Ohio State faculty teach students serving in Kuwait

By AMY MURRAY, Media Relations

Two Ohio State students are unable to attend classes in Columbus this quarter because they are serving in the U.S. Army in Kuwait. So Ohio State is bringing their classes to them, across the ocean and desert, thanks to the Internet and distance learning courses that are designed to be taken by students outside of Columbus.

SPC (Specialists) 4 Brian Yeager and David Hatcher, members of the Army National Guard since high school graduation, postponed their Ohio State education in mid-January when they volunteered to transfer together to a unit where they could support the U.S. war in Iraq. They are now assigned to Camp Virginia, Kuwait, as Unit Supply Specialists in the 371st Corps Support Group.

They have Internet access and check Ohio State's Web site occasionally to keep up on things at the university.

In early September, the two learned they would remain in Kuwait until April 2004. Yeager, a junior political science major from Westerville, contacted his adviser via e-mail about registering for classes. Wayne DeYoung, academic adviser in the Department of Political Science, enrolled Yeager in two courses that apply directly to his degree requirements.

"I never thought it would be possible to take classes while this far away," Yeager said. "When the war first started, classes were the last thing on my mind. But now, even though my first obligation is to the mission, things have calmed down a bit and I've got some time on my hands."

After registering Yeager, DeYoung inquired about other soldiers who might be interested in distance learning. Before long, Hatcher, a sophomore history major from Worthington, emerged, asking DeYoung to help him enroll.

Yeager credits DeYoung's initiative and persistence in making it possible to continue working toward his degree while serving in Kuwait. "He has played an instrumental part in setting all of this up and has many times went out of his way to assist me in my educational goals. I honestly don't know if this would have been possible with any other adviser," Yeager said.

Hatcher says the two had talked for a while about trying to take on the additional responsibility that college course work demands. "Our work load, though still heavy, allows us some free time to do personal activities. I decided I wanted to continue my education. We have always had Internet access over here, so I knew that it would be possible. It just took getting in touch with the right people."

From an administrative standpoint, Hatcher's enrollment was more challenging. After transferring from Ohio Dominican University, he was deployed just as he was beginning his first quarter at Ohio State.

DeYoung says the situation is extraordinary. "I can't say whether they are the only service members taking courses from over there, but I'm pretty sure this is the first time in history that people on active duty near a combat zone have ever enrolled in their home institution for course work that will apply toward their degrees," he said.

Technology-enhanced learning courses are an option open to more and more Ohio State students, as the number of departments offering e-learning courses is increasing each year. At one end of Ohio State's e-learning spectrum is distance learning, where instruction is totally or predominantly online and students may be on or off campus. Currently, there are 6,712 students enrolled in 211 distance learning courses like the ones that Yeager and Hatcher are taking. At the other end of the spectrum, Internet resources supplement and complement classroom instruction. Between those is a blended use, a mixture of face-to-face and online learning. According to Ohio State's Office of the Chief Information Officer, which designs and maintains the e-learning facilities, two thirds of all Ohio State students take courses that use WebCT (Web course tools).

One of the two courses that Yeager is taking, Congress and Interest Groups (Political Science 367), is designed to be taught exclusively over the Internet. Janet Box-Steffensmeier, Vernal Riffe Professor of Political Science, has taught many innovative distance learning courses in the past, although none that have crossed an ocean. "I've had other students in a desert -- in Arizona, but never anyone on active duty near a combat zone," she said.

Steffensmeier says distance learning courses expand educational opportunities to students in a variety of situations. "I enjoy offering the online course as a service to students. It offers accessibility for students with handicaps, students who are balancing home-family-work-course overloads, students with nontraditional hours, and those who aren't physically present in Columbus," she said.

She added that Yeager can interact with other students in her class, and can offer a unique perspective. "Since the class focuses on interest groups, I'm sure some students will be attracted to the study of interest groups that have a foreign policy orientation, or perhaps the ACLU where issues of freedoms arise," Steffensmeier explains. "Regardless, I'm sure Brian's perspective will be very much respected and unique given his situation."

Afghan women, OSU to benefit from leadership project

By JONI BENTZ SEAL, onCAMPUS staff

Imagine earning a degree, and not having the opportunity to use it. Imagine leading a successful career, and in an instant, watching it evaporate. Imagine having the determination to facilitate change in your country, but not having the channels or the leverage to make it happen. Such is the fate of many professional women in Afghanistan, a population largely forgotten by its own government, and in the opinion of many, by ours.

In 2001, a small group of concerned women at Ohio State began discussing how to fulfill the United States government's promise to be supportive of improving life for women in Afghanistan.

