Congratulations to the recipient of the 2019-2020 Sabbatical Awards:
Mayhill Fowler,Associate Professor; Director of SPREES, Stetson’s Program in Russian, East European and Eurasian Studies: Theater on the Frontlines of Socialism: The Military-Entertainment Complex in Ukraine, 1940s-2000s
Mary Pollock, Professor of English: Theater on the Frontlines of Socialism: The Military-Entertainment Complex in Ukraine, 1940s-2000s
Christopher Bell, Associate Professor of Religious Studies: Dorje Shugden and the Yellow Book
Judith Burnett, Associate Professor of Counselor Education: Panua Partners in Hope: Curriculum Development and Expansion of Psychosocial Programs in Naivaisha, Kenya
Pamela Cappas-Toro, Associate Professor of World Languages and Cultures: Co-Teaching Spanish with Incarcerated Instructors in a Men’s Maximum Security Prison: Using Communicative and Critical Pedagogy Approaches to Language Acquisition
Roslyn Crowder, Assistant Professor of Biology: Confirming Yaupon Holly Anticancer Properties
Chris Ferguson, Professor of Psychology: Cross-National Predictors of Violent Crime
Jennifer Foo, Professor of Finance, School of Business: Scholarly Research and Fulbright Teaching (Poland)
Krista Franco, Associate Professor of Theatre Arts: Endstation Theatre Company: An Oral History Project
Ten years ago, we introduced an annual recognition for outstanding faculty advisors – the Faculty Advisor of the Year Award. In addition to teaching students to navigate their academic success, faculty advisors play a critical role in helping students explore, develop and achieve their academic and career goals. Students were invited to show their appreciation for their advising experience by nominating faculty advisors for the Faculty Advisor of the Year Award. This year we received a record number of nominations indicating how heavily students have leaned on their advisors.
The 2021-2022 recipient has been nominated numerous times over the years including multiple nominations this year. The nominators have shared that this faculty advisor is very patient, attentive, kind, and knowledgeable. This person also shows their advisees that they care about their personal and professional growth. One nominator shared that “it’s been a privilege working closely with my advisor throughout the last year and she never fails to impress me with her dedication and genuine care about her students. She had pushed me to pursue my interests and regularly checks in on me and my progress. I am grateful to have her!” Another student stated that, “there were several times that I felt overwhelmed and wanted to quit, but she talked through the challenges I was having and helped me to unpack solutions. She treated me with respect and dignity and helped me to see that she genuinely cares about me as a person..” These students’ statements are a testimony to the powerful relationships being developed in the faculty advising process at Stetson, as well as this particular advisor’s commitment to supporting students.
In recognition of her exemplary leadership and service to students and the university, I would like to recognize Dr. Jelena Petrovic as Advisor of the Year.
Jelena Petrovic
Associate Professor of Communication and Media Studies
Dr. Petrovic is one of the co-founders of Community Education Project, a higher education in prison program in Tomoka Correctional Institution, in Central Florida.
The grant, Seeding Justice: Collaborative Learning Landscapes in Carceral Spaces, was made possible by the foundation’s The Future of Higher Learning in Prison initiative. CEP is the first recipient at Stetson to receive a grant from The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.
In 2015, a Journal of Critical Scholarship on Higher Education and Student Affairs research article titled “Higher Education in an Era of Mass Incarceration: Possibility Under Constraint” by Erin L. Castro, PhD, et al, showed that among the more than 2.2 million individuals behind bars in the United States, only 6% have access to formal postsecondary educational opportunities.
Since its inception in 2015, CEP has been committed to offering high-quality liberal-arts education to incarcerated students, and for the past three years has been teaching incarcerated students credit-bearing courses and providing them with additional learning, research and teaching opportunities.
Pamela Cappas-Toro, PhD
“The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation grant will benefit incarcerated students by providing them with an opportunity to be more fully engaged in food studies, learn about planting and harvesting produce in an outdoor classroom,” said Pamela Cappas-Toro, PhD, who is one of CEP’s co-directors and associate professor of world languages and cultures at Stetson.
Besides Cappas-Toro, CEP is led by co-directors Andy Eisen, PhD, visiting assistant professor of history; Melinda Hall, PhD, associate professor of philosophy; and Jelena Petrovic, PhD, associate professor of communication and media studies.
The grant will allow CEP to offer five new courses, including two food studies classes on sustainable food production that explore race, class and gender in the food system, two humanities courses that are aimed toward food studies, and a special topics class on race, food and nation in the Americas.
