Academic Affairs Faculty News - Spring 2005

This is the second in a series of newsletters, to be published periodically, highlighting the accomplishments of our faculty and librarians. Please submit news items for publication to Lisa Shaw, Academic Affairs, 104 Boyden.

ANNOUNCEMENTS

Statistics released by the Academic Achievement Center show that academic performance by first year students has increased dramatically in the past decade.  In 2004, 13% of first-year students qualified for the Freshman Dean's list, compared with only 7% in 1994.  Favorable academic standing trends comparing 1998F and 2004F freshmen show improvement as well.  In 1998F, 1514 freshmen enrolled, 74% were in good standing, 19% were on probation, and 7% were dismissed.  In 2004F, 1794 students enrolled, 84% were in good standing, 11% were on probation, and 5% were dismissed.  

The Masters in Social Work program has received notification from the Council on Social Work Education (CSWE) granting second year candidacy for the master program.

Jabbar Al-Obaidi was elected to the Board of Directors of the Bridgewater Television Access Corporation (BTV).

James Hannon recently led a day-long training for facilitators of restorative justice circles for juvenile offenders in Concord and Carlisle.

Anne Hird and Kathleen Laquale were selected for the St. Mary Academy - Bay View Athletic Hall of Fame

The GeoGraphics Lab, run by Uma Shama and Larry Harman, was awarded the Association for Continuing Higher Education (ACHE) in the Creative Use of Technology Category for their project entitled "Statewide Web-Based Advanced Travel Planner for Access to Training and Employment."

Hazel Varella, an adjunct faculty member of the History Department since 1998, has been selected for inclusion in the 2005 "Who's Who in America."  Hazel was department chair of the Social Studies Department for the Town of Easton for thirty-three years and she's an Advanced Placement Consultant for the College Board. 

APPOINTMENTS

Pamela Hayes-Bohanan served as Latin American and Caribbean Studies coordinator for Spring 2005.

Curtiss Hoffman has been elected to the Board of Trustees of the International Association for the Study of Dreams, whose conference he attended in June of 2004 in Copenhagen.  He has chaired a committee for this organization, which established guidelines for an annual student paper competition.  He has successfully bid to have this organization hold its annual conference at BSC in June of 2006.

Arthur Lizie and Susan Holton have been named Faculty Directors of the First and Second Year Seminars, respectively. 

Peter Saccocia will assume the position of Co-Coordinator of the Adrian Tinsley Program for Undergraduate Research for three years beginning this fall.

Catherine Womack has been appointed the position of Co-Coordinator of the Center for the Advancement of Research and Training; her term will extend through the next three years.

ARTICLES

Patricia Bancroft co-authored an article "The Moral and Cultural Reasoning of IPO Accountants:  A Small Sample Study" in Research on Responsibility and Ethics in Accounting (vol. 9).

Marcia Dinneen published two articles, one on Emma Lathen and the other on Sharyn McCrumb, in the 2005 Dictionary of Literary Biography volume on Mystery and Detective Writers.

James Hannon published the article "Preserving Life History Research as an Empirical and Collaborative Method" in Sociological Imagination (December 2004).

Curtiss Hoffman published three articles in the Fall of 2004:  "Dumuzi's Dream:  Dream Interpretation in Ancient Mesopotamia" in the journal Dreaming, "Nested Dreaming, Lucid Living" in the on-line journal Lucid Dream Exchange, and "Symbols in Stone, Part Two:  Quartz Ceremonial Objects from the Middleborough Little League Site" in the Bulletin of the Massachusetts Archaeological Society.  He also completed a 900-page site report on the Little League Site; a copy has been donated to the Bridgewater State College Library.

Susan Holton's article "Seven Deadly Sins for Department Chairs" was published in The Department Chair, Fall 2004.

The article "Teach 2D Graphics Concepts with an Open GL Graphing Program" by Toby Lorenzen, Assistant Professor of Computer Science, and his student Joseph Michaud was accepted for publication in inroads, which is the official quarterly publication of SIGCSE, the Special Interest Group on Computer Science Education in the Association for Computing Machinery. 

In Fall 2004, Child & Adolescent Social Work Journal published Beverly Lovett's article entitled "Child Sexual Abuse Disclosure:  Maternal Support and Other Variables Impacting the Victim."

