SPC director named chair-elect for state distance learning, student services council

Vicki Westergard

Vicki Westergard, St. Peterburg College’s Executive Director of eCampus and Web and Instructional Technology, was voted Chair-Elect for 2013-2014 at the May 21 meeting of the Florida Virtual Campus (FLVC) Members Council on Distance Learning and Student Services.

Westergard has been the SPC representative to the FLVC since it was created by the Florida Legislature in July 2012. Since 2005 she has served as the SPC representative to the Florida Distance Learning Consortium, one of four previously independent organizations that comprise the Florida Virtual Campus.

Each year the Member Council on Distance Learning and Student Services Chair rotates between a state college and a university representative. University of Central Florida representative Thomas Cavanagh, 2012-2013 Chair-Elect, will become the Chair in July for 2013-2014. Following the established rotation, Westergard will assume the Chair position in July 2014.

As Chair-Elect, Westergard will also serve on the Florida Virtual Campus Advisory Board until June 2015.

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Spotlight: Natural Sciences faculty Dan Schroeder

Dan Schroeder

Dan Schroeder was nominated as the St. Petersburg College Center of Excellence Teaching and Learning (CETL) Faculty Spotlight due to his efforts at SPC Downtown. He is an example of peer-to-peer mentoring on a collegiate level. Schroeder strives to increase access to difficult curriculum and provides tireless support to his students. He not only raises the bar of expectation for students but helps them reach their potential. His continued open access in the learning commons and hands on approach with his students helps drive his students to success.

Schroeder grew up in Ohio and because of carious career opportunities, has lived and worked in Toronto, Boston, Philadelphia, New York City, Atlanta and Chapel Hill.

He earned a B.S. in Business Marketing from Liberty University; a Doctor of Chiropractic (D.C.) from Life Chiropractic College; a M.A. in Bioethics and Medical Humanities from the University of South Florida, College of Medicine; a M.A. in Pastoral Theology from Barry University and a D.Min. from the Graduate Theological Foundation.

Prior to joining SPC, his career experience included more than 20 years in technology and health care.

After making a mid-life/mid-career change in order to complete his undergraduate degree, he came to SPC to complete his pre-chiropractic science requirements.

CETL caught up with Schroeder to learn how he became involved in Natural Science.

CETL: Which courses do you teach at SPC?

Schroeder: Human Anatomy; Human Anatomy & Physiology I & II, Lecture & Labs

CETL: In what modalities to you teach at SPC? (Face-to-face, Blended, or Online?)

Schroeder: Face-to-face

CETL: How did you get started in your field?

Schroeder: I discovered, or rather learned an important life lesson; that serving and helping others offers peace and fulfillment. That fork in the road led me to a career in healthcare as an individual provider, and as a chaplain in hospitals and hospices, and ultimately to return to St. Petersburg College, where the journey began 23 years ago.

CETL: What prepared you for your faculty role?

Schroeder: My journey in business, in healthcare, and in education has been about making a difference, and that journey has uniquely prepared me for what I am doing and where I am doing it; teaching at St. Petersburg College.

CETL: What new developments are happening in your field?

Schroeder: There is a paradigm shift taking place in all of education, certainly in the S.T.E.M. disciplines. Whether it is flipping the classroom, moving the needle, or making thinking visual, educators are integrating the best of pedagogy with technology to meet the students where they are.

CETL: What are your biggest challenges in preparing students for the field of natural science?

Schroeder: Getting students to prepare for coursework in sciences is one of the reasons the Natural Sciences Department, under the leadership of Dean John Chapin, is moving forward with several initiatives.

CETL: What do your students seem to appreciate or enjoy about your class?

Schroeder: The human body is amazing! Students are amazed when they discover something for the first time about how it works. They also enjoy the relaxed atmosphere in the classroom.

CETL: What teaching strategy do you find effective?

Schroeder: Engage, engage, engage!

CETL: What are you most excited about regarding your faculty role?

Schroeder: Learning from my students and my peers, both continually amaze and impress me.

Of all the things I’ve accomplished, of all the places I’ve been, teaching at St. Petersburg College is the noblest to which I have aspired – helping others prepare to achieve their dreams, helping others prepare for life’s changes. This is where I am supposed to be.

CETL: What can students do to prepare for a career in your field?

