Innovative Teaching

Harold Williford, department head since 1996, says innovation makes Western unique among schools in his experience. "The people in this department were willing to look at reform movements--reform calculus, for instance--when other schools still clung to the classical models." Such reforms move mathematics into the realm of real-world applications, data analysis, and technology. Two or three years ago, the department added a computing survey course for non majors. Just last year, it revamped its Math 101 course to meet the changing goals of the General Education Committee. Faculty embraced the challenge, taking computer classes and workshops to make technology a part of the new curriculum.

As a result, Williford claims, Western's faculty teach at the forefront of reform pedagogy, and they frequently demonstrate their innovative techniques at national and international conferences. Most recently, Associate Professor Mark Holliday presented his "Web-Based Introduction to Computer Networks" at the 3rd Annual Conference on Integrating Technology into Computer Science Education (ITiCSE'98), in Dublin, Ireland.

Because they excel in making abstract concepts accessible, Western's Mathematics and Computer Science faculty receive more than their share of teaching-award nominations. In the past three years Shan Manickam, Kathy Ivey, Joe Klerlein, and Charles Wallis have been finalists or winners for the Chancellor's Distinguished Teaching Award and/ or the UNC Teaching Award.

Julie Barnes and Kathy Ivey use a series of activities which relate concepts under discussion to real-world situations. For example, to explore the concept of derivative, students use a motion detector and their graphing calculators to create graphs of position and velocity functions. Walking to produce different types of curves is a concrete method for approaching an abstract concept.

The department's newest hire, Benjamin Schults, helped students at Kenyon model mathematical concepts by creating a program which parsed the text of Beowulf and created its own randomly-generated poem.

Charles Wallis, who won the 1998-9 Chancellor's Distinguished Teaching Award, likens himself to a tour guide helping students feel at home in the "different world" of mathematics. "Food," he jokes, "is a good bribe." Wallis' statistics class performs Coca-Cola taste tests and analyzes the results, using their findings as the basis for a hypothesis test. "The faculty members in my department care about, and enjoy working with, our students. We work as a team in sharing the responsibilities, and I enjoy being a part of the team."