The grant also will provide CEP with an opportunity to create the garden, an outdoor classroom, and employ a garden manager and postdoctoral fellow in the humanities.
Both positions will have an integral part in the outdoor classroom component, which will include collaboration with CEP faculty and students and a community garden learning landscape with heirloom or historically significant crops such as Seminole pumpkins, Everglades tomatoes, sweet potatoes, cowpeas, Alabama red okra, African runner peanut and Florida broadleaf mustard greens.
Sarah Cramer, PhD
“A food studies education is wonderful because it allows the Community Education Project students at the Tomoka Correctional Institution to develop the skills and access the resources to analyze and critique something as fundamental in our lives as food,” explained Sarah Cramer, PhD, visiting assistant professor in sustainable food systems at Stetson, who is teaching two of the grant-funded food studies courses.
The grant monies also will be used for a second edition of CEP’s literary journal More Than Our Blues, which is edited by Denise Yezbick, PhD, who taught two courses at TCI before CEP’s program became accredited, and data analysis and assessment conducted by Steven Smallpage, PhD, assistant professor of political science at Stetson.
Steven Smallpage, PhD
“My job is running the data analysis and assessment to translate all of the excellent, hard work that the Community Education Project’s faculty, staff and students have contributed to the program into a language that helps everyone better visualize its return on investment,” said Smallpage. “By doing that, we will understand which interventions and initiatives work and which ones need to be tweaked along with the process for making those adjustments.”
CEP will be collecting a steady stream of student survey responses and reports from its faculty and staff on activities, perceptions and overall satisfaction. CEP students also will be continuously updated on the program’s progress.
One of the grants seeks to increase the number of professional counselors from underrepresented populations.
The Counselor Education Department will be providing students at Stetson University and other universities with specialized mental-health counseling training, thanks to two research grants totaling $2,764,570. The grant awards are the largest combined sum received by a department at Stetson.
Spiritual And Religious Competencies Project (SRCP)
SRCP is designed to equip mental-health professionals with the competencies for addressing the religious and spiritual dimensions in people’s lives.
The SRCP grant goals are:
Generate methods and tools for defining, studying and assessing religious and spiritual competencies.
Establish methods for training mental-health professionals in religious and spiritual competencies.
Synergize diverse stakeholders with a commitment to promoting religious and spiritual competencies.
Fuel the momentum for systemic and cultural changes in ways that religious and spiritual competencies are addressed in mental-health care.
Stetson’s three-year subaward is $1,724,985, which is the largest private foundation grant in the university’s history to support a single-investigator faculty research project.
The “Research in Religious and Spiritual Competencies in Clinical Training” research project will be funded by Stetson’s subaward.
Jesse Fox, PhD
“The project was born out of a vision to bring the four major mental health disciplines, which are psychology, counseling, social work and marriage and family therapy, together and create religious and spiritual competence models for training and research,” said Jesse Fox, PhD, principal investigator for the Stetson research project.
Religious and spiritual competence is a holistic framework for training mental health professionals to recognize and be responsive to pious dimensions of their clients’ lives.
Fox and his colleagues Joseph Currier, PhD, professor of psychology at the University of South Alabama, who is the principal investigator for the entire research project, and Cassandra Vieten, PhD, executive director of the John W. Brick Mental Health Foundation, will develop and implement funded studies on religious and spiritual competence during the next three years. Stetson also will host two summits with Currier, Vieten and other top-research clinicians in the mental-health field to catalyze a new research and clinical training culture.
“Religion and spirituality offer people strong resources for living healthy lives,” added Fox, who is an associate professor of counselor education at Stetson. “Religion and spirituality help people cope more effectively with challenges and crises and provide pathways toward the ultimate meaning in the human experience.
“The goal is to bring an openness to training mental-health counselors to be more responsive to their clients and provide them with the knowledge to create environments that are characterized by deep compassion, acceptance and wisdom in navigating the many challenges people face from cradle to the grave,” said Fox.
Hatters Behavioral Health Coalition (HBHC) Program
The four-year program will provide counselor-education graduate students with an opportunity to counsel underserved populations by melding behavioral and medical health in an interdisciplinary approach to client care during a 12-month internship. The interns also will receive a $10,000 federal stipend for their living expenses.
“This grant will significantly benefit our students now and in the future,” said Page Thanasiu, PhD, HBHC Program director. “The interns will receive specialized training and experience in interdisciplinary behavioral health-care approaches. They also will develop an area of expertise that provides considerable advantage when seeking employment after graduation.”
