Barbara E. Walvoord is Professor Emerita at the University of Notre Dame. She was the founding director of Notre Dame’s Center for Teaching and Learning, and she coordinated Notre Dame’s self-study for re-accreditation from the Higher Learning Commission of the North Central Association. She has consulted and led workshops at more than 300 institutions of higher education, on topics such as assessment, effective teaching, the scholarship of teaching and learning, and writing across the curriculum. Named the Maryland English Teacher of the Year for Higher Education in 1987, she has taught English and interdisciplinary humanities courses for more than forty years.
Dr. Walvoord's research interests focus on teaching and learning in higher education, including the forces and reform movements, such as assessment and writing across the curriculum, that affect higher education. Her publications combine broad qualitative research projects with guidance for practitioners. They include Assessment Clear and Simple: A Practical Guide for Institutions, Departments, and General Education (Jossey-Bass, 2004); Academic Departments: How They Work, How They Change (Jossey-Bass 2000); Effective Grading: A Tool for Learning and Assessment (Jossey-Bass, 1998); In the Long Run: A Study of Faculty in Three Writing Across the Curriculum Programs (NCTE, 1997); and Thinking and Writing in College: A Study of Students in Four Disciplines (NCTE, 1991). A documentary-style video for faculty, Making Large Classes Interactive (1995), of which she is executive co-producer and co-writer, won two national awards in 1995.
Dr. Walvoord will be speaking at the Opening Plenary Lunch on Monday, May 19th, as well as leading a Featured Session on Managing Grade Inflation on Tuesday morning, May 20th.
Kathleen B. Yancey, the Kellogg W. Hunt Professor of English at Florida State University, directs the graduate program in Rhetoric and Composition Studies. Past President of The Council of Writing Program Administrators, she is also a Past Chair of the Conference on College Composition and Communication, the largest scholarly organization for college writing faculty. Currently, she is President of the National Council of Teachers of English, a 50,000+ member organization of literacy educators from pre-K to graduate school. With Barbara Cambridge and Darren Cambridge, she directs the International Coalition on Electronic Portfolio Research, which has brought together over 40 institutions to focus on and document the learning that takes place inside and around electronic portfolios. And as part of her near-decade-long work with the middle and high schools in Virginia Beach, she is working with English teachers to develop a “new literacies” curriculum culminating in electronic portfolios.
Yancey is also the author, editor or co-editor of over 60 chapters and refereed articles and ten books, several of which focus on reflection, portfolios, and/or assessment. They include Portfolios in the Writing Classroom (1992), Assessing Writing across the Curriculum (1997), Self-Assessment and Development in Writing (2000), Situating Portfolios (1997), and Reflection in the Writing Classroom. The section editor for student portfolios in the AAHE publication Electronic Portfolios (2001), she guest edited the 1996 issue of Computers and Composition dedicated to electronic portfolios. In the June 2004 issue of College Composition and Communication, she published an analysis of electronic portfolios that contrasts them with print portfolios and that defines them as “web-sensible” digital compositions. In summer, 2008, Stylus Publishing will release her co-edited volume (with Barbara Cambridge and Darren Cambridge), Electronic Portfolios 2.0, which documents the electronic portfolio projects on many campuses, in general education programs, and in various disciplinary contexts.
Dr. Yancey will be leading a Featured Session on e-Portfolios on Tuesday afternoon, May 20th, as well as leading a workshop in the e-Portfolios and Writing theme on Wednedsay morning.
Bill Drayton, Chair and C.E.O. of Ashoka: Innovators for the Public, is a social entrepreneur. As a student at Harvard, Balliol College in Oxford University and Yale Law School, he was active in civil rights and founded a number of organizations, such as Harvard’s Ashoka Table, an interdisciplinary weekly forum in the social sciences.
In 1970, he graduated from Yale Law School and began his career at McKinsey and Company in New York. From 1977 to 1981, Mr. Drayton served as Assistant Administrator at the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, where he launched emissions trading (the basis of Kyoto), among other reforms.
In 1981, while working part-time at McKinsey and Company in New York, he launched both Ashoka and Save EPA and its successor, Environmental Safety. In 1984, with support he received when elected a MacArthur Fellow, he was able to devote himself fully to Ashoka.
Mr. Drayton is currently the Chairman & Chief Executive Officer of Ashoka: Innovators for the Public. He is also chair of Youth Venture, Community Greens, and Get America Working! Mr. Drayton has won numerous awards and honors throughout his career. In 2005, he was selected as one of America’s Best Leaders by US News & World Report and Harvard’s Center for Public Leadership. In 2006, he was recognized as being one of Harvard University’s 100 “Most Influential Alumni.” In 2007, he received Duke University Center for the Advancement of Social Entrepreneurship’s (CASE) Leadership in Social Entrepreneurship Award, the University of Pennsylvania Law School’s 2007 Honorary Fellow Award and the Goi Peace Foundation’s Peace Award. He has just recently been recognized by Tufts University’s Institute for Global Leadership with the Dr. Jean Mayer Global Citizenship Award.
Mr. Drayton will be speaking at the plenary lunch at noon on Wednesday, May 21st, in Copley Formal Lounge.
Michael Baime, M.D., of the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine, is the Director of the Penn Program for Stress Management. This mindfulness-based stress management program has enrolled more than 4,000 individuals in a structured eight-week meditation-based training course since its inception in 1992. Dr. Baime graduated from Haverford College in 1977 and from the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine in 1981. He completed post-graduate training in internal medicine at The Graduate Hospital in Philadelphia in 1984, and served an additional year as chief resident. He is currently a Clinical Associate Professor of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine. Dr. Baime was the recipient of The Provost’s Award for Distinguished Teaching at the University of Pennsylvania in 2006. He was also awarded the Appel award for student work in psychiatry in 1981.
Dr. Baime has studied and practiced meditation since 1969, and was formally authorized to teach meditation in the Kagyu and Shambhala traditions of Tibetan Buddhism in 1983. He has trained meditation and stress management instructors and led numerous retreats and advanced meditation programs in both the Shambhala Buddhist tradition and in secular settings. He is currently engaged in research on the impact of mindfulness meditation on empathy, burnout and patient care in the hospital settings; the use of meditation for the treatment of obesity, ADHD, multiple sclerosis, and insomnia; and the behavioral and neural changes associated with meditation practice, among other interests.
Dr. Baime will be leading a Featured Session on Mindfulness in Education on Wednesday afternoon, May 21st.