George Serra co-authored two articles in 2004, which are "Casework, Issues, and Voting in State Legislative Elections:  A District Analysis."  Journal of Legislative Studies.  Vol. 10, No. 4 (Winter 2004), pp. 1-15 and "The Costs of Reform:  Consequences of Limiting Legislative Terms of Service."  Party Politics.  Vol. 10, No. 1 (January 2004), pp. 69-84.

Kendra St. Aubin published an article entitled "AgeSource Worldwide" in The Charleston Advisor, Vol. 5, Issue 4, April 2004.

Uma Shama and Lawrence Harman co-authored an article entitled "Unmanned Aerial Vehicles:  A New Pilot" in Rail - Connecting Communities by Moving People.

AWARDS

William Levin was awarded the Bridgewater State College Lifetime Faculty Achievement Award to honor distinction in academic research over the span of an individual's career at BSC.

Michael Kryzanek received the Class of 1950 Distinguished Faculty Research Award, which awards a faculty member engaged in a significant research project during the current academic year.

Ruth Farrar received the Dr. Jordan D. Fiore Research Prize in World Justice, which is given annually to a full-time BSC faculty member who is seeking support for research or other academic project related to world justice.

Thomas Turner was awarded the Dr. V. James DiNardo Award for Excellence in Teaching.  This award is presented to a member of the BSC faculty whose contributions include mastery of subject matter, enthusiastic teaching style and personal attention to students.

This year Thomas Curley and Rob Lorenson were awarded Bridgewater State College Presidential Fellowships.  This highly competitive award allows the recipients to focus exclusively on his/her research for an entire academic year with two semesters of course release time and a budget of up to $10,000 for research-related expenses.

The Massachusetts Department of Education announced the Summer Content Institute awards, totaling just over $100,000, to the following BSC faculty and participating school districts for Summer 2005:

Joan Hausrath and Cambridge Public Schools:  "New Technologies in the Visual Arts"

Mark Kemper and Brockton Public Schools:  "The Constitution, Crime Control, and Rights of the Accused in United States History"

John Kucich, Lee Torda and Elaine Bukowiecki and Brockton Public Schools:  "Theories of Reading and Writing in the World"

Margaret Landman, Salem State College and Salem Public Schools:  "Viewing the People and Places in the Commonwealth through an Economic Looking Glass"

Jeff Williams and Rob Hellstrom and Brockton Public Schools:  "Energy and the Environment"

TheBridge received a Silver Crown Award, the highest honor offered by the Columbia Scholastic Press Association for student publications at the Spring National Media Convention last March.  The journal won the Apple Award for Best-in-Show for literary/arts magazines as well as six Gold Circle honors for individual works, including First Place for best short story ("Paper Fish" by Mandy Simoneau).

Commonwealth Politics, sponsored by the Center for Legislative Studies, was an award recipient at the 26^th Annual Telly Awards for its program "Post Election Analysis," with Senators Robert Hedlund and Brian A. Joyce.  The Telly Awards were founded in 1978 to honor outstanding local, regional, and cable TV commercials and programs, and video and film productions.  This award also honors Arthur Slotnick, Matthew Derechie, and Perry Clark of the television crew at the Moakley TV Studio.

CONFERENCES

Ann Brunjes presented a paper entitled "Timothy Dwight's Imaginative Conundrum:  Resistant Landscapes and the Aboriginal ‘slack hand'" at the Society of Early Americanists Biennial Conference in Arlington, Virginia in April.

Jon Bryan presented a paper at the 3^rd International Conference on Entrepreneurship and Macroeconomic Management" at the University of Rijeka, Croatia held from April 26-May 5, 2005.

Anne Doyle presented a paper in March at the annual Conference on College Composition and Communication (CCCC) in San Francisco on "Affirming Access to the Conversation:  Students as Primary Researchers."

Kathryn Evans attended the Conference on College Composition and Communication (CCCC) in San Francisco and presented a talk entitled "Revising Teaching:  An Invitation to Blog for Professional Development."

Helene Fine presented a paper entitled "Remanufacturing Manufacturing Identities" at the Standing Committee on Management and Organizational Inquiry (SC'MOI) conference in Philadelphia.

James Hannon presented a lecture, "Understanding Adolescent Substance Abuse:  Getting Real and Reducing Harm" at a Harvard Medical School Conference on Adolescent Self-Destruction.

James Hannon gave two talks last January at a Wesleyan University Faculty Seminar Symposium on Prison Education.  The first, "Encountering Self and Other in Literature Courses in Prison," was a reflection on his teaching experiences at MCI-Bay State and MCI- Framingham.

