A Newsletter for UMW Faculty and Staff
Jason Davidson
Associate Professor of Political Science and International Affairs Jason Davidson’s essay “Assessing NATO’s Experience in Libya” appears in the journal Aspenia. The journal is a publication of the Aspen Institute Italia.
Kristen LePine
The HUB Theatre in Fairfax, Virginia will present a staged reading of Kristen LePine’s new play, “Dire Wolves,” on Thursday, May 24, 2012, at the Greater Reston Arts Center. The reading starts at 7:30pm, admission is free, and the Center is located at 12001 Market Street, Reston, VA.
“Dire Wolves” was commissioned by the HUB Theatre, and examines how quick changes impact personal identity as six people must either adapt and evolve or face the possibility of extinction.
LePine holds a Master of Fine Arts in Dramatic Writing from Humboldt State University. Her works have been presented various venues, including Active Cultures, Inkwell, Pinky Swears Productions, Woolly Mammoth Theatre Company, and the John F. Kennedy Center for the Arts.
More information about this event can be found at www.thehubtheatre.org/performances_staged.html
Mara Scanlon gives a presentation during Faculty Academy (Photo courtesy of Cathy Derecki, @saracup)
More than 100 faculty and staff came together for the 17th annual Faculty Academy at UMW’s Fredericksburg campus on Wednesday, May 16 and Thursday, May 17. For the participants, Faculty Academy was an opportunity to share efforts and accomplishments in the classroom, especially in the area of teaching and learning technologies.
The program, “Under Disruption,” featured presentations and panel discussions by dozens of UMW faculty and staff members, as well as keynote speeches by David Darts, Giulia Forsythe and Grant Potter. Topics ranged from 3-D printing to digital history to technology in the classroom.
UMW’s Division of Teaching and Learning Technologies hosted the event, with sponsorship from the Center for Advancing Teaching and Learning and the Department of Information Technology.
Faculty Academy included demos of MakerBot 3-D printers (Photo courtesy of Andrea Smith, @andikappa)
For more information about Faculty Academy, visit http://blog12.facultyacademy.org/.
Holly Schiffrin
Holly Schiffrin presented during a four-hour workshop at the annual meeting of the American Institute of Architects National Convention and Design Exposition in Washington, D.C. on Wednesday, May 16. The workshop, “Happiness and Architecture: Linking Design to Positive Psychology,” also featured Charles First, an architect with HEERY that has been working on the Dahlgren campus. Other co-presenters included Tim Bachman and Connie Hom of Buckingham Greenery.
Anand Rao, associate professor of communication and director of the speaking intensive program, will be a presenter next week in Shanghai, China, at a debate training workshop for high school English teachers.
The “Training Workshop on the Harvard Debate-National Forensic League Curriculum” will be held from Wednesday, May 23 through Monday, May 28. Rao will be one of four presenters at the workshop, along with Stefan Bauschard (Harvard Debate), Adam Jacobi (National Forensic League), and Ryan Galloway (Samford University). The workshop will be attended by 100 English teachers from 50 of the top magnet high schools across China.
The workshop is sponsored by two government agencies, “The Society of Cultivating Innovators” and “Innovation Method Society,” which are supervised by the Ministries of Education and Technology. The agencies are considered the highest ranking non-profits in China organized by the central government. Harvard Debate and the National Forensic League, the leading organizations for high school debate in the United States, are working with the Chinese agencies to develop a high school debate program for the top students across the country. The workshop is the first presentation of a debate curriculum that is in development by Harvard Debate and the National Forensic League for use in Chinese high schools this coming fall.
Psychology faculty members Mindy Erchull, Miriam Liss, Virginia Mackintosh, Christine McBride, David Rettinger, Holly Schiffrin and Hilary Stebbins will present research at the 2012 Association for Psychological Science Annual Convention from Thursday, May 24 through Sunday, May 27 in Chicago.
Liss and Schiffrin, along with 2012 graduate Kathryn Rizzo, will present “The Impact of Intensive Parenting on the Well-Being of Mothers.” Liss and Schiffrin are the faculty sponsors of “Mother, father, or parent? College students’ intensive parenting beliefs differ by referent,” presented by students Katherine Geary, Taryn Tashner, Haley Miles-McLean, Kathryn Rizzo and Charlotte Hagerman.
Schiffrin, Liss, Mackintosh, Erchull and student Haley Miles McLean will present “Development and Validation of a Quantitative Measure of Intensive Parenting Attitudes.”
McBride will present “The Impact of Cognitive Stress, Social Stress, and Appraisals on Eating Behavior” with student Janet Greider. Students Erin Burdwood and Amy Newcomb also were part of the research team.
Rettinger will present “Guilt-Proneness and Fear of Being Caught Deter Cheating” with students Caitlin Brady, Megan Hess, Frank Knizner and Caroline Lupsha.
Stebbins will present “The Interaction Between Emotional Expressions of Face Targets in the Attentional Blink” with students Alyssa Dembrowski, David Levin and Chelsea Mageland.
Debra Harber, director of financial aid, held a live chat on Fredericksburg.com on Tuesday, May 15. She answered questions from the public about student loans, including the difference between federal and private loans, how to handle student loan debt and ways to save for college. The full text of the chat is available at http://www.fredericksburg.com/News/chat3/Archive?chat_id=147.
