Presentations and Panels
  
Travis Malone, Sally Shedd  and four VWU students (above) presented a workshop and research on "Team Building through Improvisation" to 80 high school and middle school students and teachers at the annual Virginia Theatre Association conference.
 
Kathy Merlock Jackson  participated on a panel titled "Publishing Opportunities in Popular Culture and American Culture Studies" at the Midwest Popular Culture Association Conference in St. Louis, Oct. 18-22. She also attended the Popular Culture of the South conference in Savannah to attend the Popular Culture Association midyear Governing Board meeting and represent The Journal of American Culture.
 
Takeyra Collins , Kathy Stolley and Robin Takacs  presented a Modified Pecha Kucha on "Ten Steps to an On-Campus Winter Homeless Shelter" at the Association for Applied & Clinical Sociology Annual National Conference in Cleveland, Ohio.
 
Jill Sturts (above, second from left) and  Takeyra Collins (above, right) presented "Its a Win-Win: Strategies for Internship Success (Seekers and Supervisors)" alongside VWU graduates Asiah Allen and Dare Wright, at the Virginia Recreation & Parks Society Annual Conference in Hampton, Virginia.

Takeyra Collins presented "Academic Service Learning: 'Homelessness' as an Intervention for Risk Factors of Stigmatization."
 
Stephen Leist served as a panelist for "Transition to Tipasa: Insights from the First Six Months," discussing pros and cons of OCLC's interlibrary loan software, as part of the annual Virginia Library Association conference.

Lisa Lyon Payne moderated a peer-reviewed research panel at the College Media Association conference in Dallas. The panel is one of two annual sessions she organizes as the CMA research chair. 
November 2017
 
Dan Margolies  presented "U.S. Jurisdictional Assertions in Submerged Lands and the New Spatialized Regimes of the Sea, 1945-1958" to the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations (SHAFR) Annual Meeting in Arlington, Virginia in June. He also served as panel commentator and chair for the panel "The Spaces of Interwar Internationalism" at SHAFR.
 
Terry Lindvall was the keynote speaker for the Southern California C. S. Lewis Society 2017 Conference, with four talks on "C. S. Lewis' Tree of Life," "The Chestertonian Roots of C. S. Lewis," "Lewis' Leaves of Laughter"; and the "Cultural Fruit of C. S. Lewis." 
 

Maynard Schaus (above, left)  presented a poster "Fulfilling an Academic Mission by Building as a Teaching Tool: Virginia Wesleyan University's Greer Environmental Sciences Center" at the Association for the Advancement of Sustainability in Higher Education conference in San Antonio. Soraya Bartol, Joe Atkins (also pictured) and Michelle Amt coauthored the poster.
 
At the Association for Applied and Clinical Sociology annual conference in Cleveland, Ohio, Kathy Stolley organized a Publishing Your Book panel and an Author Meets Critics session, was installed as AACS Vice-President, and was presented the Robert Ezra Park Award for Sociological Practice announced earlier this summer.

Doug Kennedy was elected to a second term on the Council on Accreditation of Park, Recreation, Tourism and Related Professions at the National Congress of the National Recreation and Park Association in New Orleans, LA. While there he presented a session titled "Academic Accreditation Standards for Park and Recreation Curricula."

Doug Kennedy also presented a session titled "The good, the bad, and the potentially ugly: Recreation in 2025" at the Annual Conference of the Virginia Recreation and Park Society in Hampton, VA.

Sue Erickson presented a lightning round at the Virginia Library Association annual conference in Norfolk .Alain Gabon presented a paper titled "Jihad in France" as part of a panel on postcolonial perspectives in Francophone Studies at the 2017 Mountain Interstate Foreign language Conference (MIFLC) in Wilmington, North Carolina.

In Print


Dan Margolies  produced the CD Best of the Festival of Texas Fiddling for Texas Folklife, Austin Texas.
 
Dan Margolies  published a book chapter titled "Reimagined Old Time Music Cultures in the Trainhopping Punk Rock South," in Shawn Chandler Bingham and Lindsey Freeman, eds., The Bohemian South (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2017).
 
William Pruitt's  research on laws that criminalize denial of the Holocaust and other genocides has been published in the most recent issue of the  International Journal of Criminal Justice Sciences. The article is titled "Understanding genocide denial legislation: A comparative analysis."
 
