eInside Events

Student Recreation and Wellness Center Offering Demo Week

Time to put those New Year's resolutions into action

The Student Recreation and Wellness Center is a state-of-the-art health club equipped with all the latest fitness equipment, hundreds of programs and every amenity you could imagine. It provides the opportunity to get in a workout or take one of numerous classes right on the Kent Campus.to commit
In addition, this week is the popular Demo Week.Start off the new year on a healthy note!

Take advantage of a free week of classes starting Jan. 9 through Jan. 15; all classes offered as part of the Group X and Instructional Class schedules will be free for anyone wishing to participate (upon gaining access to the Student Recreation and Wellness Center). Every semester, hundreds of fitness classes are offered, including Spinning, Yoga, Women on Weights, Zumba and six new classes!

For additional information, contact the Student Recreation and Wellness Center at 330-672-4REC or visit its website.

Pan-African Studies Partners with Tri-C to Present "Cosmopolitanism and Diversity in the African World" Lecture Series

As part of a new collaboration with Cuyahoga Community College's (Tri-C) Office of Student Life, Kent State University's Department of Pan-African Studies presents a panel lecture "West African Muslim Societies and Their Contributions to World and U.S. Culture" as part of the 2011-2012 Pan-African Studies lecture series at Kent State. The series, titled "Cosmopolitanism and Diversity in the African World," benefits from support of the Ohio Humanities Council and the West African Research Association (WARA). The first lecture at Tri-C is being funded by WARA and the Council of American Overseas Research Centers through a grant from the Carnegie Endowment.

"West African Muslim Societies and Their Contributions to World and U.S. Culture" will take place Jan. 25 at 7 p.m. at Tri-C's Eastern Campus in its new Health Careers and Sciences Building and on Jan. 26 at 7 p.m. at the second floor Lecture Hall in Ritchie Hall on the Kent Campus. Both events are free and open to the public.

The program includes a panel of scholars, including Dr. Fallou Ngom, associate professor and director of the African Languages Program at Boston University; Dr. Ousseina Alidou, director of the Center for African Studies at Rutgers University; and Dr. Erin Augis, associate professor of sociology at Ramapo College of New Jersey. The panel will be moderated by Dr. Wendy Wilson-Fall, chair and associate professor of Kent State's Department of Pan-African Studies.

Topics that will be discussed during the program include:

• West African Intellectual Tradition and Ajami (traditions of writing African languages in Arabic)
• A Comparative Study of Muslim African Women in Niger and Kenya
• Urban and Immigrant African Muslim Women and Youth
• Historical and cultural connections between North America and Muslim West Africa

"The goal of the program is to provide more understanding of a new sector of immigrants to the United States: West Africans, among whom a good percentage is Muslim," Wilson-Fall says."We' ll look at cultural differences between West Africans and Arabs, and also national origins.

"We expect this to be the first of several more collaborations between the Department of Pan-African Studies and Tri-C's Eastern Campus," Wilson-Fall adds.

"Cosmopolitanism and Diversity in the African World" is made possible through a grant from the Council of American Overseas Research Centers to the West African Research Association, which selected Kent State's Department of Pan-African Studies as the beneficiary partner.

For more information on Kent State's Department of Pan-African Studies, visit www.kent.edu/CAS/PAS.

For more information about Tri-C's Eastern Campus in Highland Hills, Ohio, visit www.tri-c.edu/campuses/east.

Interested in Free Publicity for Your Event?

You may have noticed a "What to do at KSU" list of events on the Kent State's home page. And you may be wondering if your department or departmental organization can post an event here. The answer is yes! And luckily, the steps are few and simple:

1. Go to http://www.kent.edu/news/event-submission.cfm.
2. Fill out the online event submission form. Your submission must be an event with a definitive time and place. The calendar will not post announcements, holidays or closings.
3. After you submit an event, University Communications and Marketing will review the submission for content, spelling and grammar before publishing it in the calendar. In order to allow for this review process, please submit your event at least one week in advance.

If you are planning on using the calendar more than 10 times a year, please e-mail Tim Priester at tprieste@kent.edu in order to set-up a department calendar.

By Abbey Linville

Finding Efficiency in Good Learning: The Large Class Experience

Fill the seats, fill the minds. Learning why your course is the most important thing to their future is essential for students, even when it is challenging to their world. This series will challenge you to learn about taking your expertise and pairing it with appropriate and supportive tools to keep the emphasis on the learning, not on the managing of a class.

• Finding and Working With Teaching Assistants Effectively, Division of Graduate Studies, Jan. 20, 2011, 12:15-1:30 p.m., Room 310 A/B, Kent Student Center (Brownbag)
• How to Dish the DIRT, Kent State University President Lester A. Lefton, Feb. 3, 2011, 1:30-3 p.m., Moulton Hall Ballroom
• Decoding the Disciplines, Spring Learning Institute, Feb. 17-18
• Moving Across the Continuum: Experiential Education in Large Sections, Tina Kandakai, Office of Experiential Education and Civic Engagement, March 4, 2011.
• Team-Based Learning, Paul Koles, M.D., March 16-17, 2011 Moulton Hall Ballroom (Co-sponsored by the College of Nursing)
• Managing the Many, What Technology Has to Offer (Clickers, Blackboard9, Prezi and other tools) March 28, 2011.

For more information, visit the Faculty Professional Development Center website.