Stephen Farnsworth, professor of political science and director of the Center for Leadership and Media Studies, was a featured guest on CTV News on Monday, May 14.
In the segment, available online at http://watch.ctv.ca/news/#clip678653, Farnsworth discusses the implications of Newsweek’s recent cover with the headline “The First Gay President.”
Gary Johnson
Gary Johnson, director of Career Services, and Katie Locke, assistant director of Career Services, presented a series of roundtables titled “Practical Assessment” at the Virginia Association of Colleges and Employers (VACE) Annual Conference on Thursday, April 26 in Fairfax, Va. The presentation centered around a discussion of trends in data collection and assessment in career services and higher education. Johnson is past-president of VACE.
Katie Locke
Ken Tyler has been named director of athletics at the University of Mary Washington. Tyler comes to UMW after serving as director of athletics at West Virginia Wesleyan College, an NCAA Division II school in Buckhannon, W.Va. Tyler succeeds Edward Hegmann, who is retiring from the university next month after 36 years. Tyler begins work at UMW in June.
“I am delighted that Ken Tyler has accepted our offer to become our next director of athletics,” said UMW President Richard V. Hurley. “I am impressed by his experience, his enthusiasm and his ideas on how to advance our athletic program.”
Tyler has been at West Virginia Wesleyan since July 2008, overseeing the largest athletic department in the state of West Virginia, with more than 500 student athletes and 19 varsity sports. While in Buckhannon, Tyler’s programs swept the President’s and Commissioner’s Cups for overall athletic excellence in the West Virginia Intercollegiate Athletic Conference each year of his tenure.
“I am grateful and honored to be named director of athletics at the University of Mary Washington,” Tyler said. “I want to thank President Hurley, Vice-President Searcy and all the members of the search committee for this wonderful opportunity. Mary Washington’s outstanding academic reputation, combined with its strong and broad-based athletic program, makes this one of the best small-college positions in the country.” He added, “Ed Hegmann and the terrific coaching staff have laid a very solid foundation, and I look forward to working with everyone to take the program to the next level. My family and I are excited to join the Eagle family, and I can’t wait to get started!”
At WVWC, Tyler added the sport of women’s lacrosse and created the position of director of compliance and academic services. He also made facility improvements in department offices; the stadium; arena; locker rooms; and baseball, softball and soccer fields. In addition, he created a student-athlete lounge and academic support area. Under Tyler’s tenure, the athletics office acquired a 25-passenger bus with a professional driver to replace coach-driven 15-passenger vans and instituted mandatory university drug-testing for randomly selected student athletes.
Tyler’s strategic plan included adding full-time assistant coach positions for team sports and launching a new athletics website. The success of the programs was immediate, as the football team improved from 1-10 during Tyler’s first year to 9-2 in 2010 and 2011, including undefeated records at home both seasons. The men’s basketball team went from eight wins in 2010 to 19 wins and the NCAA Tournament in 2011, the second-biggest turnaround in Division II. This winter, the Bobcat women’s basketball team finished 23-7, won the program’s first-ever WVIAC tournament championship and received the program’s first-ever NCAA tournament berth. The 2011-12 men’s basketball team finished 22-9, and won Wesleyan’s first-ever NCAA tournament game.
With Tyler at the helm, Wesleyan won 22 WVIAC championships. In 2010-11, the Bobcats finished No. 76 nationally in the Division II Learfield Director’s Cup standings, the best finish in school history and tops in the WVIAC. That same year, Wesleyan finished fifth in the nation in student athletes recognized on the Academic Honor Roll of the Division II Athletic Directors Association. The Bobcats also have been extremely active in community engagement activities.
Tyler was on the Division II Athletic Directors Association board of directors,. He also served as the Atlantic Region chair on the Division II National Men’s Basketball committee, vice-chair of WVIAC athletic directors and chair of the WVIAC Basketball Tournament committee. He arrived at Wesleyan after a seven-year stay at Shepherd University, where he served as head men’s basketball coach and assistant athletic director.
Prior to his time at Shepherd, Tyler spent six years at Albright (Pa.) College, serving as the head men’s basketball coach and assistant director of athletics. He also had one-year stints as assistant men’s basketball coach at East Stroudsburg University (Pa.), Roanoke (Va.) College and James Madison University under legendary coach “Lefty” Driesell.
An aggressive and successful fundraiser, Tyler spearheaded significant facility upgrade campaigns at Shepherd and Albright. At Wesleyan, he launched the Corporate Partner Program, the Letterman’s Club, and the Hank Ellis Golf Classic, which raised more than$75,000 annually for Wesleyan athletics. Tyler was an active board member in the United Way of the Eastern Panhandle, serving as campaign chairman from 2006-08 and raising more than $3 million.
Tyler earned a bachelor of arts in history and a master’s degree in education from The College of William and Mary. He was a guard on the basketball team at Division I William and Mary, where he played against all-time greats Len Bias and David Robinson.
Tyler is an avid reader and a Civil War enthusiast. He and his wife, Dawn, have two children –son Jordan, 14, and daughter Logan, 10.