Today’s News from the University of Kansas
From the Office of Public Affairs | http://www.news.ku.edu
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KU lands $29.9M contract to develop, deliver state ed assessments
LAWRENCE — The Kansas State Department of Education and Achievement & Assessment Institute at the University of Kansas have announced a five-year, $29.9 million contract to develop, deliver and support the statewide assessment program for Kansas, including academic and English language proficiency assessments. Compared to one-time grants, the contract is the largest in KU history.
Expert prescribes identification, empathy for better interracial communication
LAWRENCE — A University of Kansas communication studies researcher and co-author of one of the pioneering books in interracial communication writes that identification with the other and empathy are part of the prescription for better interracial, intercultural communication. Dorthy Pennington elaborates on those ideas in a 2018 article to be reprinted this month in a new book about communication studies as well as in her own book manuscript about lessons from her longtime consulting career.
Full stories below.
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Contact: Mike Krings, KU News Service, 785-864-8860, [email protected], @MikeKrings
KU lands $29.9M contract to develop, deliver state ed assessments
LAWRENCE — The Kansas State Department of Education and Achievement & Assessment Institute at the University of Kansas have announced a five-year, $29.9 million contract to develop, deliver and support the statewide assessment program for Kansas, including academic and English language proficiency assessments. Compared to one-time grants, the contract is the largest in KU history. It will continue the longtime relationship between the two institutions and deliver state-of-the-art technology and resources to support teaching and assess student learning.
The contract allows for the development, delivery and support resources to help teachers to provide instruction to all students, including those with significant cognitive disabilities, and to assess what students are learning.
“Our long-term goal in all we do is to use assessments to help teachers teach better and to help students learn better,” said Neal Kingston, director of KU’s Achievement & Assessment Institute and a University Distinguished Professor of Educational Psychology. “Kansas has invested for years in making better assessments for the state’s schools while also ensuring students are meeting federal requirements for learning and achievement.”
The Kansas State Department of Education and KU’s Achievement & Assessment Institute have partnered in developing assessments for more than 40 years.
The latest five-year contract will support AAI’s ongoing delivery of the current academic assessments, the Kansas English Language Proficiency Assessments and the Dynamic Learning Maps Alternate Assessments, as well as the design and development of the next generation of academic assessments. AAI will also provide the online platform to deliver assessments and service desk support for all schools using the system.
Through the new contract, AAI and KSDE will collaborate to design the next generation of academic assessments to meet ongoing accountability requirements while producing periodic assessment results that support teachers’ instructional decision-making.
The Kansas State Department of Education and AAI have a long history of innovation in student assessments. The state was one of the first to test students online, and today 99% of Kansas students take their assessments online. Kansas is also one of a handful of states to include assessments, tools and resources in one integrated online system. The new partnership will help keep Kansas at the forefront of national assessment of student learning and educational practices.
“Not only have we been innovative in our partnership with KSDE, we’ve also historically been among the most cost-effective to deliver a state assessment program,” Kingston said. “The state of Kansas has demonstrated its commitment to continuing our partnership, and we are proud to be part of developing the next generation of assessments and supports for Kansas educators and students.”
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Contact: Rick Hellman, KU News Service, 785-864-8852, [email protected], @RickHellman
Expert prescribes identification, empathy for better interracial communication
LAWRENCE – Dorthy Pennington has been writing and teaching about the difficulty of overcoming barriers to interracial and intercultural communication for decades at the University of Kansas. So this spring’s explosion of sometimes violent street protests over the police killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis — and the subsequent Black Lives/All Lives Matter arguments on social media — hardly surprised her.
“America has peaks of intercultural or interracial communication where there are public displays of antagonism in a cyclical way, in the sense that there are hot moments,” said Pennington, associate professor of communications studies. “There are moments when mass media – plural — are consumed with it, and then it fades from the media’s attention until another precipitous moment occurs. So it goes back and forth. I would say that what we are going through now is another precipitous moment that is precipitated by some of the actions we’ve seen captured in mass media. So media play a great role in how the cycle is looked at, compared to similar events in history.”
Pennington is co-author of one of the pioneering books in interracial communication, “Crossing Difference … Interracial Communication,” published in 1976 by Charles E. Merrill Publishing, which included the importance of understanding the power dynamics in interracial communication. Similar to the current precipitous dynamics in race relations, the book described the predominant form of power that African Americans have as being that of reactive power; that is, the power of agitation and protest for change.
Pennington wrote about her career in a 2018 article titled “Interiority as Epistemology: Situating Myself in the Central States Communication Association” in the journal Communication Studies. The article will be reprinted as a chapter in the new book “Connections and Inclusions: Intercultural Communication in Communication Studies Scholarship,” (Routledge/Taylor and Francis Publishers, 2020) edited by Ahmet Atay and Alberto Gonzalez.
“I was referring specifically to the craft of writing or speaking or communicating, where a writer’s sense of self — inner thoughts, feelings, based upon experiences — are related in such a way that he or she hopes the audience can at least identify with, if not experience it vicariously through empathy.”
Identification with the other and empathy are at the root of Pennington’s prescription for better interracial, intercultural communication. She said it is contained in a book manuscript she’s been working on, in which she spells out some of the lessons she has learned while consulting with private industry over the years.
“People who are out there on the battlefront, so to speak, want practical answers that they can use in their organization, rather than something theoretical that needs to be further explained to them,” Pennington said. “In my draft, I’ve got six of these things that I’m recognizing for better race relations. Number one is an identification with the other, where all racial barriers have been crossed. Number two is having a spirit of goodwill, a predisposition for good, genuine race relations. Number three is knowledge, education, awareness and information that helps you to understand the other person better … their history, their cultural experiences, their worldview, so as to understand their perspectives and to not be offensive or insulting to them, being sensitive to other people’s needs. Number four is an ethic of caring, being concerned about other people’s welfare. Number five would be the need to have adequate skills. That is, knowing and doing what is necessary in order to enhance cordial race relations.
“And then number six would be a willingness to positively engage with the other, being action-oriented … reaching out, taking the initiative in establishing and maintaining good race relations. Those are my ways of bringing the races together.”
So what does she think of the current moment? Will it lead to long-lasting improvements in interracial communication?
“I think there’s more consciousness of the need for it,” Pennington said. “Part of that is based upon the goodwill of people who really do want to understand other people better. And then the other part of it is more mandated by the EEOC (Equal Employment Opportunity Commission), or places that require people to have training in diversity. Now, most major institutions, organizations and corporations are using the diversity, equity and inclusion language as a way of coming to grips with the fact that that’s what the world will require in a global marketplace.”
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