Students attend presidential inauguration

Land your dream internship or job!

Looking for that dream internship or the perfectly fit job? BU’s Office of Academic Internships and Community Engagement will be hosting a webinar on Tuesday, Feb. 5, from 2 to 3 p.m. at Bakeless 005 to highlight numerous internships and jobs available to students and soon-to-be graduates throughout the federal government. The webinar will also show students how to research, find and apply for an internship or job that best suits them. Contact academic internships at (570) 389-4923 for details.

Mobile app provides “on the go” access

Bloomsburg Mobile is available for free on iTunes for Apple devices and Google Play for Android devices. Users can stay on top of their course information and view the latest announcements and event occurring across campus, as well as keep up with Huskies athletics, check computer lab availability and access the university directory.

Chefs strike gold at ARAMARK competition

Forensics Team among the best

BU’s Forensic (Speech and Debate) Team was second out of 11 schools at the Collegiate Forensic Association’s Winter Tournament held at the Queen Elizabeth Hotel in Montreal on Jan. 25 to 26. Sixteen students competed at the tournament with eight winning 15 speaking awards:

• Dan Clark (team president) — 3rd place, Prose; 3rd Place, Poetry; 3rd Place, Single Dramatic Interp; 4th Place, Impromptu Speaking
• John Munchel — 1st Place, Declamation; 5th Place, Extemporaneous Speaking; 6th Place, Dramatic Duo Interpretation with Stephanie Kaminski
• Stephanie Kaminski — 3rd Place, Declamation; 6th Place Speaker Award in Parliamentary Debate; 6th Place Parliamentary Debate with Joshua Hooks
• Cortney Fenton — 1st Place, Persuasive Speaking; 5th Place, Informative Speaking
• Sydney Hare — 5th Place, Single Dramatic Interpretation
• Dan Lacca — 5th Place, Communication Analysis
• James Neff — 1st Place, After Dinner Speaking
• Joshua Hooks — 6th Place, Parliamentary Debate with Stephanie Kaminski

Other students competing included Zach Moore, Jackson Staples, Samantha Morgan, Betsy Rubio, Michael Feiertag, Ashley Feariheller, David Yael, and Maxwell Charles. Erika Mohr, a 2012 graduate and Ryan Geiger, an alumnus and current graduate student, participated in the tournament as speech and debate judges for the BU team. Harry C. “Neil” Strine IV, director of forensics, also served as a speech and debate judge at the tournament.

BU’s Speech and Debate Team will travel to Wilkes University on Feb. 8 to 9 for their next speech tournament. The team meets every Monday at 9 p.m. in Bakeless 202. All interested students are invited to join the team. No prior experience is necessary. Contact Neil Strine at hstrin2@bloomu.edu for more information.

CCM on mission in Haiti over break

Nine students representing BU’s Catholic Campus Ministry spent a week, Jan. 11 to 18, over winter break helping Foundation for Peace continue its earthquake relief mission in Port-au-Prince, Haiti, which was devastated by a 7.0 quake in 2010. There, they assisted a local vocational school in teaching and helped renovate damaged buildings and the landscape, as well as spending a day at a local orphanage.

Daily the students traveled about an hour to a vocational school to help adult students with English and Spanish and conducted various projects, including sanding and painting the wrought-iron windows, painting the inside and outside of the school building and helping to dig a massive trench. The students also had the chance to take a break from the manual labor and teach in both the English and Spanish classrooms, which was an experience they truly enjoyed! #HuskyUnleashed

Middle East foreign policy expert visits BU

Trita Parsi, founder and president of the National Iranian American Council, was among many distinguished guest speakers to visit BU last semester. Parsi discussed President Barack Obama’s diplomacy with Iran on Nov. 28 to a full campus audience in Kenneth S. Gross Auditorium and then was featured on WKOK's Roundtable series with Mark Lawrence, where he said he is hopeful the U.S. and Iran someday find a peaceful solution to the stalemate. He said he fully understands something needs to be done to keep Iran from introducing more nuclear weapons, but war is not the answer.

BU’s speaker series continues this spring with more distinguished guests ranging many disciplines, including noted civil rights leader Julian Bond in February. Bond, former chairman of the NAACP, will be the keynote speaker of the 20th Annual Martin Luther King, Jr. Commemorative Banquet on Feb. 15 where he will speak on his extensive experience participating in the movements for civil rights and economic justice since his student days at Morehouse College in the early 1960s. Bond, who is also well-regarded politician, professor and writer, began his activist career by helping to establish the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) in 1960 and then becoming the first president of the Southern Poverty Law Center, a public interest law firm based in Montgomery, Ala. As SNCC's communications director, Bond was active in protests and registration campaigns throughout the South.

Pupils connect with Africa Study Abroad

In December, students in Patricia Wetzel's fourth grade class at St. Joseph School in Danville participated in a holiday book drive for Cameroon. The book drive invited fourth graders and families to donate books for the Africa Study Abroad Reading Day Program. Reading Day, a partnership between C&J Mebinaps Primary School in Southwest Cameroon and Bloomsburg University, promotes literacy by bringing together elementary school children, parents, and teachers from throughout Kumbe, Cameroon for a day-long celebration of reading.

