Wild Scholars

We live in a wild world. Has the classroom prepared you? Student. Are you conformed and ranked at school, being force-fed subjects that are irrelevant to your interests? Parent. Has standardized testing hijacked your child's passions and purposes, and left you without a voice? Teacher. Are you frustrated by the rigid system that dictates what you teach and how you teach it? Neighbor. Have you lost touch with your local school, which plays no direct role in transforming your community? If so, you may be a Wild Scholar, looking for an educational process that prepares you to thrive in this wild world. This book explores an educational system that includes "Client-based Ventures", "Intelligent Fast Failure", "CENTER habits", "Coaches", and other concepts of a Wild Scholars education. How do we develop a system that focuses on Scholars' passions and purposes, rather than just their test scores? Dr. Darrell Velegol, Professor of Chemical Engineering at Penn State University, is an award-winning teacher and researcher. He has worked with 1000s of students, using his CENTER habits (www.velegol.org/CENTER.htm). In each young person he works with, he sees the capacity for greatness. He and his family live in State College PA.
About the Author: Darrell Velegol attended West Virginia University for his BS in Chemical Engineering, and he earned his PhD in Chemical Engineering at Carnegie Mellon University in 1997 working with Professors John L. Anderson and Stephen Garoff. In 1998 Velegol won the Victor K. LaMer Award of the American Chemical Society for the best PhD in the field of Colloid & Surface Science. He continued with a post-doc in the Center for Light Microscope Imaging and Biotechnology at Carnegie Mellon, working under Professor Fred Lanni of the Biology Department. In June 1999 Velegol joined the Department of Chemical Engineering at Penn State, where he was promoted to Associate Professor in 2005. Velegol won an NSF CAREER Award in 2000, and has continued to be funded by NSF, DOE, EPA, PRF, the Air Force, and other agencies for his work with colloidal forces, colloidal assembly, electrokinetic flows, and colloidal motors. His research investigates the fabrication of colloidal assemblies and devices, with a specialty in understanding the interparticle forces and sorting processes. His research group uses a wide range of experimental and modeling approaches. In 2009 Velegol was promoted to Full Professor at Penn State. For his work in experimental and theoretical problems in the dynamics of complex colloidal particles, Velegol was elected a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in 2011, and appointed as a Distinguished Professor at Penn State in 2012. He is a member of ACS, AIChE, AAAS, and ASEE. More recently, he has engaged in studying the "physics of community", pursuing questions in learning, creativity, motivation, trust and deceit, courage, and other social science ideas using results from physics, chemistry, biology, and chemical engineering. In 2011 he published a book, Wild Scholars, available through amazon.com, and he seeks to impact grades 7-12 education throughout Pennsylvania and beyond. In 2013, his book CENTER will be available, and he is teaching a MOOC called "Creativity, Innovation, and Change."