Week Twenty November 30 – December 6, 2008

UTEP-UMCE News – Dr. Bill Robertson, Fulbright Scholar, UTEP Assistant Professor

 

Week Twenty November 30 – December 6, 2008

 

The following is a summary of the activities that I have been engaged in during the week of November 30 – December 6 as they relate to the work I am doing here at UMCE as part of my Fulbright Scholarship.

 

Physics Project Update

 

On Wednesday, December 3, I attended what would be the last of the regular physics project meeting and this meeting focused on my work over the semester. I focused on three main areas, the teaching items I had done at UMCE and in the community, the research project I have been working on, and also on the role I had played as a “cultural ambassador”, in fact one of the only North Americans that most of the students at UMCE had ever met in person.

 

In the areas of teaching, I had worked at La UMCE in the areas of the Physics project, which included Mechanics, Mathematical Methods in Physics, Experimental Physics I and the Workshop on the Development of Scientific Thinking.  I had also been involved in the ECBI program, a large number of seminars, conferences and associated workshops all around the university.  I work directly with professors in the areas of Physics, Chemistry, Biology, Mathematics and Information Technology.  I also worked at a number of local schools including Liceo Juan Antonio Ríos, Liceo Capitán de Corbete Pedro Gonzáles, Colegio Saint Gabriel de Providencia, Liceo Guillermo Labarca. All told, I did12 Demonstrations in Schools in Santiago, 10 Different workshops at UMCE and with Fulbright, 8 Different Presentations at Conferences, wrote 6 articles and Proposals about the work in science and technology education.

 

In the area of research I administered both pre-surveys and post-surveys at UMCE to over 50 students as well as over 80 students in the high schools.  My goal is to analyze the changes in attitudes along with content tests to see what kinds of impacts were made in these separate populations. My preliminary results indicate that there was a small change in attitudes, but I have yet to analyze it statistically to determine the effects over the groups and sub populations. This will be the focus of my work for the spring, and I hope that it will also result in other publications from this effort.

 

In the area of being a cultural ambassador, I feel that I have been a bridge between Chile and the United States, as well as achieved an understanding of what it is like to be a professor at the university and a teacher in local schools.  I have had a large number of opportunities to show the attitudes and abilities of a North American to the students, as well as a number of opportunities to collaborate and work with universities here, at UTEP, at the US Embassy and the Fulbright-Chile Commission.

 

After the meeting, I attended a student sponsored asado, where the students grilled out for the professors and we were able to interact in a much more casual way.  The students here are really great and I do hope that there will be a number of opportunities for inter-exchanges between UMCE and UTEP for both faculty and students in the future.

 

Final IT Video Project

 

On Thursday, December 4, I worked with the staff in IT to assemble a DVD from the Action Science Demonstrations that I had done at UMCE. We assembled 10 clips that can be used for introducing lessons in physics in Spanish, the main idea is to provide future teachers a resource that is in Spanish that they can use to engage their learners as well as a creative way to integrate physics content into the science classroom.