"We're talking about women who had the capacity and circumstances to become leaders, even in a country that had no history of women leaders; women who had been educated and trained, who had been professionals before the Taliban period," said Sally Kitch, professor of women's studies and an expert on gender analysis and feminist theory. "We began to see the need to bring that potential together with the resources of Ohio State in the hopes of rejuvenating Afghan women to re-establish those leadership opportunities in their country and to initiate change."

Kitch and Margaret Mills, professor of Near Eastern Languages and Culture and an expert on Afghan culture and regional gender studies, emerged as the leaders of what is now a small committee that has launched a five-year initiative called the Project for Afghan Women's Leadership. While the initial framework for the project has been created, Kitch and Mills will spend the coming year designing the programming and soliciting foundation grants and government funding.

Kitch said they envision an interactive program, hosted by Ohio State, where Afghan women would have the opportunity to examine their own circumstances, their relationship to the world's women and to contemporary global politics, and to plan for an uncertain future. Their goal is to turn the project into an academic and intellectual exercise to benefit the university through faculty research projects and through interactions between the women and the university community.

"Our ideal result will be to engage a cross-section of faculty, staff, students and community volunteers who will learn from the women's experience and from their perspective on themselves, the world and on us," Kitch said. "One of the lessons that we want to learn from the current global crises is how important it is for us as Americans to understand the world from other people's perspectives. Facilitating that understanding is part of our mission."

Program plans

Initial plans involve a 10-week session during each of the five years of the project, with the first session slated for winter quarter 2005. Each session will center around a theme to help the women explore the opportunities available to them and strategize their roles as social change agents. Media, law and the social order, the relationship between religious and civic law, public health, education, and small business and entrepreneurship are themes being considered.

"You can see by the topics that we're choosing large-scale concerns," Mills said. "But for each session, we'd like to bring in a number of faculty to help raise specific issues within these topics and provoke innovative planning among the participants."

Cohort recruitment

The committee is currently defining the qualifications and accumulating names of potential participants through various sources. Mills, a frequent traveler to Central and South Asia, has contacts in Afghanistan from her field research. They are enlisting governmental and non-governmental agencies in Afghanistan to identify prospective leaders, and will also seek participants from the small population of women academics at Afghan universities. There is also a large expatriate community in the U.S. and Canada highly concerned with Afghanistan's future, Kitch said, but project planners want to be sure they solicit participants who are in good standing in their country and want to return there to put into practice what they learn at Ohio State.

"We're defining leadership rather broadly, understanding that women have been excluded from many formal leadership roles for years, even if they have been educated to perform them," Mills said. "But they exert leadership in and from the family, and are able to affect society through informal as well as some formal networks. We are interested in transforming informal power into formal power, which we think is one important next step."

Project support

Kitch said each cohort will number from five to seven women, depending on the funding and accommodations. So far, the project has received support and seed grant funding from the Coca Cola Critical Difference for Women Research on Women grant; the Office of International Affairs, which has awarded two grants; and the Office of Research. Kitch and Mills also are grateful for the support they've received from their colleges, from their fellow faculty, and from the departments of Women's Studies and NELC, and the Women in Development (WID) organization.

They also credit Judy Fountain, director of The Women's Place, for being instrumental in helping the group get organized, and for supporting project activities.

"She also was involved in getting a woman critical to our cause considered for the President and Provost's Diversity Lecture Series," Mills said.

That woman is Mahnaz Afkhami, an author and leading advocate for women's rights and leadership, who will deliver "Culture, Religion, and Identity: Future Trends in Gender Equality Work" at 3 p.m. Oct. 16 in the Ohio Union.

Afkhami is former minister of state for women's affairs in Iran, founder of the Association of Iranian University Women, and has served as secretary general of the Women's Organization of Iran prior to the Islamic revolution. In exile in the United States, Afkhami has lectured and published extensively on the international women's movement and women's human rights, especially women in Islamic environments and has been a lead organizer for two international women's organizations, the Sisterhood Is Global Institute (SIGI) and the Women's Learning Partnership, of which she is presently CEO.

Mills had worked with Afkhami several years ago on an Iranian women's seminar, and contacted her. "When she heard we were thinking of the Afghan project, she said she was interested in placing more women in this kind of extended workshop or internship," Mills said. "She expressed interest to have the opportunity to come to the Midwest because most of her work is outside the U.S. or on one of the coasts, where there is more action of this kind."

Afkhami's involvement with the project will not end with her October visit. She will serve as a consultant for the program, Mills added.

According to Fountain, Afkhami's work is a good model for bringing an international scope to the lecture series that previously had a more local purpose.

