UW-Parkside SENCER - Initiatives

The SOCA and POLS courses have been available through their respective departments for some time. The ENVS courses are new, and will embody the SENCER goals of teaching science through complex, unresolved public issues and providing hands-on community-based learning experiences for the future teachers. Unique within these sequences will be intentional modeling of pedagogy, so that prospective teachers can work through models of civic engagement that they can take to their K-12 classrooms. Another feature of this program is that the two sets of paired courses will be followed with a TEDU (Teacher Education) capstone course that will provide prospective teachers with a supervised curriculum design exercise in which they incorporate their learning, and actively work to bring these ideas and methods into classrooms for regional K-12 pupils.

In addition to humanities, natural and social science faculty, the UW-Parkside SENCER team now includes participants from the TEDU department, UW Extension Education, and Wisconsin Campus Compact.