Screening of ‘If These Halls Could Talk’ April 3

 

Lee Mun Wah

Quinnipiac University will screen “If These Halls Could Talk,” a documentary film series about 11 college students and their conversations about diversity issues in higher education, at 6:30 p.m. on Wednesday, April 3, at Burt Kahn Court on the Mount Carmel Campus. Lee Mun Wah, the renowned Chinese American documentary filmmaker who directed the film, will lead a discussion following the screening.

This event, sponsored by the School of Education, College of Arts and Sciences, Student Affairs, the Office of Multicultural and Global Education and the Albert Schweitzer Institute, is free and open to the public.

For more information, call 203-582-8652.

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University announces commencement speakers

Josh Elliott of “Good Morning America“ and Jessica Jackley, co-founder of KIVA, a microlending website, will address students and receive honorary degrees at the 82nd undergraduate ceremonies on Sunday, May 19. Jackley will address College of Arts and Sciences and School of Business students at our 10 a.m. ceremony. James W. McGlothlin, chairman and CEO of The United Co. and a Quinnipiac Business Leader Hall of Fame honoree, will also receive an honorary degree at the ceremony. Elliott will address School of Communications, School of Health Sciences and School of Nursing students at 3 p.m.

The Honorable Dennis G. Eveleigh, a Connecticut Supreme Court justice, will address the University’s graduating School of Law students on Sunday, May 12. He will also receive an honorary degree.

Denise D’Ascenzo, weekday anchor of WFSB-TV’s 5:30 and 6 p.m. newscasts, will address students at the university’s graduate Commencement ceremony on Sunday, May 12. She will also receive an honorary degree.

Quinnipiac will once again sponsor a Commencement Fair on the Mount Carmel Campus on Monday, April 15, from 10 a.m. to 7 p.m. and on Tuesday, April 16, from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. in the Piazza of the Carl Hansen Student Center. It will also be held on the North Haven Campus on Wednesday, April 17, from 9 a.m. to 3 p.m. Representatives from all offices involved in commencement will distribute caps and gowns and answer questions.

Learn more about each of the ceremonies here.

Education students attend Read Across America Day in New York City

School of Education students Victoria Formica, left, Carolyn Tufts, Erica Romano and Marie, Schussler attended the National Education Association’s Read Across America Day at the New York Public Library in Manhattan on March 1.

Four members of the Quinnipiac Future Teachers Organization at the School of Education at Quinnipiac University attended the National Education Association’s Read Across America Day at the New York Public Library in Manhattan on March 1.

Victoria Formica, Erica Romano, Marie Schussler and Caroline Tufts were selected to be among 10 student volunteers to participate because of their affiliation with the Connecticut Education Association’s Student Program.

The students helped run the event, and Formica, president of QTFO, and Schussler, vice president, dressed up as Seuss characters ‘Thing 1’ and ‘Thing 2’ to entertain the students. Celebrities Uma Thurman and Jake T. Austin also read Seuss books to the more than 250 public school students who attended the event.

Read Across America Day is held annually to honor Seuss’ birthday, and is celebrated nationwide to emphasize the importance of developing a love for learning at an early age. According to the NEA, the event had more than 45 million participants.

Connecticut teachers complete Holocaust curriculum training at School of Education

More than 25 teachers from Connecticut completed a Feb. 5 training program on “Echoes and Reflections: A Multimedia Curriculum on the Holocaust,” a comprehensive 10-part curriculum on the Holocaust. The Connecticut Office of the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) sponsored the training, which took place at the School of Education. (Photo by Mark Stanczak, manager of photographic services.)

More than 25 teachers from Connecticut completed a Feb. 5 training program on “Echoes and Reflections: A Multimedia Curriculum on the Holocaust,” a comprehensive 10-part curriculum on the Holocaust. The Connecticut Office of the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) sponsored the training, which took place at Quinnipiac University‘s School of Education.

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“Echoes and Reflections” uses visual history testimony from survivors and other witnesses and additional primary source documents, including maps, photographs, timelines, literature excerpts and other materials. The curriculum was produced primarily for use in high schools in partnership with the Anti-Defamation League, the USC Shoah Foundation Institute for Visual History and Education and Yad Vashem, the Holocaust’s Martyrs’ and Heroes’ Remembrance Committee.