"The Women's Place and the President's Council on Women's Issues -- one of the sponsors of Afkhami's lecture -- felt that last year's speakers were focused more on building the university's internal competencies around women's issues," Fountain said. "It seemed logical, given the larger world context, that we look at international issues -- specifically the development of women in countries where they have been repressed -- and ensure that an institution of Ohio State's stature play a role."

Lights, cameras, atoms!

By Jo McCulty Students in Susan Fisher's Biology 101 class have an assortment of visuals during their first class session Sept. 24.

Professor takes artful approach to teaching Biology 101 students

By HOLLY WAGNER, Research Communications

Gregor Mendel, one night,

studies by candlelight

two pretty petals, young pea flowers.

An idea blossoms.

-- from Ladders

by David Citino, Ohio State poet laureate

Susan Fisher started with a sneaky idea -- disguise science as art in hopes of engaging non-science majors in the wonders of biology.

Her idea blossomed into "The Basics and Beauty of Biology," an introductory science course rooted in basic biological concepts that are presented through the beauty of creative expression. Talented students and professors from the biological sciences and other disciplines, including dance, music and English, help Fisher, an entomology professor, explain the intricacies of cell division and protein synthesis, the discovery of genetic expression and the process of DNA replication.

Fisher wants her Biology 101 students -- some 700 this quarter -- to walk away with one fundamental concept: that DNA makes protein and, because of this, life in the universe is possible.

The course covers the basics of any introductory biology class, from life's beginnings on earth to Mendelian genetics to biological diversity and extinction. But how Fisher presents the topics is far from ordinary.

"This is not your typical biology course," she told students on the first day of class fall quarter. "The purpose of your DNA is to make protein, and the rest of the quarter is an examination of what this precisely means."

And she'll help students investigate the concept by catering to their diverse learning styles.

Fisher taught her first "Basics and Beauty of Biology" class last spring; before that, she hadn't taught an introductory biology class in more than 12 years. This time around, she felt there must be a better way to convey scientific concepts to non-science majors than by reading overhead slides from behind a podium. So Fisher pulled on her own love for and experience with the arts -- each of her seven children play violin -- and also sought inspiration from faculty and students around campus.

During the first lecture of the fall quarter class, Fisher asked her Biology 101 students to question the human capacity to appreciate and enjoy music.

"The enjoyment of music is an evolutionary mystery," she told the class. Music doesn't have anything to do with our basic survival needs. Still, music often invokes deep emotions. Could it have something to do with our biological makeup?, she asked.

To make her point, Fisher invited a string quartet to play for students that first day of class. Performers included Joan Herbers, dean of the College of Biological Sciences and a violinist, and Edward Behrman, a biochemistry professor and a cellist. While the quartet played, Fisher showed and discussed images of living things -- a family of wild boars living in suburban Germany, spiders, house cats and cranes hopping in a mating dance, to name a few.

"It's an adventure in experimental teaching," Fisher said of her methods. "But it's completely utilitarian in the sense that I'm using methods of teaching for which these students might have a greater appreciation, while sneaking in some biology that they otherwise probably wouldn't readily devour."

Her peers in the College of Biological Sciences are taking note, too.

"Dr. Fisher is a leader in our science education reform movement in the college," Herbers said. "She has thought deeply about how to engage students and allow them to think more creatively about science, which is necessary for any citizen in our highly technical society."

Later in the quarter, students from Ohio State's dance department will perform an interpretive dance of cell division and replication. Poet Laureate David Citino put genetic expression to poetry's rhythmic beat and will read his poem to the class. A doctoral student in the School of Music composed a melody to represent testosterone. Fisher herself wrote "BioRap," a catchy lyrical rap that drives home the DNA-makes-protein point:

DNA is the star of this fanciful tale

In the smallest mouse, in

the largest whale

Determining your features

to the last detail

From this cellular obsession, life on

Earth shall prevail.

-- from BioRap by Susan Fisher

"There isn't a lot of distance between science and art, so it's easy for the two to commingle," Fisher said. "I feel I can reach students in a deeper way than is possible by simply telling them to memorize the bases of DNA."

Also scheduled is a visit from the Columbus Zoo -- zoo staff will bring a few endangered species to class to coincide with Fisher's lecture on extinction and the value of diversity.

Fisher has another goal, too: she wants her students to appreciate biology enough so that they leave her class informed citizens.

"My students will have to make decisions about stem cell research and the funding of cancer research," Fisher said. "Both relate to understanding DNA. These students don't need to know details -- all they need to know is the big picture and a little bit about the ramifications for public policy.

"I don't teach Darwin and evolu-tion in hopes of changing a student's deeply held beliefs, but I do insist that students be able to distinguish between that which is science and that which is not. If they can make that distinction, it's a real accomplishment."

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