Susan Holton presented her paper "Looking Away…Faculty-Faculty Conflict," at the National Communication Association Conference, November 2004, in Chicago, Illinois. 

Susan Holton also presented "Three Steps to Conflict Management:  The Holton Model for Conflict Management," at the Association for Conflict Resolution, September 2004, in Sacramento, California.

Garland Kimmer presented his essay "'For We Have New Worlds Here':  Ireland, Myth, and the Roots of Anti-Heroic Fantasy Fiction" at the 2005 American Conference for Irish Studies at the University of Notre Dame.

John Kucich presented a paper in March entitled "Sons of the Forest:  Jonathan Edwards, Samson Occom and the New England Landscape" at the Northeast Modern Language Association (NEMLA) conference in Cambridge.

Ron Pitt presented a paper, with two colleagues from Bryant University, entitled "Meeting Standards:  Does Accreditation Support or Undermine Academic Quality?" at the Southeast Academy of Management Conference in February.

Peggy Smith and Helena Santos presented at the Annual Conference on the First-Year Experience in Phoenix last February.  A link to the entire presentation entitled "Bridgewater State College - Educating in Three Centuries" is available on the Academic Affairs website at http://www.bridgew.edu/Depts/AcAffairs/

Cynthia Svoboda planned and coordinated the March 10-11, 2005 conference on libraries, technology and information commons that was held in the Moakley Center for librarians from across the southeast Massachusetts region.

Lee Torda presented an essay entitled "The Great Brighton Fraud" at the Western Literature Association Annual Conference in Big Sky, Montana.

Kathleen Vejvoda read her paper entitled "Race, Gender, and Migration" at the 2005 American Conference for Irish Studies.

GRANTS AWARDED (FY 05 Quarter 2 & 3)

Martina Arndt, Collaborative Research: Polarimetric Imaging and Spectroscopy of the Corona from 500-1500nm During Solar Eclipses, National Science Foundation, $500 

Daniel Cooney, Internship in Photo Realist Painting with renowned English Photo Realist, Peter Evans, Marion and Jasper Whiting Foundation, $4,600

Kevin Curry, Institute for Watershed Studies: Using Technology, Community Service and Applied Science to Implement the Community Preservation Initiative (ITQ), Massachusetts Board of Higher Education, $30,000

Vernon Domingo, Global Education Consortium, Massachusetts Global Education Consortium at Framingham State College, $20,000 

Mary Fuller, Southeastern Massachusetts Regional ITAC Proposal, Commonwealth Information Technology Initiative, $50,000

Larry Harman and Uma Shama, Migrating e-Transit Databases and Web Services to a TerraService Model (Scientific Data Intensive Computing), Microsoft Research, $25,000

Larry Harman and Uma Shama, Colorado State University's Hurricane Landfall Project, Colorado State University, $20,000 

Robert Hellstrom and Jeffrey Williams, Clean Energy for a Sustainable Environment, Massachusetts Technology Collaborative, $18,505 

Robert Hellstrom and Jeffrey Williams, Energy and the Environment Content Institute, Massachusetts Department of Education, $32,902

Merideth Krevosky, BSC CityLab: Training Scientists of Tomorrow, Verizon, $10,000

Margaret Lowe, Teaching American History - Year 3, U.S. Department of Education, $253,293

Donald Padgett, Seed Germination and Propagation of the Rare Dwarf Cow-lily (Nuphar microphylla), International Waterlily and Water Gardening Society, $2,400

Lidia Silveira, Promoting Inclusion through Assistive Technology - Year Two, FIPSE, $9,594

Peggy Smith, Ronald McNair Disadvantaged Student Program - Year Two, Massachusetts Board of Higher Education, $25,000

Michael Somers, FY2005 Virtual Catalog New Member Grant, Massachusetts Board of Library Commissioners, $13,500

Jeffrey Williams, Physical Science with Mathematical Modeling (ITQ), Massachusetts Board of Higher Education, $50,000 

INTERVIEWS

Uma Shama was interviewed in The Hindu, a national newspaper in India that has international circulation on the web about her participation in a project detailing 500 bus schedules across the United States using the Geographic Information System (GIS).  The article can be found in the following link:  http://www.hindu.com/lf/2005/02/13/stories/2005021312830200.htm.