Midway through their summer study abroad experience, the group of BU students made presentations at the colloquium on Contemporary Approaches to English language and Literary Studies in Cameroon co-organized by English faculty S. Ekema Agbaw and Stephanie Schlitz at the University of Buea. The colloquium, which attracted participants from several other universities in Cameroon, was organized in collaboration with the University of Buea’s department of English within the framework of the cooperation agreement between the two institutions. BU students also performed an adaptation of Real Mothers, a Cameroonian novel they studied in the Non-Western literature class.

Lynda’s in the house

Bloomsburg University faculty, students, and staff now have access to more than 1,500 courses and 85,000 individual online, video tutorials that are designed to improve their skills in the use of common and specialized software applications. The tutorials are presented in very short modules with excellent tables of content so it’s easy to jump right to the section you need to answer your question. You can also use your mobile iOS or Android devices to access the materials. Just go to lynda.bloomu.edu and sign in with your Husky ID. Watch How to use lynda.com, and you’ll be off and learning in a few minutes.

Clowning around with Patch Adams

Recently Michael Patte, professor of educational studies and secondary education, and his colleague Cindy Dell Clark, associate professor of anthropology from Rutgers University, sat down for an interview with Patch Adams, the prominent American physician, social activist, clown, and author to discuss play and its relationship to wellness — a topic all three know very well.

Throughout his 50-year career Patch has advocated for treating the patient and not the condition and during the two-hour interview he shared glimpses of his life’s work, which was the inspiration of a Hollywood movie in 1998, starring Robin Williams.

During those fifty years Patch estimates he clowned at 10,000 death beds and held 2,000 children in his arms the day they died of starvation. Patte and Clark both study and teach about children, culture, and play with a focus on health related issues. A recent publication by Clark includes a child-centered ethnography on how children and their families cope with asthma and diabetes, “In sickness and in play: Children coping with chronic illness.” Patte recently examined how the field of playwork might combat factors marginalizing children’s play in America in, “Playwork: A profession challenging societal factors devaluing children’s play.”

Faculty collaborate to enhance teaching

Just prior to the spring semester, BU's Teaching Excellence Academy Fellows of 2013 completed a week studying course design through TALE. The Fellows studied L. Dee Fink's Creating Significant Learning Experiences to create a framework for thoughtfully re-imagining how their courses. In addition, faculty participants:

• developed and exchanged ideas about how to incorporate more active learning into their classes
• learned how to provide students with meaningful feedback from Ted Roggenbuck, director of the Writing Center
• developed an appreciation for how diversity should be part of any course design with the help of Brian Johnson, director of the Frederick Douglass Institute
• and explored theories of student motivation with Karen Hamman, director of University Tutorial Services, in order to apply these ideas to their course design

The week was capped off with Fellows sharing their course designs to solicit feedback from colleagues. (Front L-R) Cindy Surmacz, Mary Nicholson, Kristin Pelczarski and Cindy Venn. (Back L-R) Stephanie Schlitz, Jennifer Venditti, Angela Hess, Craig Young and Kevin Ball

Spring brings several changes across campus

The Office of Academic Internships is now part of the Division of University Advancement. Alison Stone-Briggs is director; Donna Murphy is assistant to the director. And Jerrold Harris has joined the Office of Planning and Assessment as coordinator for compliance and assessment. These members of the campus community are serving in temporary roles:

• Richard Angelo, acting associate dean, College of Science and Technology
• Melissa Cheese, interim director, ACT 101/EOP
• Carl Chimi, a special project, Husky Tales, Offices of the Provost and Marketing and Communications
• John Hranitz, interim coordinator, Undergraduate Research Center, Office of Graduate Studies
• Jonathan Lincoln, acting dean, College of Science and Technology
• Robert Marande, acting assistant provost for strategic initiatives
• Cristina Mathews, assessment fellow, Office of Planning and Assessment
• Luke Springman, adviser to international students, global education and BU representative to the PASSHE International Education Council
• Stephanie Schlitz, co-chair, Middle States Commission on Higher Education (MSCHE) Accreditation Reporting
• Mark Tapsak, co-chair, Strategic Planning and Resource Council (SPARC) II

Faculty gain new perspectives on teaching

BU faculty recently attended the Lilly Conference at Miami University in Oxford, Ohio, where they spent four days learning “Evidence-Based Learning and Teaching," as well as participated in numerous sessions about teaching in higher education. The faculty who attended will share some of what they learned with colleagues during TALE seminars in the spring 2013 semester. Travel was made possible by the Provost office and Dean of Graduate Studies.

Presentation topics included:

• But What Can We Do on Monday? Identifying Lessons Learned, Promising Applications, and Test Driving New Cats From the Upcoming 3rd Edition
• How Research-Based Approaches to Cross-Cultural Teaching Can Inform Our Practice: Findings And Implications From A National Study of Indigenous Teaching
• Teaching Naked: How Moving Technology Out of Your College Classroom Will Improve Student Learning
• 5 Transformative Teaching Practices
• What Happened to Borders and Tower Records? How Universities Remain Relevant
• Achieving Learning Goals by Design (Instead of by Good Fortune)
• What Research Tells Us About How People Learn

(L-R) Beverly Natividad, communication studies; Denise Davidson, counseling and college student affairs; Howard Lee, finance; and Mykola Polyuha, languages and cultures.

Two faculty earn tenure this spring