Jacqueline Williams, PhD
The HBHC Program Internship Coordinator Jacqueline Williams, PhD, assistant professor of practice in counselor education at Stetson, will be providing the grant-funded interns with assistance throughout the program.
The HRSA/BHWET grant goals are:
Train counselors to competently work with medically underserved populations.
Increase the number of professional counselors from underrepresented populations.
Increase the number of organizations utilizing an interdisciplinary approach to patient care that includes both behavioral and primary health care.
“It’s important that counselors and medical practitioners understand the ways in which a person’s culture impacts how they navigate and resolve an illness, stress and other challenges,” added Thanasiu, who is the Counselor Education Department chair. “Clients will have the best chance of obtaining success when mental-health counselors suggest treatments and coping strategies that align with clients’ values and beliefs.”
Another grant component is training programs that teach students to counsel adolescents, children and transitional-aged youth who are at risk for behavioral-health disorders. The Counselor Education Department met the criterion with its play therapy and childhood trauma courses.
The HBHC Program also will be teaming up with Stetson’s Health Sciences and Psychology departments. The collaboration will prepare students for medical and health-focused professions.
“The collaborative efforts by the Counselor Education, Health Sciences and Psychology departments will provide three separate student populations with a chance to learn about the importance of team-based care and how they can be active participants in this approach within their own career fields,” said Thanasiu.
The HBHC Program will have an interdisciplinary, advisory council, comprised of representatives from diverse health-care fields that will guide program development and monitor effectiveness. Partnerships with AdventHealth and other experiential training sites also will provide patients with integrated, behavioral and primary health care.
The Fairwinds Foundation presents the grant to Stetson University on March 3 in Orlando to, holding the check, left to right, Tim Stiles, executive director for Career and Professional Development; Board of Trustees Vice Chair Steve Alexander ’85 B.BA; and Jeff Ulmer, vice president of Development and Alumni Engagement.
The Fairwinds Foundation presented Stetson University with a $23,651 grant that will help provide 30 students with career training and mentoring in order to successfully secure an internship or job.
The grant matches a $23,651 grant from the Jessie Ball duPont Fund for Stetson’s EDGE 2020 program, which “focuses on accelerating social capital and success for 30 students with limited incomes,” said Tim Stiles, executive director of Career and Professional Development at Stetson.
The EDGE program is open to first-year students through seniors. It will begin May 6-8 with a three-day “Orlando Bound” excursion that will include meeting with various employers, attending networking events, and receiving online and in-person financial literacy training and development.
“The program will continue with one-on-one and small group mentoring for eight to 12 months — until every participant uses their training and contacts to successfully secure an internship or job,” Stiles said.
If you are interested in applying for the program, contact Career and Professional Development at [email protected] or 386-822-7315.
Walk into Alan Green’s International Economics class this fall and students will be geeked out in goggle-like, headset contraptions, looking as if they stepped out of some sci-fi film.
But Green’s students actually will be stepping into the world of virtual reality, thanks to a grant awarded to the Stetson Chair of Economics.
Alan Green, assistant professor of economics, receives VR Grant from Nearpod.
Green, Ph.D., assistant professor and chair of Stetson’s Economics Department, is one of just 50 instructors at elementary, secondary and post-secondary schools around the world to be awarded as part of the inaugural Virtual Reality Grant Program founded by Nearpod. The education technology company develops digital learning tools, virtual reality and interactive content for use in classrooms.
Green, who also is director of Africana Studies at Stetson, will have access to Nearpod VR headsets and more than 25 VR-based lesson plans. The grant also includes professional development, one-on-one support services and a Nearpod license for the university.
As a teacher and research economist, Green focuses on international development, trade and poverty, but he also conducts research on effective pedagogy. That research led him to use a Nearpod teaching app this past year.
“I can use their app and put questions in it and build in presentations, quizzes, activities, all sorts of things,” Green said. “During class I’ll be lecturing, but then I’ll mix in questions that students answer on their phones, laptops or whatever. Rather than them passively sitting there, they’re being forced to hear something and answer a question about it. So they have to think about it, process it and hopefully understand it.”
When Nearpod announced it was accepting applications for its new virtual reality grant program, Green readily saw the potential for use in his International Economics and Essentials of Economics II classes.
