In Brief:

Lily Wong Fillmore

Lily Wong Fillmore received a Distinguished Achievement Award in the Learned Article category in the year 2000 competition of the Educational Press Association of America. Her winning article was entitled "Loss of Family Languages: Should Educators Be Concerned?" and was published in the Autumn 2000 issue of Theory into Practice. Professor Fillmore's article uses several compelling examples to illustrate that linguistic minority students are expected to learn English rapidly, and to sacrifice their home language and any other vestiges of family values and culture that mark them as "different" and therefore "not American."

Maryl Gearhart has undertaken a major restructuring of the GSE's Evaluation Unit along with Evaluation Specialist Lynde Paule and doctoral students James Nagle and Joseph Flessa. The team has spent this past academic year learning about the evaluation needs of the School's credential programs. The team also met with the coordinators and faculty in each program and conducted a needs assessment to identify evaluation priorities for this coming year. The Commission on Teacher Credentialing requirements will guide the work the Evaluation Unit does with each program. The Evaluation Unit will focus its work in the fall on helping programs revise and/or design graduate follow-up instruments. In addition to its work with the teacher education and administrator programs, the Unit designed and conducted a study to learn about the activities Flanders Fellows are engaged in during the time of their fellowship and about activities and programs Fellows would like to participate in during and after their fellowship. Finally, the Unit is assisting the administrative services credential program, the Behring Institute, in evaluating its first year.

Rogers Hall will be director on the Berkeley campus for a new, NSF-funded Center for Diversity in Mathematics Education (DiME). The center, which is to begin operation in October 2001, involves a collaboration across three campuses: UC Berkeley (Alan Schoenfeld, Geoffrey Saxe, and Andrea diSessa are also involved here), UCLA, and the University of Wisconsin. One purpose of the center is to support several cohorts of graduate research and teaching fellows with a commitment to issues of diversity in the teaching and learning of mathematics. Faculty and graduate student participants on the Berkeley campus will work with teaching fellows recruited from the Berkeley Unified School District. Another purpose of the DiME Center is to develop courses and a digital infrastructure that support research and professional development in mathematics education. One aspect of the planned research, to be conducted by Professors Hall (UCB) and Erickson (UCLA), involves studies of how language and case production practices develop around a digital library of cases of teaching and learning.

Geoffrey Saxe recently returned from a trip to Papua New Guinea, where he was studying the counting systems of the indigenous peoples there, extending research he began in 1978 and 1980. There are 1200 counting systems in Papua New Guinea alone. While there, Professor Saxe dedicated the new Glen Lean Ethnomathematics Centre, established by the University of Goroka to preserve and research ethnomathematics, primarily of Papua New Guinea and Oceania. It will also carry out research into the use of ethnomathematics in mathematics education. Professor Saxe described the dedication as "a ceremony of much fanfare-speeches by the chancellor, a priest, deans, etc. I cut the ribbon and gave a few remarks. It was quite an event, complete with indigenous dancers."

Stuart Tannock, a lecturer in Social and Cultural Studies in Education, has published Youth at Work: The Unionized Fast-food and Grocery Workplace with Temple University Press. Carol Stack has written of it, "Powerful and revealing, Youth at Work puts youth workers on the front burner of the nation's policy concerns. Youth offer their own accounts, both wise and compelling, about their investments in work, the challenges in their working lives-and their demands, which we should listen to. A remarkable book for teaching, Youth at Work is Paul Willis's Learning to Labor for the 21st century!" Nina Ayoub, reviewing the book in the Chronicle of Higher Education writes, "Stuart Tannock knows the Joe Jobs, the McJobs, the just-a-jobs firsthand."

Brent Ducker

Marytza Gawlik

Jean Yonemura Wing

Jean Yonemura Wing has been awarded one of the first UC ACCORD Dissertation Year Fellowships. UC ACCORD stands for University of California All-Campus Collaborative on Outreach, Research, and Dissemination. It's a new systemwide clearinghouse that was recently founded to increase the knowledge base about disparities in educational accessibility and retention for California's students, and to identify strategies to overcome these inequities. Jean Yonemura Wing's dissertation is titled "An Uneven Playing Field: Behind the Racial Disparities in Student Achievement at an Integrated Urban High School." The fellowship will support the writing of her thesis and includes her presentation of work in progress at a November conference of UC ACCORD scholars.