In addition, Holocaust survivor Anita Schorr, of Westport, addressed the teachers. A native of Czechoslovakia, Schorr was arrested with her family in 1939 when she was 8, according to an April 12, 2012 article in “The Jewish Ledger.” The family survived the Jewish ghetto and was transported to Terezin, where Schorr sang in the children’s opera, “Brundibár.” The family was then deported to Auschwitz, where Schorr’s parents and younger brother were murdered. Schorr served in a slave-labor unit in Hamburg before ending up in Bergen-Belsen. After liberation, Schorr joined the Haganah, a Jewish parliamentary organization, and fought in the Israeli War of Independence. She married a fellow Czech and lived on a kibbutz until 1959, when the couple came to the U.S. Trained as a commercial artist, Schorr didn’t start telling her story until about 10 years ago, after retiring from a long career.

Educators from Cheshire, Hamden, New Haven and Norwalk complete ‘Engineering is Elementary’ workshop

Clockwise from left: Quinnipiac University School of Education student teachers Megan Mourao and Jara Richards take part in the “Engineering is Elementary” program with their cooperating teachers Anne Marie Wintenburg, a teacher at Doolittle Elementary School in Cheshire, and Amy Warren, a teacher at Church Street School in Hamden.

Incorporating engineering into an elementary school lesson plan is not so difficult after all.

That’s what five Quinnipiac University School of Education students and their cooperating teachers learned on Jan. 11, when they took part in the workshop, Engineering is Elementary,® a National Center for Technological Literacy project to enhance engineering and technology knowledge and to inspire the next generation of engineers, inventors and innovators.

Lucie Howell, director of the Bristol-Myers Squibb Center for Science Teaching and Learning at Quinnipiac, led the training which included students and cooperating teachers from Cheshire, Hamden, New Haven and Norwalk.

The attendees took part in a series of activities designed to expand their thinking about technology.

“Technology is anything human-made that is used to solve a problem or fulfill a desire,” said Howell, who led the workshop at the School of Education on Quinnipiac’s North Haven Campus. “Technology can be an object, a system or a process.”

Howell had the participants work in teams to determine how various everyday objects, including spoons, painter’s tape, Post-it Notes and highlighters, are all forms of technology.

Amanda Lubin, a student teacher at the Fair Haven School in New Haven, said the workshop taught her how to integrate engineering into her lesson plans and to think more broadly about technology. “Technology is just not cell phones and computers,” she said. “This workshop showed me how to make students think about the world and how it was not always the way it is today. Not everything we have today was always available to us. We’ve had to change and modernize.”

Andrew Turkewitz, a student teacher at the Bear Path School in Hamden, agreed. “This has been wonderful,” he said. “It has given me good ideas how to use engineering as a theme for integrated teaching. It really lends itself to teaching science and mathematics.”

In another exercise, the participants formed groups of four and were given index cards and tape to build a stand to hold a small teddy bear. At the end of the activity, each team displayed and tested its stand and discussed how they constructed it.

“I hope the student teachers and their cooperating teachers see how they can introduce more integrated STEM (science, technology, engineering and mathematics) activities into their classroom activities,” Howell said. “I also want them to see how science, technology and engineering overlap. My hope is that they realize that these types of activities can add to the learning environment without increasing their workloads.”

Those who participated in the workshop were: Anne Marie Wintenburg, a teacher at Doolittle Elementary School in Cheshire, and her student teacher Jara Richards; Amy Warren, a teacher at Church Street School in Hamden, and her student teacher Megan Mourao; Lisa Kingston, a teacher at Bear Path School in Hamden, and her student teacher Andrew Turkewitz; Ann Marie Blake, a teacher at West Woods School in Hamden, and her student teacher Christina McGuire; and Monica Morales, a teacher at the Fair Haven School in New Haven, and her student teacher Amanda Lubin. Sally Davids and Karyn Privalsky, teachers at the Side By Side School in Norwalk, also took part in the workshop.