Personal Statement Notes
* This personal statement can stand alone as a summary of my work and future plans, but is better read with reference to full Practitioner's Portfolio, which contains a section reviewing my courses, a range of annotated exhibits of my work, and attached publications. Footnotes in the personal statement refer reviewers to the publications, different sections in the Practitioner's Portfolio, and relevant websites.
1. For more details of my path to U. Mass. Boston see my curriculum vitae.
2. See "Re/constructing socio-ecologies" (1992) and "Building on Construction" (1995). Full citations are given in my c.v. Abstracts of some of my publications are linked to my c.v. on my website. By integrating practical and conceptual considerations, heterogeneous construction avoids the vexed dichotomy between scientific realism and social determination of knowledge; see also "Co-construction and process" (1995).
3. "Mapping ecologists' ecologies of knowledge" (1990); "Mapping complex social-natural processes" (1999).
4. See at the start of the exhibits, a statement of philosophy in relation to teaching and fostering critical thinking about environment, science, and society, from April 1995.
5. I use these labels throughout because I do not believe that the label "scholarship" should be restricted to research and publication or that "service" captures the importance of the work many of us do in institutional development.
6. The contents and draft introduction (exhibit 1.C.i) provide a more detailed overview of the book. Previous publications being woven into the book include "The construction and turnover of complex community models" (1988), "Technocratic optimism" (1988), "Ecosystems as circuits" (1991), "Re/constructing socio-ecologies" (1992), "Building on construction" (1995), and "Socio-ecological webs and sites of sociality" (1999). See also note 7.
7. See, in particular, my reworking of "How does the commons become tragic?" (1998) (critiquing the popular idea of the unsustainability of common, non-privatized natural resources) into "Critical tensions and non-standard lessons" (forthcoming, as a contribution to Teaching Global Environmental Politics As If Education Mattered). See also "Mapping complex social-natural processes" (1999); "What can agents do?" (1999); "'Whose trees are these?' (forthcoming); "Distributed agency" (forthcoming). P/reprints are included with the portfolio. These essays are being worked into the last chapter of The Limits of Ecology, as is material from presentations at U.N.A.M., Mˇxico, November 1998 and the International Society for Exploring Teaching Alternatives, October 1998.
8. "How do we know we have global environmental problems" (1997), "Dynamics and rhetorics of socio-environmental change" (1997), which is a revised version of "The limits of neo-Malthusian environmentalism" (1999).
9. Towards the end of "What can agents do?" (section C) I consider ways that researchers might address more self-consciously the complexities of both the situations they study and their own social situatedness. This discussion, it should be noted, draws on many of the strands I am weaving into my teaching and advising-guided freewriting, facilitation of participatory group planning, "Sense-making" contextualization of inquiry, constructivist listening, mapping of resources for thinking and practice, diagramming of heterogeneous construction (or "intersecting processes"), and the use of critical heuristics.
10. See syllabus of CCT601 in section I of the Portfolio.
11. Extended versions of two of the cases are "Natural selection" (1998), exhibit 1.A.i, and "How does the commons become tragic" (1998).
12. See exhibit 1.D.
13. See exhibit 1.E.v.
14. See exhibits 1.E.ii-iv: the workshop brochure, post-workshop report, and evaluation.
15. Out of the invitation to be a guest lecturer at the BioQuest workshop on Undergraduate Biology Education this summer, a possible collaboration along these lines is germinating with Steve Fifield, a new professor of science education at the University of Delaware, who shares my interest in science education that integrates social contextualiztion of science.
16. See teaching philosophy at the start of the Exhibits.
17. See excerpts from my 1995 teaching portfolio, on which this current Practitioner's Portfolio is modelled.
18. See exhibit 3.B.i.
19. See exhibit 2.B.i
20. "Making connections and respecting differences" (1997).
21. See teaching philosophy.
22. "Critical tensions and non-standard lessons" (forthcoming).
23. "Distributed agency" (forthcoming).
24. In addition to the statement of my teaching philosophy, see also the syllabi linked to my web-site and a current versions of my notes on 25. For an account of Re-evaluation Counselling adapted in to an educational setting, see Weissglass, J. 1990. "Constructivist listening for empowerment and change." The Educational Forum 54(4): 351-370.
26. I ran workshops at the October 1996 and 1998 meetings of the International Society for Exploring Teaching Alternatives, October 1998. See http://www.asu.edu/upfd/www/iseta for more information about ISETA.
27. I attended three training workshops at the Canadian branch of the Institute for Cultural Affairs in 1997-98. For more information about ICA see http://www.icacan.ca/ and Stanfield, B., Ed. 1997. The Art of Focused Conversation. Toronto: Canadian Institute of Cultural Affairs..
28. I was an invited commentator at a day-long Sense-Making workshop on "Methodology between the cracks" in May 1999. For more information about the workshop and Sense-making see Dervin, B. and M. Frenette (Eds.) 1999. Methodology Between The Cracks: Sense-making as Exempar (Working Papers). San Francisco: International Communication Association.
29. I was an invited Presenter and Participant at the June 1999 BioQuest workshop on Teaching College Biology. See http://bioquest.org for more information about BioQuest.
30. See the Changing Life Working Group (Exhibit 1.E.v), the summer practitioners' workshop (Exhibit 1.E.ii-iv), and a future faculty workshop (Exhibit 3.E.ii).
31. For elaboration of these features, see teaching philosophy.
32. See syllabus for CCT670 in section I of Portfolio. For an extended example of reciprocal animation, see "Natural Selection" (1998), exhibit 1.A.i.
33. See "How do we know we have global environmental problems?" (1997).
34. This last feature was less explicit than the first two, and the challenge is to lead students at least some distance towards appreciating it during only one semester.
35. Unfortunately, I will not have the opportunity to teach courses in the science-STS area this coming academic year.
36. The different courses are reviewed in section I of the Portfolio.
37. See Fall 1999 syllabus for CCT698 in section I of the Portfolio.
38. See Exhibit 2.B.ii.
39. See Fall 1999 syllabus for CCT698 in section I of the Portfolio.
40. See Exhibit 3.B.i.
41. With more time for conferences I could also develop the approach that I began during a summer 1996 writing course in which I had students focus their questions to me through writing for some minutes before we started to converse.
42. See course evaluations for CCT601 in section I of the Portfolio.
43. Exhibit 3.D.iii
44. Exhibit 2.E.ii.
45. Exhibit 3, especially 3.D on varieties of course evaluation.
46. cct website
47. Exhibit 1.E.v.
48. Exhibit 1.E.ii-iv.
49. Mobilizing the large number of loyal alums to publicize CCT should help the Program come closer to the target of 21-25 new students per year set by the Graduate Dean.
50. For example, if issues in evaluation of educational change are covered equally well by another GCOE course, I would like to focus more in my CCT research courses (CCT685 and 698) on Action- or Practitioner-Research and try to attract to CCT students involved in scientist-citizen collaborations and community based research. This would enable me to build on my long-standing, but to date low-key, association with the in Western Massachusetts.
51. I am a member of the Committee to establish General Science degree, formed at the end of the spring semester.
52. Fifield, Exhibit 1.E.iv.
53. Fifield, Exhibit 1.E.iv.
54. See Professional Activities in the c.v.
55. See the sections in my c.v. on edited special editions of journals, and the edited anthology, Changing Life: Genomes, Ecologies, Bodies, Commodities (1997).
56. See the sections in my c.v. on "Reviews, commentaries, and notes" and "Selected presentations."
57. See http://www.faculty.umb.edu/peter_taylor/ishpssbed.html.