FACULTY/STAFF

Sara Atwood, associate professor and chair of the Department of Engineering and Physics, reported these achievements:

  • She participated in Olin College’s inaugural Sketch Model Summer Workshop in Boston, Massachusetts, June 18 through 20, 2018. The workshop brought together 12 faculty members who were selected, nationally, from engineering, the arts and the humanities, to design, creatively, integrated arts-humanities-technology learning experiences at the college level. The Mellon Foundation funded the workshop.
  • She presented a paper, titled “Social Enterprise Model for a Multi-Institutional Mentoring Network for Women in STEM,” at the inaugural CoNECD Conference (Collaborative Network for Engineering and Computing Diversity) in Arlington, Virginia, from April 29 to May 2.
  • She presented a paper, titled Improved “Pedagogy Enabled by Assessment Using Gradescope” and co-authored a second paper, titled “Effects of Research and Internship Experiences on Engineering Task Self-Efficacy on Engineering Students Through an Intersectional Lens” at the 2018 American Society for Engineering Education Annual Conference on June 24 and 27 in Salt Lake City, Utah. For the latter paper, she was awarded the Best Diversity Paper across all relevant submissions to the conference.

 

Leyla Batakci, associate professor of math, was invited to speak at I-COTS 10 (10th-International Conference on Teaching Statistics) on July 12 in Kyoto, Japan. She presented two joint papers, titled “A Framework and Survey for Measuring Instructors’ Motivational Attitudes Toward Statistics” and “A Framework and Survey for Measuring Students’ Motivational Attitudes Toward Statistics.”

 

Jean-Paul Benowitz, director of student transition programs and prestigious scholarships and fellowships department in Academic Affairs, gave a presentation on Thursday, Aug. 2, 2018, titled “The History of the Horse and Buggy Mennonites,” at the Pennsylvania Chautauqua in Mount Gretna as part of its Summer Religious Series: Religious History of Pennsylvania.

 

David Bowne, associate professor of biology, published an essay “Freshwater turtles in the city, the country and everywhere in between” in Current Conservation in which he translates his recent scientific publication for the general public.

Also, a research project led by Bowne, which facilitates collaboration among undergraduates and faculty across the country to study turtles, has been featured in envirobites.org.

 

Kathryn Caprino, assistant professor of PK-12 new literacies in the Department of Education, co-authored “A Method of Partnership: Deconstructing the Theory-Practice Divide, for “Florida English Journal.”

She also coauthored “Developing perspective consciousness via middle grades trade books that feature the global south(s): A case for using Thanhha Lai’s Inside Out and Back Again,” for “The History Teacher.”

Caprino co-authored the book “Lessons from the Teachers for a New Era Project: Evidence and Accountability in Teacher Education.”

 

Kurt DeGoede, professor of engineering and physics, presented and published a paper, “Competency-Based Assessment in Dynamics,” in the proceedings of the American Society for Engineering Education Conference. This paper received recognition as the Best Paper in the Mechanical Engineering Division for 2018 (more than 1000 members in this division).

 

David Kenley, professor of history, led a two-week study abroad program to Nepal and Tibet in July 2018, with funding from the National Consortium for Teaching about Asia.  The program participants included secondary school teachers from across the country.  Dr. Kenley conducted a multi-week online seminar for all participants during the spring and then provided numerous in-country lectures during their travels.  The highlights of the trip included; a visit to the Sisterhood of Survivors Project in Kathmandu, an NGO addressing the issues of human trafficking; a homestay in Panauti, Nepal; visits to the Potala Palace and Norbulinka, the former residences of the Dalai Lama in Lhasa; an overnight stay at the Rongbuk monastery, the highest monastery in the world at 16,340 feet above sea level; and a hike to the Mount Everest Base Camp in Tibet.

 

Kristi Kneas, Fletcher McClellan and Kyle Kopko, associate dean of institutional effectiveness, research and planning, co-authored articles in the AAC&U’s summer edition of PeerReview on the topic of “Engaging in Capstones and Signature Work.”

