To promote faculty development on campus, the university will host guest speaker L. Dee Fink to teach “Designing Integrative Learning into your Courses” and “The Joy and Responsibility of Teaching” seminars.

In 1979, Fink established the Instructional Development Program at Oklahoma and served as director of this program until his retirement from there in 2005. He currently works as a national and international consultant on higher education, according to the IDEA (Individual Development and Educational Assesment) Center.

Fink has also published books on the subject of learning and has been a guest at many conferences.

The ” Designing Integrative Learning into your Courses” will be presented in the afternoon. The seminar will focus on ways to make the student connect with a course and get a deeper understanding of the material.

For the afternoon session, Fink’s focus will be to help faculty advance EIU’s Integrative Learning Initiative through course design, particularly in how to design significant learning experiences that help students to connect to and reflect on course content, said Krishna Thomas, assistant director of faculty development.

“The Joy and Responsibility of Teaching” workshop will be given in the evening.

Fink will examine our traditional responses and suggest alternative responses to four central issues of teaching: what is taught and how it is presented, how teachers gear up and how educators define themselves.

“I’m sure that his discussion will be rife with more information,” Thomas said.

The first workshop will be from 1 p.m. to 4 p.m. in the Grand Ballroom of the Martin Luther King Jr. University Union. The second workshop will begin at 6 p.m. and end around 7:30 p.m. in the Doudna Fine Arts Center Lecture Hall.

Samantha McDaniel can be reached at 581-7942 or slmcdaniel@eiu.edu.