Purdue Profs Participate in Project NExT
Brian Bergen | Mary Sandoval | Project NExT
Research Assistant Professors Brian Birgen and Mary Sandoval are both Project NExT fellows. Here they share their experiences.
Mary Sandoval
Project NExT workshops explore such issues as new approaches to teaching calculus, using technology in the classroom, pedagogical research, and professional development issues, including discussions with representatives from the National Science Foundation on writing grant proposals, and panels which address such issues as balancing research and teaching. In addition, fellows maintain a regular e-mail dialog on such diverse subjects as textbook selection, alternative methods of assessment, new pedagogical strategies, and other topics of interest.
Mary Sandoval reviews some key points with her MA 266 class.
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I was selected as a 1997-1998 Project NExT fellow, and with the generous support of the Mathematics Department here at Purdue, attended workshops in Atlanta, Baltimore, and Toronto. Project NExT was a great experience for me. I found the workshops to be very useful and informative. In addition, the experience put me in contact with a supportive community of new Ph.D.'s whose similar experiences over the past year were tremendously useful to me during my first year out of graduate school.
I would be remiss if I did not mention the contributions of one of the organizers that year, the late Jim Leitzel. His boundless energy and enthusiasm had a tremendous impact on all the participants. Upon his passing, fellow organizer T. Christine Stevens (whose efforts this past year have been nothing short of Herculean) and all of the Project NExT fellows proposed a memorial fund in his honor: the Project NExT Leitzl Lecture Fund. The Fund has so far raised over $30,000 to support the James R. C. Leitzel Lecture, which is to be given annually at the Mathfest, and which will address issues in mathematical sciences education at both graduate and undergraduate
levels.
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