Uilani (Lani) Hunt

Uilani (Lani) Hunt, who works as a Program Assistant III in the Excellence through Collaboration and Outreach (ECO) Center in the School of Education, completed an intensive 11-month staff internship in the office of University Relations. "I learned how to plan and implement an annual fundraising campaign and I learned a great deal about the organizational structure and function of UC Berkeley development operations across campus," she said. Her tasks included raising funds for the Senior Class Gift Campaign, where her efforts helped garner over $38,000 in gifts and pledges from members of the Class of 2001. She hopes to use the new skills she acquired during her internship to raise funds for GSE projects and community organizations, including K-12 schools. Lani Hunt has worked for the Graduate School of Education since 1991.

No fewer than six GSE students won this year's award for Outstanding Graduate Student Instructors. Four of the students were winners for courses taught in Education, and two students won for work in other departments.

Colette Cann, a doctoral student in Social and Cultural Studies, won for teaching a section of Current Issues in Education. She credits the curriculum itself with setting a tone that helped in her teaching: "The principles of a democratic/critical pedagogy that the course is built on allow the GSI and the students to work together," she said. "My favorite day of class was when we studied Freire's Pedagogy of the Oppressed. The students were in small groups-every student had the reading out with notes scribbled all over it. The sincerity with which they addressed this reading and its implications for true social justice really touched my heart." Christine Selig also taught a section of Current Issues in Education. She took risks in terms of broaching difficult topics: "One of the first days of class we conducted a panel of students who grew up poor-they volunteered," she explained. "The students each took turns answering the following questions: what was your class background, what was hard about it, and what do you never want to hear again? People talked about their lives openly, and many students said that this was one of the highlights of their semester." Christine Selig also works to create personal ties among her students. "The key to building friendships within the classroom: listening to each other and play, play, play."

Elisa Salasin and Mary Christianakis, both Ph.D. students in Language, Literacy, and Culture, won the Outstanding GSI Award for an unusual course. The class, Supervised Teaching in Elementary Education, is the student teaching placement for prospective elementary school instructors. Elisa Salasin worked on redesigning the field work placement in collaboration with Della Peretti, the coordinator of the GSE's Developmental Teacher Education Program, and with Moyra Contreras, the principal of Melrose Elementary School in Oakland. "One central component of this redesign was to structure a student teaching placement in the last semester of the program where all the credential candidates focus on second language learners," Elisa Salasin explained. Ms. Salasin's part in this included scheduling a series of training sessions focused on the concerns of the school and the students. "I was primarily responsible for the planning and scheduling of a series of joint inservice workshops for DTE students and the Melrose staff," said Elisa Salasin. "These presentations were based on needs that Melrose had identified. They felt that they have a well-developed and articulated program for their Spanish-speaking students (the majority), but wanted to improve their instruction for all kids."

Mary Christianakis has been a GSI for three years. "This course was challenging and interesting in that I got to think about the whole group's teaching needs," she said, "while also working with individuals in their own development as teachers. My supervision strategy is to help students figure out where they would like to go in their teaching and then to help them get there." She found the discussions immediately after field supervision to the be most rewarding and helpful to students.

Anastasia (Anna) Thanukos is a master's student in Cognition and Development. She won the Outstanding GSI Award for her teaching in Evolutionary Genetics, a computer lab course in the Department of Integrative Biology. "The most interesting (and unpredictable!) times in this course," she said, "are when students start pushing beyond the specific goals for that week's lab, when they ask questions that we all (myself and the students) have to put real effort into coming up with an answer for. That's really exciting." Anna Thanukos knows the material in this class extremely well. Although she's an Education student, she helped develop materials for this science course: "I took the course four years ago and ended up working for the professor over the summer to develop the computer simulations and the lab manual," she said.

Another Education student who won the award for work in a science department was Nicole Gillespie, who taught two courses in Physics. For the course Introductory Physics, required of all biology and pre-med students, she helped revise the curriculum: "I worked with a group of people in the Physics Department to reform how we used discussion and lab time. We developed new labs that were designed to highlight the application of physics principles to biological contexts. The discussion section curricula were designed so that students would work in small groups in tough problems-rather than watching the GSI work out the problems for them." She also taught Physics for Scientists and Engineers.