UW-Oshkosh Magazine, Spring - Liberal Education Initiative

UW Oshkosh not only encourages students to
continue a life of learning past graduation, but also
offers older adults opportunities to pursue new
interests following retirement.
With more than 300 members, the university’s
Learning in Retirement (LIR) organization offers
courses about everything from Asian cuisine to
archeological findings in northeastern Wisconsin.
College students will be jealous to know that these
courses involve classes and instructors but no tests
or grades.
Astronomy is for Girls,
Too participants
The astronomy program is
just a part of a larger effort to
provide enrichment opportunities,
said Ted Lenz, a seventhgrade
science teacher at Winneconne
Middle School. “The
girls’ response to the program
has been positive. We all felt it
was well worth our time spent,”
he said.
The positive response could
help reverse trends. When
computer science was new, no
stereotypes about who could be
a computer scientist existed,
and enrollment was about equal.
Now, only 25 percent of students
enrolled in computer science are
women.
“The reality is that information
technology is a very family
friendly career, but women
shy away from it,” Sandrin
explained.
Sandrin has her work cut
out for her, but she finds her
audience—from middle-school
aged girls to middle-aged male
professors—receptive to her
message.
When Bernard Olejniczak moved to Oshkosh
in 1997, joining LIR proved to be “a big ice breaker.”
He has met many interesting and good friends
through the organization and enjoys learning
something new almost every week.
Teaching an educational leadership class on
campus as a College of Education and Human
Services ad hoc faculty member also keeps
Olejniczak busy.
“But I’m torn sometimes,” he said, “between
the classes I teach and the ones I want to take.”
Spoken like a true lifelong learner.
“I think that the Women
and Science Program is great
at helping faculty incorporate
teaching and learning strategies
that better support women and
minorities,” Howard said. “However,
the teaching and learning
techniques that improve learning
for women and minorities also
help white males learn better, as
well. So, the program is really
about improving the teaching of
science, engineering and math
to everyone.”
— by Heidi Heidenreich Nowicki
Italian Interpreter
Franca Barricelli, History Department Chair
The worlds of faculty
scholarship and
regional business have
converged in a number
of interesting ways
for Franca Barricelli,
history department
chair.
Barricelli, whose
specialty is Italian
cultural history, is
fluent in Italian and
has tutored community members in Italian language and
culture since the late 1990s. It was in this capacity that
UW Oshkosh’s Center for Community Partnerships
contacted her to serve as an Italian interpreter for an area
business.
The company was hosting a dozen businessmen from
northern Italy. Since none of the visiting party spoke a
word of English, Barricelli brought her expertise in Italian
language and culture to unite the two groups.
“It was a week of corporate jets, site visits, explaining
the nuances of different business practices–a far cry from
my daily routine at UW Oshkosh,” Barricelli said. “I
even found myself on a quail hunt with them.”
Her contributions helped the company expand its
European operations in Italy.
Barricelli’s role as one of the Fox Valley’s Italian
experts has helped her secure the business prospects of
others, too.
She tutored a member of the Wisconsin Family
Business Forum, whose interests in generational family
activities led him to Italy. Unlike local family businesses,
which may go back only two or three generations,
Italian family-run companies can reach back centuries,
providing a more time-tested model for family business
practice.
“Businesses recognize that we in the liberal arts can
help provide the context for more informed decisions
based on the integration of different cultural perspectives,”
Barricelli said.
Barricelli has been a fellow at the Institute for
Research in the Humanities in Madison and a fellow
at an N.E.H. Seminar in Cambridge, Mass. In 2004,
she received the UW Oshkosh Distinguished Teaching
Award.
—Heidi Heidenreich Nowicki
O
UW OSHKOSH MAGAZINE
People of Pride
Liberal Artist
John Koker, College of Letters and Science Interim Dean
There’s nothing
simple about John
Koker. And there are
no boundaries to his
creative expression as
math professor, dean
and, yes, as an actor
on stage.
As an undergraduate
at St. Norbert
College, he participated
in athletics and
theatre while majoring in mathematics. Before his first
play, his biggest concern was memorizing the lines.
During the first class he taught as a new professor in
1990 at what was then Potsdam College in New York,
he lectured from note cards.
Now, the lines are far less important than the creative
development of the character in his plays. And to
his classes, Koker brings things like cards and dice rather
than note cards and leaves most of the talking to his
students.
“Theatre and mathematics are both creative fields,”
Koker said. “The lines are just one tool an actor uses
to develop the character. In math, you have to know
the skills, but there’s so much more you can go on to
through creative application of those skills.”
That’s the essence of Koker’s work as an awardwinning
math professor and chair at UW Oshkosh, and
now as interim dean of the College of Letters and
Science. He joined the UW Oshkosh math faculty in
1991.
“The wonderful thing about a campus with a strong
liberal arts program like ours is that everyone gets the
opportunity to appreciate a wide range of disciplines and
ideas,” he said. “I think I became a better math professor
and department chair because I was in some plays.”
Koker won the UW System Regents Teaching
Excellence Award last year to become the fourth
UW Oshkosh professor to win an honor that has gone
to only 30 UW System professors.
In 2004, he was awarded the John McNaughton
Rosebush Professorship for excellence in teaching,
research and service. He also received a 2002
UW Oshkosh Distinguished Teaching Award and
was a Wisconsin Teaching Fellow in 1999-2000.
—Frank Church
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