Liberal Education and America’s Promise is putting on a showcase at UW-Whitewater today to celebrate leap day.
Director of Academic Assessment Greg Cook is coordinating the event.
“Today is mainly a showcase for the LEAP work that’s been happening on our campus over the past couple of years,” Cook said. “We’ve had just a lot of terrific work with LEAP all around campus.”
Cook said that LEAP has been around since 2005 and it was designed to improve learning and teaching at the school.
“We’ve been trying to use LEAP pretty thoroughly around campus with all of our departments, not only in academic affairs but in student affairs,” Cook said. “All of this is for the benefit of student learning. That’s the point.”
According to Cook, there will be 51 posters on display showcasing how LEAP has been implemented around campus as well as 9 sessions explaining different parts of it.
There are also several representatives from other campuses giving demonstrations about how LEAP has affected their universities, and one of them is from the University of Wisconsin Colleges.
The University of Wisconsin Colleges is made up of all the two-year universities in the state and Associate Vice Chancellor for Academic Affairs Lisa Seale said she was excited to be here giving a presentation.
“We’ll be going over liberal arts assessment in the university colleges and how it ties in with LEAP,” Seale said. “I’m always thinking about students and how I can help them and LEAP is one of those ways.”
UW-Whitewater Advisor Christine Kutz will be assisting in the presentation, and she had a distinct way of describing LEAP and its benefits.
“LEAP is the pill and it’s a really good pill and the students are the dogs,” Kutz said. “If you put that pill in a marsh mellow or a hot dog, and feed it to the dog, they’re never going to know that they’ve been given those skills. It’s basically giving them something beneficial without them even knowing.”
The main event for LEAP today is the national webinar they will be co-hosting at 2:30 p.m.
It will broadcast to 77 other schools across the nation, and Cook said he thinks it will be a great way to share UW-Whitewater’s work with LEAP throughout the country.
“They’ll be a panel of employers talking about what employers want to see in college graduates,” Cook said. “They’ll discuss what kind of knowledge and skill areas are most important today and going into the future so that our students are better prepared for the changing world.”
The LEAP event kicked off at 9:30 a.m. and will run until 4:30 p.m. in various rooms at the University Center.