“Nearpod is pushing what they call virtual reality field trips,” Green said. The goggle-like VR headsets use video, audio and even interactive capabilities so that “you can take a virtual trip somewhere. My field research is in economic development, studying poor countries around the world and how they can grow. So we can take a trip to a country in sub-Saharan Africa and get a really strong visual of a village, what people live like, what their houses are like. That makes a lot stronger impression than me just giving students numbers on GDP per capita.”
Along with the benefits of virtual reality field trips, Green’s grant application also proposed that VR technology could vastly enhance online teaching.
“I’ve done some online teaching and didn’t particularly enjoy it because there’s a separation,” Green said. “You’re not interacting with students in real time. With virtual reality, we could have a class and physically be anywhere in the world, but then we all put on our headsets and we come into a virtual classroom and we can teach and learn that way.
“One of the valuable things Stetson offers is small classes and interaction with professors. Virtual reality online learning could be a lot closer to the classroom experience.”
Green said he will “get to play around with the headsets this summer and see what we can do. This fall it’s not going to be in every class, it’s not going to be full time.” But he plans to “find instances where students can take a virtual trip during class.”
More than 300 schools applied for the Nearpod grants, which were awarded to schools across the United States as well as in Nigeria, Japan and Spain.
The Stetson Community Education Project was awarded a $210,000 grant and will expand classes for incarcerated men in Tomoka Correctional Institution, as well as begin offering college credit for courses this fall.
Assistant Professor Pamela Cappas-Toro is a co-founder of Stetson’s Community Education Project at Tomoka Correctional Institution in Daytona Beach.
The Laughing Gull Foundation approved a grant for $70,000 a year for three years for the Community Education Project (CEP), which has offered classes in the Daytona Beach prison since 2015, said Pamela Cappas-Toro, Ph.D., assistant professor of World Languages and Cultures (Spanish) at Stetson.
Beginning this fall, the project will offer one course each semester for non-degree-bearing college credit. Twenty students are expected to enroll this fall and that number will grow to 30 men next fall.
The grant will pay to hire a project coordinator, who will tutor incarcerated students and serve as a liaison with the state Department of Corrections, Cappas-Toro said. The grant also will provide textbooks and school supplies, support students’ emerging scholarship and creative course projects, and add a computer lab for the men, who currently do the coursework by hand.
Andrew Eisen, adjunct professor of history at Stetson, teaches a class on the Cuban Missile Crisis in Tomoka Correctional Institution.
“This is going to mean an expansion of our program at Tomoka,” said Andrew Eisen, Ph.D., adjunct professor of history at Stetson and one of the founders of the program. “It will be small, incremental growth to ensure the quality of our program.”
Eisen and Cappas-Toro were involved in a similar prison-education program at the University of Illinois when they were graduate students there. After the married couple arrived at Stetson, they started the program at Tomoka Correctional Institution with Jelena Petrovic, Ph.D., Stetson assistant professor of Communication and Media Studies. The following year, Melinda Hall, Ph.D., assistant professor of Philosophy at Stetson, joined the effort. Currently, the four professors co-direct the project.
Since then, more than 25 Stetson professors have taught classes, led workshops and provided guest lectures to the students in the prison. Subjects have included history, Spanish, philosophy, mathematics, communication, computer sciences and English. They have been supported in part by the Nina B. Hollis Institute for Educational Reform and its Research Impact Award.
The program received its original seed funding through the Hollis Renaissance Fund, which supports new programs in hopes that their success would then be further supported with grants from outside organizations. This is exactly what happened with CEP, said Stetson President Wendy B. Libby, Ph.D.
Stetson President Wendy B. Libby has given a guest lecture at Tomoka Correctional Institution.
“Teaching at the Tomoka Correctional Institution fits squarely into our mission,” said Libby, who has been a guest lecturer at the prison. “That our faculty have been so enormously supportive underscores how clearly this work aligns with Stetson’s values.”
Stetson’s undergraduate students do not visit the prison but have been involved in the program, interning in the CEP office on the DeLand campus and designing proposed logos for the project. Students in a Digital Arts class, taught by Brown Visiting Teacher Scholar Madison Creech, M.F.A., came up with the logos and sent videos of their presentations to the incarcerated students, who then provided feedback on the designs.
Assistant Professor Jelena Petrovic
“It is wonderful to see the academic efforts of Stetson students align with the work and community of our students at Tomoka. Stetson students in Creech’s class emphasized that the incarcerated men are part of the Stetson community, and this is precisely what we hope for,” said Hall.