Schroeder: Learn how to learn – it’s a lifelong process.

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SPC faculty named Pinellas County Paramedic of the Year

Shawn Tatham

Shawn Tatham, adjunct faculty in Emergency Medical Services at the St. Petersburg College Caruth Health Education Center, has been named the 2013 Pinellas County Paramedic of the Year by the Pinellas County Public Safety Services. He received the award at the Board of County Commissioners meeting on Tuesday, May 7.

Tatham, who serves as Assistant Supervisor/Paramedic for Sunstar Paramedics, knew from the time he was in high school that he was destined to work in emergency medical services. His experiences are vast, having worked in critical care transport and as a SWAT paramedic in conjunction with the Pinellas County Sheriff’s Office.

“He is a very dedicated instructor,” said Nerina Stepanovsky, EMS Program Director at the HEC campus. “He’s an excellent paramedic and is all about providing quality patient care and promotion of our vocation.”

“To me, it’s not just about saving lives, it’s about taking care of people,” Tatham said. “Yes, part of taking care of people is saving them and helping them stay alive, but it’s not every time we go out there. Sometimes it’s just taking care of people.”

Tatham is a three-time graduate of St. Petersburg College. He received an Associate in Arts, an Associate in Science in emergency medical services, and a bachelor’s degree in public safety administration. A self-described professional student, he is working on a master’s degree in emergency and disaster management at American Public University. He will graduate in May 2014.

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SPC’s Clearwater Campus remembers Bill Hall

Bill Hall

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

A ceremony was held Wednesday, April 17, at St. Petersburg College’s Clearwater Campus dedicating the Critical Thinking Bench in honor of Bill Hall.

The bench is located in front of the new Ethics and Social Sciences Building and provides a view of the campus quad.

Hall’s mother attended the ceremony along with more than thirty others, including students and members of faculty and staff. Hall, a longtime Senior Instructional Specialist, died last August.

Hall began working at St. Petersburg Junior College in 1988 as a part-time Instructional Assistant in the Learning Support Center. He became a full-time employee in 1990 teaching writing and reading labs. An alumnus of SPJC, he was a finalist for the college’s prestigious Apollo Award in 1989.

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Rod Davis named Tarpon Springs Campus Associate Provost

Rodrigo “Rod” Davis has been named Associate Provost at the Tarpon Springs Campus.

“I feel very fortunate to have been given many opportunities at SPC to work and learn alongside wonderful people,” Davis said. “I’m optimistic about our college’s direction in the future.”

Davis has experience in several student services positions: Counselor/Academic Advisor on the Clearwater Campus; collegewide coordinator of the Male Outreach Initiative (MOI); Student Activities Coordinator; Interim International Programs Coordinator; and Outreach Specialist. He is pursuing his PhD in Education and Human Resources at Colorado State University.

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Class to help quit smoking offered at Clearwater Campus

A free class to help current St. Petersburg College employees and students quit their tobacco habit starts this month at the Clearwater Campus.

The six-week course begins April 16 and runs until May 21. The class offers participants tools, such as nicotine patches, to help them succeed in quitting smoking and ending tobacco use. The class is part of a joint partnership with Pinellas County.

Contact Beth Woodbury at ewoodbury@pinellascounty.org or (727) 464-3768 to register. For more information about the course, check the SPC Wellness blog.

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SPC dean receives professor of the year award

Jimmy Chang

Jimmy Chang, Dean of Mathematics, has been named the recipient of the Distinguished Teaching Award from the Mathematical Association of America (MAA) and the Florida Two-Year College Mathematics Association (FTYCMA).

“This is the first time I have ever received this award,” said Chang, who will accept the award at the MAA-FTYCMA Joint Conference banquet at the University of Tampa on Friday, Feb. 22. “This is the first time anyone from SPC has been selected. I hope there will be more recipients from SPC in the years to come.”

Chang is a popular math professor who is known for his passion and energy. In 2011, Chang received the Faculty Member of the Year award at the Clearwater Campus. One of his former students, Kelliann Ganoo, said that it is his passion, warmth, excitement and care for his students that make him a deserving candidate of the awards.

“Jimmy Chang is a teacher who helps the students understand mathematics, as opposed to telling them to just memorize theorems,” said Ganoo, Student Support Assistant in Learning Resources at SPC Downtown. During her second year at the college, she had Chang as her math professor for both MAC 1147 and MAC 2311.

