Mia Self, assistant professor of theatre at Lenoir-Rhyne University, has been elected to serve on the Board of Directors of the North Carolina Theatre Conference.
The North Carolina Theatre Conference (NCTC) is a non-profit organization headquartered in Winston-Salem, NC. The mission of NCTC is to improve and enhance the environment for quality theatre in NC through service, leadership and advocacy. The organization’s membership includes professional theatres, community theatres, colleges, K-12 schools, theatrical businesses, and individual artists. NCTC produces several major events throughout the year, including the NCTC High School and Middle School Play Festivals, the NCTC College Unified Auditions for High School Seniors, and the NCTC Producing Theatre Gathering. The service organization also provides scholarships, professional development opportunities and job/audition listings.
The NCTC Board of Directors is a diverse group that represents the organization’s membership. Board members work to promote the organization, further its programs, and solicit resources. Mia Self joins an impressive group of leaders that includes Ron Law (Theatre Charlotte), Andrew Gall (Parkway Playhouse), Vito Abate (Independent Artist), Connie Mahan (PlayMakers Repertory Company), Judy Dove (Martin Magnet Middle School), Adam Faw (Pinecrest High School), Sidney Horton (Children’s Theatre of Charlotte), Andrew Rush (Triad Stage), Michelle Long (Charlotte Christian School), and Maggie Miller (Cape Fear Academy).
NCTC Executive Director Angie Hays says, “Each year we look to identify new board members, by recruiting individuals that are leaders in their community, strong advocates of the theatre field, and active participants in NCTC programming. With this new group, we have struck gold! We are looking forward to much success under their leadership.”
Lenoir-Rhyne University’s 2010-2011 Visiting Writers Series will feature a variety of authors, including recently named U.S. Poet Laureate W.S. Merwin, best-selling author David Baldacci and Little Read author Deborah Wiles. The series schedule is as follows.
• “An Evening of Poetry and Irish Music” will be held at 7 p.m. Sept. 16 in the P.E. Monroe Auditorium. Three poets will read from and discuss their works. They are Joan McBreen of Sligo, Ireland; Cathy Smith Bowers, 2010 Poet Laureate of North Carolina; and Rhett Iseman Trull, the LRU Visiting Poet-in-Residence in the spring of 2011. The reading will be followed by a public reception with Irish music and book signing in the auditorium lobby.
• “An Evening with A.J. Jacobs” will be at 7 p.m. Sept. 30 in the P.E. Monroe Auditorium. Jacobs’ best-selling book, “The Year of Living Biblically,” is the 2010 Summer Read for LRU first-year students.
• “An Evening with Luis Alberto Urrea” will be at 7 p.m. Oct. 7 in the Belk Centrum. Urrea is a 2005 Pulitzer Prize finalist for non-fiction and a member of the Latino Literature Hall of Fame. “The Devil’s Highway,” his 2004 non-fiction account of a group of Mexican immigrants lost in the Arizona desert, won the Lannan Literary Award and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and the Pacific Rim Kiriyama Prize.
W.S. Merwin, who was named U.S. Poet Laureate on July 1, will give a free, public reading at Lenoir-Rhyne University on Nov. 2 as part of the university’s 2010-2011 Visiting Writers Series.
The Poet Laureate is appointed annually by the Librarian of Congress and serves from October to May. James H. Billington, librarian of congress, said, “William Merwin’s poems are often profound and, at the same time, accessible to a vast audience. He leads us upstream from the flow of everyday things in life to half-hidden headwaters of wisdom about life itself.”
During his or her term, the U.S. Poet Laureate seeks to raise the national consciousness to a greater appreciation of the reading and writing of poetry.
Merwin will discuss his work and read from his poetry at 7 p.m. Nov. 2 in the Belk Centrum on the Lenoir-Rhyne University campus.
During a 60-year writing career, Merwin has received nearly every major literary award. He is a two-time winner of the Pulitzer Prize, in 2009 for “The Shadow of Sirius” and in 1971 for “The Carriers of Ladders.”
Born in 1927, Merwin showed an early interest in language and music, writing hymns for his father, a Presbyterian minister. He studied poetry at Princeton and, in 1952, his first book, “A Mask for Janus,” was selected by W.H. Auden for the Yale Series of Younger Poets Award.
