Spring Retreat 2008

Peg Finders, Director, School of Education, UW-L

Margaret Finders is the Associate Dean of the College of Liberal Studies and the Director of the School of Education at the University of Wisconsin-La Crosse. Her research interests focus on early adolescence, gender, and literacy learning. Finders’ first book, Just Girls: Hidden Literacies and Life in Junior High broke new ground by documenting how self and relationships are constituted and reconstituted through friendship, family, school networks, and the role of literacy. She worked with a history grant in St. Louis in which she conducted week-long workshops to assist teachers to use what they had been learning through the history grant to create history and citizenship units for the middle grades.

Bill Pemberton, Professor Emeritus, History, UW-L

Bill Pemberton, born and educated in the South, came to the University of Wisconsin--La Crosse in 1966, as a history teacher. For many years he teamed history courses with Jim Parker and the two of them retired at the same time, in 1998. Pemberton had four books published and for this lecture will draw particularly on his Truman and Reagan biographies.

Greg Wegner, Professor of Educational Studies, UW-L

Gregory Paul Wegner is a faculty member in the Department of Educational Studies at the University of Wisconsin-La Crosse. Currently the western Wisconsin regional coordinator for National History Day, Wegner holds a number of research interests including history education, Nazi education and Holocaust education in the USA and Germany. His latest essay, “A Propagandist of Extermination: Johann von Leers and the Anti-Semitic Formation of Children in Nazi Germany,” was published last summer in the Belgian journal, PAEDAGOGICA HISTORICA. Wegner’s last book, published by Routledge, examined Anti-Semitism and Schooling under the Third Reich (2002). As part of his research for a Masters Thesis in 1976, Wegner interviewed Albert Speer, Hitler’s architect and armaments minister in Heidelberg.

Cate Wycoff, Director of Student Teaching, UW-L

Bio coming soon.

Janis Hanson, Senior Lecturer and TESOL Coordinator, UW-L

Janis Hanson is the coordinator of the Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages (TESOL) undergraduate minor at UW – La Crosse, where she teaches TESOL methods courses and elementary Spanish in the Department of Modern Languages, and public speaking and U.S. Culture in the English as a Second Language (ESL) Institute. In 2006, she developed her performance of Jane Addams through participation in a Cottey College (Nevada, MO) Woman Chautauqua Institute, which was supported by the National Endowment for the Humanities. Topics for Ms. Hanson’s presentations at regional and national conferences include Jane Addams, online course management systems, and the integration of TESOL and ESL education. Ms. Hanson has an M.A. in linguistics (TESOL emphasis) from the University of Iowa and a certificate in online teaching from UW-Madison. She is certified to teach ESL (K-12) and Spanish and speech (7 – 12). She has lived in Mexico, Italy, and Japan.

Participant Presentations:

Gary Giese and Frank Juresh

Kim Ruplinger and Anita Thayer

Darcy Maxwell and Jennifer Ruetten