A renewed commitment by campus leaders to pedagogy has fueled a pilot project in which 30 faculty members have revamped their roles and now use team-based learning for their courses. For the last three semesters, a 54-seat classroom in Goodell and a 90-seat one in the W.E.B. Du Bois Library have served as incubators for the experiment. So far, the experiment has met with rave reviews and five more team-based classrooms are planned for an academic facility under construction on North Pleasant Street.
As UMass Amherst tennis players Julia Comas and Gianna Francis read a book about a character who transforms from couch potato to a road race winner, the children in a Head Start classroom in Holyoke, Mass., sat spellbound. Comas and Francis read Henry Gets Moving, which is written in English and Spanish by Pierre Rouzier, a physician at University Health Services, and Chaz Nielsen ’06.
Thousands of students, faculty, staff, alumni and friends attended festivities marking Founders Day on the UMass Amherst campus on the150th anniversary of the signing of the campus charter. Among the highlights was the ceremonial cutting of a 150-pound birthday cake created in the shape of the university’s iconic Old Chapel.