UNI professor Matt Townsley wants to see an education revolution. In his upcoming book “Making Grades Matter,” co-written with Nathan Wear, the UNI educational leadership assistant professor lays out the path for middle and high schools to abandon traditional letter grades in favor of a standards-based grading model. In this conversation, he outlines his case for why schools should rethink the way they think about grades and learning.
It’s a classic Iowa story — UNI graduate Cole was raised in small-town central Iowa, where he watched his dad and grandfather work his family’s farm together. At age five, he was sitting on his father’s lap while he drove tractors across the corn fields. Within three years, he started driving the tractors himself. It was a given that he’d grow up to take over the farm’s operations someday.
It was the middle of the afternoon when Phales Milimo saw a pregnant woman go into labor and collapse on the sidewalk.
She was in the Sinazongwe District in southern Zambia, just a five-hour drive from her hometown of Lusaka, the country’s bustling metropolitan capital. Technically, she hadn’t left her country, but it felt like she was in a different world.
Consumer preferences change from generation to generation. These preferences are dependent on a number of things — family values, cultural relevancy and personal experiences.
Companies seeking to project themselves as eco-friendly may find themselves having their very raison d’etre questioned. Zara, a well-known retailer renowned for its rapid responses to changes in fashion, recently announced its plans to reduce its negative impact on the environment.
The morning of what would eventually be a triumphant day for a team of University of Northern Iowa accounting students was not going well.
The group of five accounting majors was preparing to compete in the 19th annual FanTAXtic competition held last month in Westlake, Texas, having earned their spot in the national competition by winning the regional qualifier in November.
Before Rosie the Riveter ever rolled up her sleeves, there were the women of World War I.
Women like Maria Botchkareva, a Russian Army officer who formed the Women’s Battalion of Death, an all-female combat unit that won respect for their toughness fighting on the front lines. Or Edith Cavell, a British nurse working in German-occupied Belgium who helped hundreds of Allied soldiers escape the country.
Three weeks remained before Iowa’s first-in-the-nation caucuses, but rounds of media interviews and education events had left UNI political science professor Donna Hoffman’s voice scratchy and fading. So when a French news outlet reached out to Hoffman — one of several UNI experts on Iowa’s idiosyncratic method for selecting presidential candidates — her voice couldn’t quite manage another phone or video interview.
