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Keynote Speaker
Ken Bain, Ph.D.
Founding Director
Center for Excellence at New York University
Ken Bain (Ph.D., University of Texas at Austin, 1976) is founding director of the Center for Teaching Excellence at New York University. Prior to moving to NYU in the fall of 2001, he was founding director of the Searle Center for Teaching Excellence and a professor of history at Northwestern University. He went to Northwestern from the history faculty at Vanderbilt University in 1992, where he was also founding director of the Center for Teaching in the College of Arts and Science. In the 1970's and early 80's he was professor of history at the University of Texas--Pan American, where he also served as director of that school's University Honors College and as founding director of the History Teaching Center, a pioneering program sponsored by the National Endowment for the Humanities to promote greater collaboration between history teachers on the secondary level and university and college research historians. From 1984 to 1986, he served as director of the National History Teaching Center, which had a similar mission on the national level.
His historical scholarship centers on the history of U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East (principal works include The March to Zion: United States Policy and the Founding of Israel, 1980, 2000), but he has long taken an interest in teaching and leJanuary 23, 2006arship in that area. Internationally recognized for his insights into teaching and learning and for a fifteen-year study of what the best educators do, he has presented invited workshops or lectures at nearly two hundred universities and events in recent years--in the United States, Canada, Europe, Asia, Africa, and Australia. His learning research has concentrated on a wide range of issues, including deep and sustained learning and the creation of natural critical learning environments.
His recently-published book What the Best College Teachers Do. (Harvard University Press, 2004) won the 2004 Virginia and Warren Stone Prize for an outstanding book on education and society. He has won four major teaching awards, including a teacher-of-the-year award, faculty nomination for the Minnie Piper Foundation Award for outstanding college teacher in Texas in 1980 and 1981, and Honors Professor of the Year Awards in 1985 and 1986. A 1990 national publication named him one of the best teachers in the United States.
He has received awards from the Harry S Truman Library, Lyndon Baines Johnson Library, the Ford Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the International Studies Association, among others. He is currently completing his third book on U.S. relations with the Middle East (The Last Journey Home: Franklin Roosevelt and the Middle East).
Other conference speakers include:
Dr. Kelly H. Ahuna, Director, Methods of Inquiry, University at Buffalo, and Dr. Christine G. Tinnesz, Associate Director, Methods of Inquiry, University at Buffalo, presenting: Developing Autonomous Learners: Helping Students Succeed in College.
Dr. Lawrence Shulman, Professor, School of Social Work, University at Buffalo, presenting Group Methods for Enhancing Teaching: The Hidden Group in the Classroom.
