The Annual B.G. Raines Education Forum March 23, 2009

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The Forum is named for Dr. Bob Gene Raines, a founder of the Forum and a participant since 1988.
March 24, 2009
The Southwest Virginia Higher Education Center
Pre-registration for the 2009 Forum will open in January, 2009.
The Forum is free and open to the public. Registration is required.

Public school teachers, students in teacher education, school officials, and civic leaders interested in public education are welcome and are encouraged to register and attend.

Numeracy Across the Curriculum with Dr. Eric Gaze
Dr. Gaze is Associate Professor of Mathematics and Education at Alfred University and mathematics coordinator for the Master of Science program in Numeracy, the first of its kind in the country.

Dr. Gaze has spent the last two years developing curriculum for the M.S. in Numeracy. He is a member of the Mathematical Association of America's Special Interest Group on Quantitative Literacy (SIGMAA QL). He is a charter member and serves on the Board of the National Numeracy Network (NNN). Current research projects include a textbook, Numeracy, A Quantitative Literacy: Communicating with Numbers, and writing a monthly column for the NNN's website, Ratiocination. He lives on a small farm in Western New York with his wife and daughter raising alpacas.

At the Forum Dr. Gaze will introduce the emerging idea of Numeracy and its implications for teacher education and curriculum planning. Numeracy is a quantitative literacy, the ability to communicate with numbers and to process quantitative information. It develops the power of mind necessary to critique, reflect upon, and apply quantitative information in making decisions. It is "everyday math," the numbers we find in tables and charts in the newspaper, percentages in home finance, and the statistics employed in manipulating data for social security, climate change, and bailouts of our banking system. Teachers from all levels and disciplines should possess these skills and have the confidence to introduce relevant quantitative concepts, encouraging their students to see the applicability of mathematical content in all disciplines and in their daily personal and civic life.

Bernard Madison, the first president of the National Numeracy Network founded in 2003, states that quantitative literacy "has no academic home, is poorly understood and hardly recognized by either academe or the US public, but nonetheless considered important, even critical." We find ourselves awash in numbers on a daily basis, and businesses identify these basic quantitative skills as critical job skills:

dealing with ratios and percentages,
reading graphs, and
measuring and comparing values with different units.

Yet entering college students lack fluency with these middle school topics and find themselves enrolled in remedial algebra classes that do not address fundamental inadequacies.

The innovative M.S. in Numeracy at Alfred University seeks to provide teachers in all disciplines (not just math and science) and at all levels, K-16, with the skills and confidence to handle quantitative information in their classrooms. It defines Numeracy as a basic literacy that every teacher must have and use to improve our student's reading and writing, with numbers as well as words.

Dr. Gaze will distribute handouts to help attendees assess their own quantitative literacy prior to the Forum, and these will be posted to our website as PDF files for participants to download when they are available (Watch for the link here!). These worksheets will provide context for how we use numbers to communicate and will help isolate the math skills that are critical for quantitative literacy.

Numeracy, A Quantitative Literacy: Communicating with Numbers, will also be available for forum participants to purchase (Watch for instructions here to get the book before the Forum!). Numeracy, A Quantitative Literacy is the textbook used in Teaching Numeracy, the foundational course in the MS Program in Numeracy at Alfred University. In it, Dr. Gaze identifies the crucial topics for quantitative literacy and develops these topics based on the unifying concept of ratio and incorporating spreadsheet technology. The textbook is currently under review for publication.



Organized by Emory & Henry College
The William N. Neff Education Center at EHC includes a Virginia-approved teacher preparation program accredited nationally by TEAC and a strong program of support for school improvement within the region. It offers a range of initial teacher licensure options for all grades, pre-Kindergarten through 12. At the graduate level, general special edication K-12 and Reading Specialist PK-12 endorsements are also available, along with an M.Ed. in Professional Studies for individuals who already have a BA/BS degree and wish to teach.

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Ticket Info:  Preregistration, Free

Official Website: http://forum2009-upcoming.eventbrite.com