Faculty Research Award

Dr. Michael DiPaola received a William and Mary Faculty Research Award for this fall semester. He continues research on the “organizational citizenship” construct while completing final edits on a text, Principals Improving Instruction: Supervision, Evaluation, and Professional Development, co-authored with Dr. Wayne Hoy, due out in the spring. He also co-edited with Dr. Hoy and contributed to an edited book, Essential Ideas for the Reform of American Schools.

Teaching Enhancement
Project Award

Over the last year Dr. James Patton has received the College of William and Mary University Teaching Enhancement Project Award designed to enhance the cultural responsiveness of his own curriculum and pedagogy and that of colleagues in the School of Education. He has also received the College of William and Mary Faculty Research Award for a study entitled, "Disproportionality in Special Education: Listening and Responding to the Voices of African American Parents. Dr. Patton co-authored a chapter with Dr. Arletha McSwain entitled, "Early Childhood Multicultural Special Education". It appeared in Multicultural Special Education: Culturally Responsive Teaching by Dr. Festus Obiakor (published by Merrill Prentice-Hall).
He is also currently co-editing a book on culturally responsive training of special education teachers.

Visiting Scholar

Dr. Brenda Williams served as a Visiting Scholar for the Interdisciplinary Doctoral Seminar on Culturally and Linguistically Diverse Exceptional Children at Northern Arizona University, Flagstaff, AZ, during summer session 2006. This project, supported by the US Department of Education's Office of Special Education Programs (OSEP), seeks to increase the number of Native American and Latino scholars entering the professorate. Dr. Williams continues her work with the Monarch Center located at the University of Illinois-Chicago. This center also receives OSEP funding to build capacity of faculty at minority institutions of higher education (MIHEs) to prepare grant applications. She will present a session on the Blue Ribbon Commission on Special Education Leadership Preparation at the annual Monarch Leadership Conference in December 2006.

Faculty Highlights

Dr. Judi Harris has co-edited and contributed a chapter to the first scholarly book describing "technological pedagogical content knowledge" (TPCK) -- that is, the knowledge that teachers and educational leaders must have to integrate use of educational technologies successfully into curriculum-based instruction. The Handbook of Technological Pedagogical Content Knowledge for Teaching and Teacher Educators will be released and featured at the upcoming American Association of Colleges of Teacher Education (AACTE)'s annual meeting in February 2007. TPCK-related presentations by the book's authors will also be made at the international Society for Instructional Technology in Teacher Education's (SITE) convention in March, the American Educational Research Association's (AERA) meeting in April, and the National Educational Computing Conference's (NECC) gathering in June 2007.

This fall, EPPL faculty member Dr. John Foubert published a new book, Lessons Learned, (Routledge Publishers).  Lessons Learned is a book designed for the training of college resident assistants and is written in a format that allows users to select from among several dozen issues of importance to a particular campus.  Each chapter is written as a letter from an experienced RA to a Fellow RA who is about to begin his or her service as a staff member. Letters open by setting the institutional and personal context of the letter writer.  The writer then describes a situation in which he or she made a big mistake as a staff member. Readers then follow the author through the process of getting advice about what went wrong and getting a second chance to learn from a mistake. The letter closes with a summary of the lessons that the author (and the reader) can learn from the particular scenario. After each letter, a set of provocative discussion questions are included for personal reflection and/or group discussion by an RA staff.  Finally, each chapter closes with recommended additional resources on the topic in question.

In addition to his new book, Dr. Foubert has published five journal articles in 2006, all with either students in the EPPL program or undergraduates at William and Mary, Mary including Jerry Tatum, Greg Donahue, Dallas Garner, Kara Miller, Kate Golden, Peter Thaxter, Lauren Grainger, and J.T. Newberry. He has also served as the project director for a US Department of Education Grant evaluating the effects of a rape prevention program on college men and serves as a special consultant to the U.S. Naval Academy to develop a comprehensive new rape prevention curriculum.

Dr. David Leslie collaborated with his student Natasha Janson on an article entitled, Easing the Exit: An Aging Professoriate Likes Options in Change. Dr. Dot Finnegan had an article on YMCA evening law schools published in the Journal of Legal Education and has presented at professional conferences with Nathan Alleman, Alexei Matveev, and Lisa Heuvel. Dr. Megan Tschannen-Moran and Dr. Michael DiPaola collaborated with alumnus Dr. Jennifer Parish, Chief Academic Officer of the York County Schools, on an article on school climate growing out of Dr. Parish’s dissertation research, published in the Journal of School Leadership.

Joyce VanTassel-Baska was honored at the National Association for Gifted Children Conference for her role as president of the organization by friends and colleagues of the Center for Gifted Education.  Her presidential address was entitled "Leadership for the Future in Gifted Education:  Ten Things Administrators and Teachers Must Know".  She has also published two new books this past year.  One book represented the culmination of the proceedings from the National Poverty conference held in Washington D.C. in April.  Co-sponsored by NAGC and the Center for Gifted Education at William and Mary, the conference focused on the research and effective programs for promising learners in poverty funded by the Jack Kent Cooke Foundation. The conference was attended by 85 leaders across 30 states who have been working on this issue.  The conference proceedings is edited by Dr. VanTassel-Baska and Tamra Stambaugh, doctoral candidate, and available online from the Web sites of both the Center and NAGC, under the title Overlooked Gems.  The second book is an edited volume that inaugurates a new series on critical issues in equity and excellence to be published in five volumes by Prufrock Press.  The first book in the series is Challenging Gifted Learners Outside the Traditional Classroom: Alternative Programs and Services. It contains a compilation of chapters that include Center Research Director Annie Feng on mentorships and former master's student Ai Li Chee on service learning.

Grants

David W. Leslie received a $30,000 grant from the TIAA-CREF Institute to study trends in faculty demographics, work, and employment between 1988 and 2004. John D. Foubert received a $276,000 grant from the United States Department of Education to study reducing alcohol-related sexual assault by first-year men  (June 2005 – June 2007).