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Letter from the Co-president February 2004 Dear Colleagues: IASCE is pleased to bring you our first member newsletter for 2004. So much is happening in the field of cooperative learning, and IASCE has so much news, especially about our June 2004 conference in Singapore, that it is hard to know where to begin. In our last newsletter, we told you about the upcoming publication of Teaching Cooperative Learning: The Challenge for Teacher Education. IASCE provided both financial and moral support for this work which was edited by former Board members Elizabeth Cohen and Mara Sapon-Shevin and current Co-president Celeste Brody. This book is now available through SUNY Press at http://www.sunypress.edu/details.asp?id=60874 and is also available at amazon.com. Please help us to spread the word about this important contribution to our field. This newsletter, as usual, brings together an interesting group of resources about cooperative learning and suggests connections to related fields. Each time I read through one of our newsletters, I am impressed by the breadth of work and the number of new voices who are writing about cooperative learning. This newsletter also highlights new work from people who are acknowledged as life-long contributors to the field. Please check out From the Bookshelf for new work by David and Roger Johnson, Carol Rolheiser, Jan Terwel (co-organizer of the IASCE conference in Utrecht Netherlands, 1992), Victor Battistich and Marilyn Watson (associated with the Developmental Studies Center in California USA) and Shlomo Sharan (visionary for, and founding member of, IASCE). Our ongoing series of Calling Cards, coordinated through the efforts of IASCE Board members Yael Sharan and Kathryn Markovchick, brings us stories from “around the world.” In this issue, Pasi Sahlberg tells us about the development and implementation of cooperative learning in Finland. This is such an interesting story, and I was particularly struck that Pasi’s analysis of the issues and dilemmas facing cooperative learning included the statement that “cooperative learning is inadequately included in pre-service teacher education programs.” We think that tends to be true in many places, which is why IASCE has supported the publication of Teaching Cooperative Learning. Our biggest news is the on-going preparation for our conference in Singapore. We’ve included information about Pre-Conference Workshops and Keynote Addresses in this issue of the newsletter. The conference website (which you can access through www.iasce.net) is updated regularly as well. I have had the pleasure to be one of the planners who has participated in the blind review of proposals and, just this week, we received a list with identifying information from the first group of proposals we had reviewed. In this first “batch” alone, we had read proposals from 19 separate countries on five continents. This is very exciting. From experiential sessions to research presentations, from afternoon tea to a trip to the zoo, from Pre-Conference Workshops to Post-Conference Heritage Tours, our upcoming conference promises to be a rich event. Please join us in Singapore, as the Singapore’s National Institute of Education hosts IASCE’s first conference in Asia. Cooperatively yours, Lynda
Lynda Baloche
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