The author of more than 30 books of poetry and prose, Merwin’s influence on American poetry is profound. Often noted by critics is his decision, in the 1960s, to relinquish the use of punctuation. “I had come to feel that punctuation stapled the poems to the page,” Merwin wrote in his introduction to “The Second Four Books of Poems.” “Whereas I wanted the poems to evoke the spoken language, and wanted the hearing of them to be essential to taking them in.” (more…)
Kids in College, Lenoir-Rhyne University’s summer enrichment program for gifted children, is now in session.
The theme for this year’s K-5 program is “Investigations of the Mind.” Each teacher chooses his or her own activities to investigate. For example, one class was studying Greek mythology. During class, the students were cutting up apples and oranges to make ambrosia, the “food of the gods.”
Another class was studying human anatomy. The kindergarten through second-grade students had drawn life-sized pictures of themselves on large sheets of paper. Then, they placed pictures of different organs on the top of their drawings.
In another class, third through fifth-graders were using the sun’s energy to cook food. They had built solar ovens using either pizza boxes or shoeboxes, aluminum foil and plastic wrap.
Inside the solar ovens were mini pizzas, nachos and s’mores. With outside temperatures in the high 90s, the cheese, chocolate and marshmallows were starting to melt shortly after noon.
The popular elementary program was expanded this year to include middle school students. This year, the summer camps were also lengthened to run from 8:30 a.m. to 3 p.m., with lunch served in the university cafeteria. For more information about Kids in College at Lenoir-Rhyne, go to http://edu.lr.edu/kidsincollege.
Katie Turner, a sophomore at Lenoir-Rhyne University, will be doing more in the coming year than attending classes and hanging out with friends. The Richmond, Va., resident will also be reigning as Miss Teen Virginia.
She received the title in April and will compete in the Miss Teen United States Pageant in Las Vegas, Nev., in July. For the next year, she will also make appearances across the state of Virginia, promoting her platform, Donate Life — Organ and Tissue Donation.
It was an easy choice for Turner to support the Donate Life organization, which promotes organ and tissue donation. “This organization affected me personally when I received tissue from the local tissue bank to repair a torn ligament in my foot,” she said.
Turner is a health and exercise science major at Lenoir-Rhyne and plans to earn her master’s degree in athletic training from LRU. Afterward, she plans to attend Virginia Commonwealth University and earn a doctorate in physical therapy.
She began competing in pageants her junior year of high school and has participated in about eight pageants. Last year, she was third runner-up in the Miss Teen Virginia United States pageant. This year, she won the competition.
She competed in the categories of personal interview with the judges, swimsuit, evening gown and on-stage question. She won both the swimsuit and evening gown categories.
Her title carries with it the opportunity to represent Virginia at the national Miss Teen United States Pageant as well as modeling opportunities and gifts from pageant sponsors. (more…)
Fourteen N.C. Teaching Fellows from Lenoir-Rhyne University recently returned from an eight-day study trip to Europe.
The students and four chaperones met with their counterparts at the University of Magdeburg-Stendal in what was formerly part of East Germany. They also visited elementary and secondary school classrooms in Germany.
The students who participated in the trip, and their hometowns, are as follows: Desirae Ball, Mooresville; Krysten Bolick, Conover; Tyler Bumgarner, Taylorsville; Aaron Campbell, Roxboro; Leia DeWald, Washignton; Sarah Grier, Moooresville; Kelley Hensley, Asheville; Brittany Keaton, Tobaccoville; Brian Mulligan, Claremont; Leah Staton, Cherryville; Chase Tutttle, Winston-Salem; Laura Waller, Sneads Ferry; Stephanie Watts, Statesville; Kimberly Wood, Elkin.
The trip is part of a recently formed partnership between Lenoir-Rhyne University and the German university that provides for student exchanges as well as short-term visits. Three students from the University of Magdeburg-Stendal were students at LRU last fall.
Dr. Joyce Davis, director of the Teaching Fellows at LRU, said research and global education are important parts of the university program. She plans to continue the partnership with the University of Magdeburg-Stendal by taking each class of L-R Teaching Fellows to Germany during their junior year. (more…)
The Rev. Dr. Pat Earle, a part-time religion professor at Lenoir-Rhyne University, thought President Barack Obama could use some encouragement.
