From the Desk of the Chancellor, Oct. 19, 2010

Chancellor Charles R. Bantz View print-quality image

Last week, the stellar 40-member  Board of Trustees of the Woodrow Wilson Foundation visited Indianapolis to tour the schools where the Woodrow Wilson  Indiana Teaching Fellows are working. IUPUI is one of four universities in Indiana offering the $30,000 per year fellowship, which is funded by a $10 million grant from the Lilly Endowment and designed to increase the number of STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) teachers in high-need Indiana schools.

The trustees visited Northview, Harshman (a magnet middle school for science, technology, engineering, math, and world languages), Lynhurst, Ben Davis, Decatur Central, Christel House, and Lawrence Central. Governor Mitch Daniels and former North Carolina Governor Jim Hunt spoke at the dinner. Governor Hunt served on the Carnegie Task Force that created the National Board for Professional Teaching Standards and more recently on the Spellings Commission on the Future of Higher Education.

Another dinner speaker was Scott Knust, a member of the first cohort of fellows who pursued their studies at IUPUI. Scott had completed a baccalaureate degree with a double major in chemistry and physics from the University of Indianapolis when he received the fellowship. He now teaches chemistry and physics at Ben Davis High School to 180 students each day. His favorite part of the fellowship training was the 32 weeks he spent in middle school and high school classrooms with mentor teachers, a key component of the fellows’ training. Rhoda Owolabi also spoke. She had been a biology major and Louis Stokes Alliance for Minority Participation scholar at IUPUI and pursued her fellowship at Ball State.

Under the leadership of its president, Arthur Levine, the board and staff of the Woodrow Wilson Foundation created the teaching fellowship as its signature program to address the need for more well-prepared teachers, which research shows is the single most important factor in student achievement. At IUPUI, the fellowship program is designed by an interdisciplinary team of faculty members from three academic units: the Purdue School of Science, the Purdue School of Engineering and Technology, and the IU School of Education and administered under the auspices of our  Urban Center for the Advancement of STEM Education (UCASE).  Applications are now being accepted for the 2011 cohort.

Comments? Write chancllr@iupui.edu.