NPR's "Talk of the Nation" interviewed Aeon Skoble on January 24, 2005 (for an eight minute segment in a twenty-two minute piece) about people in the US who live in areas where natural disasters are sure to occur and how this impacts subsidized insurance programs and guaranteed disaster relief.  The audio is archived at http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyld=4464163.

INVITATIONS

Mary Dondero, Assistant Professor of Art, was chosen through nomination to be a portfolio judge for graduating seniors at l'Ecole Superieure D'Arts Graphiques Et D'Architecture in Paris.  ESAG is one of the most prestigious art schools in the world.

NEW ARTICULATION AGREEMENTS

BSC's Department of Communications has reached an articulation agreement with Bristol Community College.

PUBLICATIONS

Thomas Kling's paper "Wide-field Weak Lensing by RXJ 1347-1145" was published in Astrophysical Journal, Vol. 625, No. 2, June 2005.

Phil Tabakow published a chapter in a book of criticism about Canadian novelist and short story writer Douglas Glover in The Art of Desire:  The Fiction of Douglas Glover, edited by Bruce Stone:  Oberon Press, December 2004. 

Phil Tabakow's book of poetry entitled The Mechanics of Submission was published by DC Books in March 2004.

STUDENT ACCOMPLISHMENTS AND AWARDS

Karyn O'Connell, a Biology major, was accepted into Tufts Veterinary School.

Rosa Aleman presented a video production about the Upward Bound program at Lawrence High School at the 5^th Annual Undergraduate Research Symposium on April 29^th in Moakley.  Rosa also included a piece on diversity, which she presented at the 19^th National Conference on Undergraduate Research (NCUR) in April.  Rosa has been invited back to Washington and Lee Universities as a diversity speaker and Joseph Pauley (BSC class of '52) invited her to a seminar on reaching "hard-to-reach" students.

Twenty-seven BSC students participated in the 19^th National Conference on Undergraduate Research (NCUR) held at Virginia Military Institute (VMI) and Washington and Lee Universities from April 20-23, 2005.  The BSC group presented a variety of scholarly and artistic activities across the disciplines and was the tenth largest group attending the conference out of 250 schools from across the country. 

More than 275 people attended The 5^th Annual Bridgewater State College Undergraduate Research Symposium held in Moakley on April 29, 2005.  Sixty-eight undergraduate students from all disciplines presented their research, scholarship, or artistic work with thirty-nine posters and twenty-nine oral presentations.  Ann Brunjes and Ed Brush served as faculty coordinators for this ATP-funded event.

Keith Anderson is the first BSC student to complete the flight training and instruction requirements with Delta Connection Academy.  He was hired last month by Comair Airlines and is currently in Cincinnati undergoing First Officer Training.

A team of students in the Master of Science in Management program, led by Christine Perakslis and John Drew, won a writing award at the Information Systems Educators Conference (ISECON, 2004).  Their publication, "Utilization of Robotics in Higher Education" was peer reviewed by three editors and will be published in the ISEDJ "Information Systems Educators Journal." 

Lauren Marsh and Jessica Dye, Art majors, received full waivers to this summer's prestigious annual marble carving symposium in Marble, Colorado.  Lauren and Jessica will be carving stone in the Rocky Mountains with artists from all over the world.  The fact that both BSC students received the award is even more meaningful because typically only one student waiver is given per year, but the work of both these students was strong enough to merit giving them both waivers.

Erin Nevens, Russ McCormick, and Kathleen Gonsalves of the Earth Science and Geography Department, presented research papers at the Geological Society of America Northeast meeting last March in Saratoga Springs, NY. 

Matthew Fabisch and Shannon Moriarty were awarded senator assignments at Stetson University's 34^th Annual Floyd M. Riddick Model Senate held in March.  Matthew role played Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist and Shannon Moriarty modeled Senator Richard Durbin.   

The Bridgewater State College Forensic Team placed first at the 2005 Northeast Regional Tournament in Plymouth, New Hampshire.  In addition to their first place finish, the BSC team also won eighteen trophies.  Molly Jarvi qualified for the Interstate Oratorical Contest (the oldest speech competition in the county), and her speech will be published in Winning Orations, a collection of student speeches used in classes and speech textbooks.

Seven BSC students attended the National Tournament, Convention, and Developmental Conference last March.  They competed in multiple speech events in seven different categories and also competed in their first professional conference on forensics.

Last Modified: May 18, 2005