“These programs are very much needed, especially in a state like Florida that has one of the highest prison populations in the country,” said Petrovic.
The Laughing Gull Foundation provides grants to increase access to credit-bearing college courses for incarcerated students, primarily in the South, according to its website. The Foundation awarded the grant to Stetson’s Community Education Project this month after visiting the DeLand campus and the prison classroom in February.
Assistant Professor Melinda Hall
“We are very excited to partner with Stetson University and we appreciate the inspiring work of the Community Education Program!” wrote Hez Norton, interim executive director of the Laughing Gull Foundation, in an email announcing the grant on June 12.
The Stetson organizers hope other faculty members continue to join the project. Already, Joshua Eckroth, Ph.D., assistant professor of Computer Science, has expressed interest in helping with setting up the prison computer lab.
“We’re able to draw on the expertise and the willingness and dedication of faculty members who have from day 1 helped us build this program, all as volunteers,” Eisen said.
Principal investigators: top left, Roslyn Crowder, PhD, associate professor of biology; top right, Holley Lynch, PhD, assistant professor of physics; bottom left, Heather Evans-Anderson, PhD, assistant professor in the Department of Health Sciences; bottom right: Lynn Kee, PhD, assistant professor of biology. Photo: Stetson University/Ciara Ocasio
By virtue of a Major Resource Instrumentation Grant from the National Science Foundation, Stetson is receiving $266,000 in funding to purchase an inverted fluorescent microscope system — capable of imaging over a wide range of living biological samples from subcellular structures to small organisms.
The microscope system will be used to engage undergraduate students across biology, health sciences and physics in superior training through faculty-mentored research projects, and promote the implementation of inquiry-based lab experiences for students in upper-level biology and physics courses.
Also, the system will provide a substantial foundation to support and enable fundamental pioneering research by junior faculty members, and foster sophisticated capstone research for seniors under the mentorship of faculty members committed to student training and advancing the participation of underrepresented and minority undergraduates in the sciences.
Microscopic image of HeLa cancer cells stained with chemical dyes to visualize the internal structures (red and green) and DNA (blue). Photo: Stetson University
Collectively, these invaluable experiences will promote scientific competency in students as they achieve a comprehensive range of career goals and contribute to the development of the next generation of scientists.
Highlights of the anticipated research: 1) tracking migrating cells in living tissues to link cellular and subcellular mechanisms to tissue-scale movements; 2) examining improperly located cell death proteins in malignant cells; 3) dissecting communication pathways that regulate cardiac myocyte cell proliferation and regeneration in Ciona intestinalis; 4) examining spatial organization and dynamics of iridescent marine bacteria; and 5) promoting education through use of CRISPR/Cas9 gene editing technology by undergraduates in a Genetics course to manipulate and label genes in order to visualize effects in living organisms.
“This really opens up new avenues of research at the cell and, especially, the subcell level at Stetson. We have a growing number of researchers who work with that scale in three departments. And it will allow students to use a research-grade microscope.”
Principal Investigator Holley Lynch, PhD, assistant professor of physics
Stetson’s Principal Investigator is Holley Lynch, PhD, assistant professor of physics. Co-Principal Investigators are Lynn Kee, PhD, assistant professor of biology; Roslyn Crowder, PhD, associate professor of biology; and Heather Evans-Anderson, PhD, assistant professor in the Department of Health Sciences.
“This really opens up new avenues of research at the cell and, especially, the subcell level at Stetson,” Lynch said. “We have a growing number of researchers who work with that scale in three departments. And it will allow students to use a research-grade microscope.”
Lynch noted that while some of Stetson’s science faculty/researchers need to see “very small things, such as look inside cells,” others need to see how cells behave over time. The new system, which is expected to arrive on campus later this fall, is “flexible,” she said.
Evans-Anderson agreed, commenting, “This kind of imaging will help all of us.”
In 2018, Kresge Foundation funds led to Stetson’s acquisition of an advanced stereo microscope, which effectively aids in the visualization of tissue layers and development of organisms. The new microscope system will deliver even greater power of magnification and capability to see inside cells, Evans-Anderson said, adding that extensive interdepartmental collaboration will result.
“I see this as a really good steppingstone. Having this equipment here enables us to apply for other kinds of grants that will fund our research and take our students to the next level,” Evans-Anderson concluded.
Notably, the NSF, with an annual budget of $8.1 billion (FY 2019), is the funding source for approximately 27% of the total federal budget for basic research conducted at U.S. colleges and universities.
