Dear Colleagues,
Over more than a decade’s work, the teams behind VAWLT, the Augusta Writing Center, and the Bangor Writing Center have built invaluable resources for students learning to write and to incorporate writing into various aspects of their scholarly and professional work. Their work should be supported, funded, and celebrated. We’re writing because we also think the success of VAWLT and the writing centers should be emulated in the area of quantitative skill.
In our work, we perceive fear, anxiety, fixed mindsets, a lack of preparation, and a lack of extracurricular support in quantitative skill to be a considerable challenge for UMA students as they work to learn and grow. This challenge is important during a time of a significant growth in demand for receptive quantitative literacy and productive quantitative skill in activities of work, learning and living.
Could a quantitative learning center or a similar project enrich UMA? Other colleges and universities in New England, such as the University of Connecticut, UMass Amherst, UMass Boston, the University of New Hampshire, the University of Rhode Island, Amherst College, Bowdoin College, and Wesleyan College, seem to think so. At these institutions, quantitative learning centers have been established outside the classroom and helped prepare students at those institutions to be confident, competitive, and constructive in the modern quantitative era.
Would you be interested in joining a working group to identify current areas of strength and future areas for development in extracurricular support for quantitative learning at UMA? If so, please email james.m.cook@maine.edu to let us know. We’ll get back in touch with you soon to arrange a time for us to meet, exchange information and ideas, and think carefully about what possibilities exist and how we might pursue them.
Best Regards,
Jennifer Long, Assistant Professor of Biology
James Cook, Associate Professor of Sociology