NEWS RELEASE

Contact: Jennifer Anderson (andersonj@nsula.edu )
News Bureau
Northwestern State University
Natchitoches, LA 71497
(318) 357-6466

6/27/2002

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

NATCHITOCHES-Northwestern State University's College of Education has received a $100,000 Board of Regents Support grant to fund the project "Preparing College Faculty for Redesign: Content, Technology and Standards."

The university matched the grant with $85,535 to provide technological support needed for the project.

Ron McBride is the principal investigator for the grant. Bob Gillan, Frank Fuller and Karen McFerrin are co-principal investigators.

The goals of the project are to prepare college faculty who are content specialists to teach education majors using teaching strategies appropriate to teacher preparation reform, provide all teacher educators with information and resources using the latest technology, assist college content specialists to prepare courses for teacher preparation reform and provide technological support for those teachers.

"You have education students taking classes content classes with faculty with no understanding of education pedagogy and strategies," McBride said. "This project will help faculty understand how to build their courses under the guidelines of redesign."

Content specialists teach courses outside the College of Education. There are 15 areas of content specialties at NSU. They fall into the Colleges of Science and Technology, Liberal Arts and Business. Instructors from the fields will be grouped with College of Education faculty, classroom teachers or administrators for a series of workshops in which they will build courses designed with education students in mind.

The enhancement plan is a response to the mandate from the Board of Regents to reform teacher education. This reform under the recommendation of the Blue Ribbon Commission and the PK-16+ Council that stipulate the development of a comprehensive system to recruit, prepare and retrain high quality teacher for Louisiana.

By the end of the project, 30 education courses and 30 courses from content areas will be restructured in response to redesign standards.

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