courses in new areas and maintaining credibility as educators. Session topics will concentrate on teaching and learning, interactive media, interdisciplinary, visual representations and the use of social networking (i.e. Facebook and Twitter) as tools for engagement.
Though the conference is free, pre-registration is requested by August 13. Lunch will be included for the conference.
By Sarah Costello ’11