Ganoo describes him as one of the pillars of the SPC community.

“Jimmy Chang is an exceptional human being that is an example of SPC’s motto ‘Within Reach,’” Ganoo said. “He lives the core value that the college strives to instill. Jimmy Chang is making SPC and the community a better place through his actions every day.”

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Spotlight: Adjunct Instructor of Political Science Kenneth Strickland

Kenneth Strickland

St. Petersburg College’s Center of Excellence for Teaching and Learning (CETL) caught up with Adjunct Instructor Kenneth Strickland to learn about teaching American Government.

Strickland was born and raised in Dallas, Texas. He earned dual bachelor’s degrees in political science and sociology from Texas Tech University in 2002 and a master’s degree in political science from The Ohio State University in 2004. He is working towards a doctorate in higher education at the University of South Florida.

As a full-time worker in the market research industry, Strickland manages large scale consumer research studies for a variety of clients. He has extensive training in statistical analysis procedures and serves as his firm’s Manager of Analytic Consulting. At SPC, he teaches American National Government online.

In addition to teaching at SPC, Strickland has taught at Ohio State, Columbus State Community College, Hillsborough Community College and Columbia Southern University.

CETL: How did you get started in Political Science?

Strickland: I was always interested, from a very young age, in how people developed the opinions they held on a variety of political and social issues. In fact, I was more interested in opinion on these issues than the actual issues themselves. I decided to major in political science in college, where a faculty advisor encouraged me to apply to attend an undergraduate political science research conference held annually at Rice University. My abstract was accepted and I presented my research at the conference, finding the entire process very exciting. This experience convinced me to pass up law school and instead apply to graduate programs in Political Science. I was accepted into and attended The Ohio State University, which was one of the top programs in the country with a specialization in political psychology – the study how we formulate political beliefs.

CETL: What prepared you for your faculty role?

Strickland: Being in one of the strongest-rated American Politics graduate programs in the country provided me with tremendous exposure to some of the most cutting edge ideas and research initiatives in the field. Undergraduate students are typically taught political science from a perspective that only requires that they be able to recall institutional facts and provide basic analysis related to those facts. My own academic preparation in the subject has allowed me to take my students well past this point and enables me to transform them into political scientists – observing, analyzing and decoding political behavior from an objective, research-oriented perspective.

CETL: What new developments are happening in your field?

Strickland: As with many fields, political science is increasingly addressing the issue of globalization and technology advancement – particularly with regard to the dissemination of information quickly and efficiently, although not always accurately, through electronic means. Many of the seminal theories in political science are based on specific assumptions regarding how citizens collect and cognitively process information. We’re working to revise those models in response to the new media environment and determine what implications these changes have on key political institutions moving forward.

CETL: What are your biggest challenges in preparing students for the field of Political Science?

Strickland: As is the case for many Americans, the increasingly negative tone of political messaging in the modern era has increased baseline political disinterest for many of my students. My biggest challenge as an educator in the field is to convince my students that they don’t have to be interested in politics to become interested in political science. True political science reaches well beyond simple issue positions and public discourse and encapsulates a much broader set of assumptions and questions about general human social behavior. If I do my job correctly, my students leave my course with the understanding that political science isn’t simply about politics but is instead a field comprised of a wide array of ideas and approaches that have great applicability to many facets of our day-to-day lives.

CETL: What do your students seem to appreciate or enjoy about your class?

Strickland: My goal each semester is to make my online courses look and feel as much as possible like a traditional face-to-face course, which my students regularly indicate that they would prefer to take if their schedule/home-life permitted it. I accomplish this by personalizing the faculty/student relationship with videos I regularly post to ANGEL, including a weekly “what’s going on?” video at the start of each week and separate videos for each set of lecture slides, as well as for major assignments. My SSI feedback indicates that students appreciate and enjoy the fact that I go the extra mile to create a more engaging student experience and that they recognize the fact that I truly care about their success – even if I never meet them in person.

CETL: What teaching strategy do you find effective?