Denise Wilkinson's article , "Teaching Dilemmas: Understanding the Concept of 'Slope' Through Graphs and Storytelling" was published in the fall 2017 edition (Volume 44, No. 1) of Virginia Mathematics Teacher Journal.
 
Scott Miller writes regular higher education columns for The Virginian-Pilot, Huffington Post, College Planning and Management and Enrollment Manager. He is the co-executive editor of the online presidential thought series " President to President ."  He authors a daily blog,  Dialogue , which is linked on the front page of the Virginia Wesleyan website.

Other Accomplishments 
 
Kathleen Casey, Leslie Caughell, Terry Lindvall, Taryn Myers, Timothy O'Rourke, Vic Townsend  and Craig Wansink  are teaching this semester as part of the Lifelong Learning Institute- a new partnership with Westminster-Canterbury which brings Virginia Wesleyan faculty to the campus of Westminster-Canterbury to teach courses. Programming for this initiative has been coordinated by  Ben Fraser , the newly appointed Westminster-Canterbury Fellow for Religious Studies and Lifelong Learning and adjunct in the Communication and Religious Studies departments. Several courses will be taught each semester, and roughly half will be on faith-related topics.

Takeyra Collins  was awarded a $10,500 Health & Wellness Community grant from the Hampton Roads Community Foundation for the "GOALS R US" project. "GOALS R US" (Get Out & Lower Sugars through Resiliency & Unyielding Strength) is a new program developed in collaboration with VWU, ODU and CHKD's Diabetes Center for youth with Type 1 Diabetes to expand health literacy.
 
Paul Ewell  was selected by the Virginia Maritime Association to serve another term as Chair of its Education & Training Committee. Paul Ewell was selected to serve on the board of the local chapter of APICS, the Association for Operations Management.
 
Jason Squinobal  performed on saxophone at Norfolk State University as a guest soloist for NSU's Wesley Westminster Campus Ministry annual benefit concert. Squinobal performed two solos selections, and three selections with the gospel choir from St. Mark RZUA Church.
 
During the Lighthouse D.C. Day bus trip, Kathy Stolley took a group of students from the Epidemics and Society class to the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Maryland for a tour of the National Library of Medicine and NIH campus and Clinical Center.
 
 
Kathy Stolley (above, left)  and Takeyra Collins (above, right)  co-advised Virginia Wesleyan's Sociology/Criminal Justice student team-- Claude Clarke III, Grace Crawford, Brenna Gonzales and Allison Heitsman-- who  won the "Client's Choice Award" in the Client Problem Solving Competition held at the Association for Applied and Clinical Sociology annual conference in Cleveland, Ohio.

Community Engagement
 
Bill McConnell's  Education 329 students developed and implemented a STEM activity entitled, "Force, Mass, & Marshmallows" at Greenbrier Intermediate's STEM & M Night. Parents and their children took part in an activity that explored the relationship between force and mass. A student reflected, "I was surprised at the different ideas the kids had about why the larger marshmallow went farther. It made me realize that even when students might have the "right" answer, the thinking behind it could be flawed. It is important to let students do more than just provide a quick answer."
Technology Corner
Preparing Future Educators to Use Technology












While some courses use technology to support students' understanding of content, for other courses, the content is technology itself. This is the case for VWU's INST 103: Applied Technology for Innovative Instruction taught by Professor Bill McConnell.

In this course, students cover topics such as word processing, collaborative software (google docs, sheets, classroom, forms, etc.), blogging, working with scientific equipment, creating original educational videos, coding, 3D printing and using assistive technology. Some innovative student projects have resulted from the class.

Beginning last spring and scheduled again for this spring, VWU students in INST 203 and students in a similar course at the University of Mary Washington collaborate to create a cross-river collaborative mini-blog using Tumblr. VWU students use various technologies to collect basic water quality data from the Elizabeth River, while students at UMW do the same with the Rappahannock River. 

This activity not only engages students with content represented in the K-12 Virginia Standards of Learning, but also creates a model for collaborative learning through technology these future educators could bring to their own classrooms.

Students are also creating online lessons for K-12 students at Tidewater Collegiate Academy. As part of these lessons, VWU students create a game that relates to the content or skill they hope to teach students using the programming software Scratch. A VWU elementary education student created, "Catching Apples" so her would-be Kindergarten students can practice counting while catching apples in a basket.

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