So she wrote him a letter. Two months later, she was surprised to receive a hand-written response signed by the president.
Earle is an Episcopal priest at Church of Our Savior in western Lincoln County. Her letter compares serving as president of the country to being pastor of a church. “This is a letter of encouragement and affirmation,” her letter begins. “As a clergy person, I see that both of us have been called to a work. I believe my call was spiritual. You were most certainly called by the people of the United States to lead us into a new day.”
The letter continues: “For clergy, the first year in a parish or congregation is something of a honeymoon, but the second one often is a time of criticism and censure as if all that was overlooked in the honeymoon year is saved up and seems to explode on the scene. … If one can hang in till the third year things seem to get better, and it usually takes about five years to see the dreams for the parish or congregation come to some kind of fruition. If this is also applicable to the presidency, then you must win the next term.” (more…)
Nissan of Hickory is helping two Lenoir-Rhyne University Teaching Fellows raise money for a study trip to Costa Rica this July. The two students are Desirae Ball of Mooresville and Kelley Hensley of Asheville.
The car dealership will donate $1 for each person who clicks the “like” button on the company’s Facebook page between now and the end of June. So far, the promotion has raised approximately $200 out of a maximum of $1,000. The students are now encouraging everyone to help them realize the maximum donation from the dealership. You may find the Nissan of Hickory Facebook page here.
Trey Colbert, business development center manager at the dealership, said the company is very involved in using social media as well as community outreach. Nissan of Hickory approached Lenoir-Rhyne about a possible partnership and learned about the students’ trip. They felt this would be a good way to help two deserving students, he said.
Ball and Hensley plan to conduct a major research project comparing how student learning is assessed in three different countries: the United States, Costa Rica and Germany. They participated in an earlier Teaching Fellows trip to Germany. Conducting such a research project, and study abroad, are both important parts of the N.C. Teaching Fellows Program at Lenoir-Rhyne. Dr. Janet Painter, professor of education, and Dr. Rand Brandes, Martin Luther Stevens Professor of English, served as mentors for this project.
Both students are rising seniors who plan to teach in the elementary grades. Hensley is a student assistant for the university’s Visiting Writers Series and Ball is a student assistant in the university’s Occupational Therapy Program. Both share an interest in the fine arts, and this is one reason they selected this research topic.
They feel that there is often too much emphasis on standardized tests to measure student learning. Their project will study how “authentic assessments” are used in the three countries. These assessments use such things as community projects, fine arts displays, and science experiments to display subject mastery.
The three countries have very different educational systems. Germany is known for an academically differentiated structure and its heavy use of open-ended types of questioning. According to the UNESCO Institute for Statistics, 22.8 percent of government spending in Costa Rica goes to education, and that country has one of the most literate populations in Latin America.
Ball and Hensley wrote, “With such large differences from the schooling system in the United States, our research within these two countries will provide us with a wide context of varying assessment strategies.” (more…)
Twelve students from Lenoir-Rhyne University participated along with more than 5,000 peers from 340 schools on five continents in the 2010 National Model United Nations-NY conference.
The LRU students participating this year were Caitlin Hensley, Brendan Chaney, Brian Mulligan, Kyle Butler-May, Carolina Ruiz, Jeremy Buchanan, Jamie Fisher, Jake Stuckey, Crystal Howton, Harrison Smith, Kellie Medley, Nikki Merritt.
Opening Ceremony remarks were given by Kiyotaka Akasaka, under-secretary-general for communications and public information, along with Susan E. Rice, U.S. permanent representative to the United Nations. Rice extolled the United Nations as “the only institution where 192 nations come together, the way you have today, to advance global security and solve collective problems.”
She added, “At its best, the UN bolsters security, helps to rebuild shattered societies, lays the foundations of democracy and development, and establishes conditions in which people can live in greater dignity and mutual respect.” (more…)
Mia Self, assistant professor of theatre at Lenoir-Rhyne University, has been elected to serve on the Board of Directors of the North Carolina Theatre Conference.
