Faculty members are invited to a pedagogical luncheon on Thursday, March 11, from 11 a.m. to 1 p.m. in the Memorial Union Plains room. Joey Sprague, professor of sociology at the University of Kansas, will present a research talk titled, “Gender and the Evaluation of Teaching: What We Can’t Count Can Hurt Us,” which deals with bias in student evaluations. Following the talk, Sprague will discuss what faculty can do in the classroom given an understanding of biases that students have. Faculty can register for this event through the link provided by Donald Schwert in the e-mail sent to the faculty listserv.
In addition to the luncheon, Sprague will provide a workshop for Promotion, Tenure and Evaluation Committee members from 9:30 a.m. to 10:30 a.m. in the Memorial Union Arikara room and a workshop for chairs and heads from 2 p.m. to 3 p.m. in the Memorial Union Plains room. To register for these events or for more information, go to www.ndsu.edu/FORWARD.
Sprague earned a doctorate from the University of Wisconsin. Her research focuses on ways social relations organizing gender, class and race shape our knowledge from the questions we pursue and frames we use to interpret our answers to the social organization of production and distribution of formal knowledge in the academy. She looks at the degree to which gender influences both students’ expectations for teachers and teachers’ practices, influencing what happens both in classrooms and in teachers’ careers.