Strickland: Political Science is a research-based field, though there is little to no mention of this in most of our textbooks. The teaching strategy I find most effective is to expose my students to the research side of the field in a way that is easily digestible, yet substantive. I do this by seeking out a wide array of articles, interviews and online videos that demonstrate to my students how we go about asking and answering questions in our field. My students also complete a two-part survey research experiment, where we conduct a political survey with our friends, develop hypotheses regarding the results and then analyze the data upon completion. At the end of my course, each of my students has completed a very simple yet comprehensive political science research paper that serves as a primer for larger, more complex academic inquiry.

CETL: What are you most excited about regarding your faculty role?

Strickland: I have full-time job in the corporate world outside of education that provides me with a very good quality of living but fails to meet my need to give back and work towards advancing the goals of others. The thing I’m most excited about regarding my faculty role is to have the opportunity to work with students of all ages to help them uncover their hidden potential and to see them grow over the short period of time I have with them. I’ve never treated my faculty position with SPC as a job – I already have one of those. Instead, I see it as a passion that allows me to meet interesting people and have a small part in helping them better themselves and see the world in a different way. No amount of money can match the satisfaction that brings me.

CETL: What can students do to prepare for a career in your field?

Strickland: As with most professions in the new economy, the key to success is networking, networking, networking. I tell my students that they can accomplish far more in front of a person than they can from their computer. Students preparing for a career in politics should do so by attending as many meetings and events as possible and volunteering their time and resources when able, so that their abilities and hard work become apparent to the political leaders they come to know.

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SPC instructor named Sundance screenplay winner

Elizabeth Indianos

Libertaire, a historical screenplay by Elizabeth Indianos, was selected as one of the Top 10 movie scripts and the Best Screenplay in the Historical Category for the fourth annual Sundance Table Read My Screenplay contest. Indianos is an Adjunct Instructor at the Tarpon Springs Campus.

Two Grand Finalists were selected from the Top 10 list and were flown to Park City, Utah. Their screenplays are then read by professional actors during the 2013 SUNDANCE Film Festival, Jan. 17-27.

“I’m thrilled to be in the Top 10 and to have won in my category,” said Indianos. “Though, I’m not one of the two chosen to go as a guest, attending Sundance would have been an amazing, career boosting opportunity to participate as a Finalist.”

“I intend for Libertaire to become a movie—an extremely difficult, if not impossible task,” said Indianos, who consulted on the screenplay with Robert McKee, a Fulbright scholar whose Story Seminar writing classes are world renowned. “As a screenwriter, I enter a variety of contests with the hope of catching the eye of producers, agents and top-notch actors.”

The screenplay is the story of Joe Pulitzer and Auguste Bartholdi, a French sculptor and a newspaperman who fight discrimination and indifference for a woman no one wanted: Lady Liberty.

Elizabeth Indianos consults with Robert McKee

“What inspires me is a spirit of hope and determination,” Indianos said. “I know firsthand all the reasons why an idea is considered impossible, why one is told ‘no’ before ever being told ‘yes.’”

“As a teacher in the classroom, a role model and professional in the field, I try to illuminate that every great accomplishment is at first impossible. My father and grandfather, an immigrant outside of mainstream culture, had a saying: The impossible just takes 15 minutes longer…”

Libertaire also was in the top 10 percent of all 7,197 entries for the 2012 Nicholls Fellowship in Screenwriting, which is sponsored by The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. It also has been nominated twice for a Culture and Heritage Award by Fresh Voices, a consortium of industry professionals that strives to discover, encourage and promote the most promising voices in storytelling.

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Two SPC employees selected for leadership development programs

Laura Smith

Todd Smith

Two St. Petersburg College employees will represent the college in area leadership development programs. Laura Smith, Academic Chair of Communications at the Tarpon Springs Campus, has been accepted into the Leadership Tampa Bay Class of 2013. Todd Smith, Director, Financial Assistance Services at District Office, also has been accepted into the Leadership St. Pete Class of 2013.

SPC employees responded to the call for candidates for each leadership development program. A review team consisting of representatives from the Faculty Governance Organization (FGO), Career Service Employee Council (CSEC) and Provost/Dean Council convened to select the SPC candidates. The SPC candidates then pursued the application process in order to be accepted to their respective programs.

Each year, the Office of Professional Development in Human Resources supports leadership development opportunities for SPC employees by funding application and tuition fees. Among the programs sponsored are Leadership Pinellas, Leadership Tampa Bay and Leadership St. Pete.

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