 

Jeffery Long, Religious Studies, published the following:

  • a review of Hindol Sengupta’s “Being Hindu: Understanding a Peaceful Path in a Violent World,” in Reading Religion and “One Life/Many Lives: An Internal Hindu-Christian Dialogue” in the online journal Religions.
  • “Many Views, Many Truths, One Truth: A Jain-Inspired Approach to the Diversity of Worldviews” in the Berkeley Journal of Theology and Religion. This article is based on his presentation in February 2017 of the Surjit Singh Lecture at Berkeley’s Graduate Theological Union.
  • “Swami Vivekananda’s Address to the First Parliament of the World’s Religions,” an essay for a volume of primary sources for interfaith engagement. The volume, edited by Or N. Rose, Homayra Ziad and Soren Hessler, is titled ‘Words to Live by: Sources for Interreligious Engagement.” It was published in June 2018.

Long also was invited by the Faculty of Divinity at Cambridge University, in Cambridge, England, to participate in a conference on Hindu-Christian Dual Belonging. Long attended the conference on July 3 and 4, 2018, and presented his paper, titled “Hindu, Christian, Hindu-Christian, and Beyond: Exploring the Relations between Identity and Spirituality.” on July 3.

 

Charla Lorenzen, associate professor of Modern Languages, presented a session at the 100th-annual conference of the American Association of Teachers of Spanish and Portuguese (AATSP) in Salamanca, Spain. In her session, she shared the teaching, scholarship and service that have taken place in the Elizabethtown College Children’s Spanish Program since its inception in 2009.

 

Tara Moore, visiting assistant professor of English, presented “Young Adult Cli-Fi and the Risen Sea” at the national Children’s Literature Association conference in San Antonio, Texas, in June. This talk covered part of a chapter she is working on for an edited collection.

 

Brenda Read-Daily, associate professor of engineering; Kurt DeGoede, professor of engineering and physics; and Stacey Zimmerman, associate director of Strengths Coaching and Ethical Leadership Development, presented their paper, “Gallup StrengthsFinder in Engineering” at the American Society for Engineering Education’s annual conference in Salt Lake City, Utah, on June 26, where were awarded Best Presentation in the First-Year Programs Division.

Read-Daily also presented her paper, “Hands-on Activities to Improve Students’ Conceptual Understanding of Water Hardness,” at the conference.

 

Jonathan Rudy, Peacemaker in Residence, with the Center for Global Understanding and Peacemaking, presented on “Culture of Exclusion: Transforming Society from within a Broken System,” a panel focused on healing memories at the Caux Forums, organized for Initiatives of Change (formerly Moral Rearmament), a Swiss based organization committed to trustbuilding, ethical leadership, sustainable living, economic justice and environmental sustainability.

He was invited to give input during the Just Governance for Human Security Forum from July 4-9. From the former vice president of Gambia to a Ugandan woman traumatized by violence of displacement, the participants spanned the spectrum of society. His input centered around his home church congregation forgiving a juvenile member who murdered his parents, also members of his church, in 1991 and the subsequent journey with this young man for the past 27 years.

Rudy also conducted two workshops for participants: one on intercultural/interfaith dialogue, one on deep listening.

 

Kevin Shorner-Johnson, associate professor of music education, presented two papers at the International Society of Music Education in Baku, Azerbaijan. His first presentation, titled “Reclaiming musical idleness from colonized Christian notions of the Sin of Sloth,” explored the relationship of notions of temporal sin with 17th- and 18th-century Puritan psalm singing and singing schools.

He also participated on an international panel for a forthcoming book, titled “Music Education and the Common Good.” In his book chapter, Shorner-Johnson critiques the United Nations 2015 Rethinking Education report from an Anabaptist tradition of peacebuilding and an interest in challenging linear notions of time.

 

 

STUDENTS

Ryan Rippeon ’20, engineering; Debra Wohl, professor of biology; and Brenda Read-Daily, associate professor of engineering, presented a poster, titled “Nitrate Removal Performance in a Sulfur-Limestone Amended Agricultural Drainage System,” on June 5 at the Pennsylvania Water Environment Association’s Annual Technical Exhibition and Conference in Hershey, Pennsylvania.

 

E-town NOW publishes achievements of our faculty and staff members once per month during academic semesters and less frequently during breaks.  Submit your achievement here.