CCT News

15 January 2011

See also previous news, alum news and exchanges, items for the upcoming news, and CCT calendar.
Inform cct@umb.edu if you have news OR want to be emailed when there's a new news compilation (no more than once/month) OR want to be removed from such mailings.

Contents: Student matters, CCT community, CCT events, alums, other events, opportunities, resources, food for thought, humor

Student Matters

Registration continues for spring 2011 courses. See files/spring11.html for details and full descriptions. Spring courses start January 24, 2011 (week of Jan. 31st for online courses).

• Mathematical Thinking seeks additional students for the spring. When this course was offered regularly in the 90s, it was a powerful experience for students who had been streamed out--or streamed themselves out of--studying math. when they were at school. (Similar to the experience of students in Creative Thinking who discover that they can be creative after all and now want to do what they can to ensure that children not get locked into inhibiting images of themselves.)

CCT Community

Read the CCT self-study for the 7-year AQUAD review of the Program and use this form to make your own comments.

CCT Events

CCT Community Open House
Reflecting and Connecting for Lifelong Learning: Celebrating the Accomplishments of CCT
Tuesday, February 1; 6:45- 9:00pm
Wheatley W04-0148. Email cct@umb.edu to RSVP and for additional details. Refreshments will be served.
Come meet the CCT community! For this special open house, we'll start off the spring semester of 2011, we'll discuss successes and challenges and hear from a number of part-time and other faculty about their experiences with the CCT program.

• (The AQUAD review committee will visit the open house for the first hour so if you come you can show them your interest in the Program.)

Alum and CCT associates Notes

Doug Brenner, an active member of the Teaching Thinking Network of the ACSD and, through that, someone who connected CCT (and many others) with a wider network of people teaching critical and creative thinking, died last summer.

Ashok Panikkar, CCT alum ('97) (and guest at a fall 2010 CCT open house) will be one of the keynote speakers at Mediators Beyond Border's' 4th Annual Congress (theme: From Conflict to Peace: The Mediation Revolution). The conference is March 4-6 in Los Angeles. See for more info. and to register: http://www.mediatorsbeyondborders.org/what/congress.shtml

Kevin Johnson ('06) is Multicultural Educator/Program Manager at Berklee College of Music.

Luz Valdez ('06) helped organize the 9th Annual Boston Latino International Film Festival from December 2nd to 5th, 2010.

Abby Yanow (abbyyanow at hotmail.com) is starting a coaching certification process, focusing on career and work issues. She describes her work as follows:

• I'm passionate about helping people become more effective in their professional roles, to achieve their work and life goals. People often turn to coaches when they're feeling stuck, wanting to clarify their vision, or needing more of a work/life balance. Coaching isn't therapy, and it's not advice-giving - the coach's role is to help the client get in touch with, and move towards, their goals, and to help them become more effective in the roles that they play. To that end, I'm offering discounted coaching sessions to "certification clients" (to fulfill the requirements of certification). The client will define his/her goals for the coaching, and then we'll work together towards those goals, through weekly or bi-weekly phone calls.

Peter Taylor continues his daily blogs, but now posts the ones on critical thinking & reflective practice on Probe—Create Change—Reflect, while the ones on complexity & change in environment, biomedicine & society continue to be at Intersecting Processes.

Events

Creativity, Play, and the Imagination will be held from May 26 through May 28, 2011 at Teachers College, Columbia University.

ELEVENTH INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE ON DIVERSITY IN ORGANISATIONS, COMMUNITIES AND NATIONS
University of the Western Cape, Cape Town, South Africa
20-22 June 2011
http://www.Diversity-Conference.com

OD (Organizational Development) Network Conference 2011, October 30 - November 2, 2011, Baltimore, MD.
Request for proposed presentations

Opportunities

Re-Production, March 4-5, 2011, Call for Papers Deadline Extended to Jan 24
Re-production, with equal emphasis on the embedded relation of repetition and production, expresses the problematic of biological, technological, and linguistic apparatuses of capture immanent to capitalism, to history altogether. We thereby invite papers from multiple disciplines. Please email your 250-word abstract or any queries regarding the conference to re.production2011@gmail.com. Abstracts should include the participant’s name, institutional affiliation, email and phone number.

International MA Program in Comparative Education at Beijing Normal University (in English) will start next Autumn 2011 Semester. The Chinese Government is providing a 2-year scholarship for exellent candidates. The UMass Office of the International Students & Scholars Affairs invites applications by 1 March 2011.

Resources

seeds of our future: some first sprouts -- an overview by Otto Scharmer of the first five years of the Presencing Institute.

Lotsa Helping Hands, helps create communities that address the question: "what can I do to help?" If you are caring for someone in crisis, or going through one yourself, chances are you have heard this question a lot.

Food for Thought

Action research/service learning by UMass students with the Louis D. Brown Peace Institute.

"A simple writing exercise can relieve students of test anxiety and may help them get better scores than their less anxious classmates, a study has found," Boston Globe report

No longer post-ideological generation? http://bit.ly/ieEtSj

Live as if your were to die tomorrow. Learn as if you were to live forever.—Mahatma Gandhi

Humor