UAB Magazine Online Features
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UAB Grants Help Local Teachers Inspire Digital Success
By Shelley Stewart
Middle school teacher Jameka Thomas (center) says her job is to challenge high-achieving students to help them reach their full potential.In the early 20th century, iron ore from Birmingham’s Red Mountain fueled the young city’s rapid growth. One hundred years later, information has replaced iron as the driving force behind economic success, but the mountain—the scenic backdrop to UAB, the region’s new powerhouse—is still a symbol of opportunity.
The Red Mountain Writing Project (RMWP), founded in 2004 and sponsored by UAB’s School of Education and College of Arts and Sciences, is dedicated to helping teachers at all grade levels find and adopt innovative strategies for literacy instruction. Some of the most exciting innovations involve tablet computers, e-book readers, and other high-tech tools, which are poised to bring a revolution in education, says Tonya Perry, Ph.D., director and principal investigator of the RMWP since 2008.
“Being prepared for a digital world is critical for all young people,” says Perry, an assistant professor in the Department of Curriculum and Instruction in the School of Education. Although they are making greater use of technology, many urban schools, facing chronic budget constraints, don’t always have the means to give students this vital experience, she says.
In 2012, the RMWP awarded four public-school grants of $1,000 each to bring new digital tools into local classrooms. “Research shows that students who participate in innovative work like this definitely outperform those who aren’t prepared,” Perry says.
Adventures in Education
Rod Leonard, a teacher at Bush Hills Academy in Birmingham, bought iPads to improve literacy among his seventh- and eighth-grade students. “They take technology in stride, and I can see that they’re engaged,” Leonard says. “They are having so much fun that some of them didn’t even realize they would get a grade for what they are doing.”
Winning Team
UAB’s System for Scholarship Success
By Matt Windsor
As UAB's director of national and international fellowships and scholarships, Ashley Floyd is a matchmaker of sorts. She helps students identify opportunities, then guides them through the rigorous application and selection processes for these awards. Things that are easier than earning a Rhodes scholarship: getting selected in the NFL draft, getting elected to Congress, hosting your own TV show, winning an Oscar, recording a hit single.
Rhodes Scholars, who win funding for up to three years of study at Oxford University in England, have done each of these and more. There aren’t many of them: Only 32 are selected each year, but they make an outsize impact on the world. Rhodes alumni include politicians Bill Clinton and Bill Bradley, football player Myron Rolle, pundits Rachel Maddow and Bill Kristof, Hollywood director Terrence Malick, and singer Kris Kristofferson. The list also includes UAB’s own Neel Varshney—who won in 2000, went on to graduate from Harvard Medical School, and is now a venture capitalist in Chicago—and Josh Carpenter, who won the Rhodes scholarship in 2012.
You have to be a scholar to win a scholarship, but grades are not enough. Neither are energy, activism, or a killer list of extracurriculars. The secret is in the story. “All of your fellow applicants will be smart and engaged—just like you,” says Carpenter, who is currently studying comparative social policy at Oxford’s St. Hilda’s College. “You have to identify what it is that makes you unique.”
Investing in Success
A scholarship is essentially an investment, Carpenter explains. “The committee wants to find the person who will give them the best return on that investment, and it’s important that you be able to articulate why you are that person.” (For more advice from UAB scholarship winners, see “Scholar Tips,” below.)
Dividends of Peace
Preparing Peace Corps Volunteers for Nursing Careers
By Jo Lynn Orr
The two years Andrea Torre spent in Dimbwe Village in southern Zambia changed her life. Now she has come to the UAB School of Nursing (SON) to learn the skills she needs to spend the rest of her career helping to change others’ lives.
From Zambia to Alabama: The Peace Corps Fellows program at the UAB School of Nursing offers financial assistance to returned volunteers such as Andrea Torre (above) as they pursue new careers in health care. As a Peace Corps volunteer from 2006 to 2008, Torre was officially tasked with helping to teach women in Dimbwe about HIV prevention. But once she learned the local language and got to know the people, Torre took on a larger role. “I worked with women’s groups on income-generating activities, taught math at the local school, and worked with the local clinic to vaccinate and weigh children five years old and younger,” she says.
Collaborating with the village’s parent-teacher association, Torre wrote a grant proposal and received $3,000. “Over the next eight months, a preschool was built with local materials and local labor, a local teacher was hired, and 45 children each year will now receive an early education,” she says.
After returning to her hometown of Salt Lake City, Utah, Torre worked as a program director at a local nonprofit organization while she settled on a future career. “I went back and forth between teaching and nursing,” she says. She decided on the latter, because “I knew with nursing I could educate and heal.”
War and Remembrance
UAB Filmmaker Chronicles a Journey of Discovery
By Matt Windsor
When Captain Malcolm A. Smith's P-47 Thunderbolt fighter (above) crashed in the French countryside in 1944, his family was told it was an accident. Sixty years later, they learned the real story. Smith's niece, UAB filmmaker June Mack, tells the tale in a documentary that will premiere at UAB on November 10. On May 21, 1944, Captain Malcolm A. Smith’s P-47 Thunderbolt fighter fell out of the skies over northwestern France. The U.S. Army Air Corps, suspecting weather trouble, informed Smith’s family in Alabama of the loss, but kept his status as “missing in action” for another two years before acknowledging he would never return.
Sixty years later, Smith’s sister, Marianne Smith Morgan, received a letter from a Frenchman who said he had discovered what really happened on that fateful Sunday afternoon. Smith had actually been killed in action in a dogfight with a German warplane—and he had become a beacon of hope for the villagers of Vibraye, a tiny community near his crash site.
“At first we thought it was a hoax,” says June Mack, M.F.A., Morgan’s daughter and an award-winning filmmaker on the faculty in the UAB Department of Communication Studies. But Mack soon discovered she had become a part of an incredible true story of redemption, gratitude, and hope. She eventually turned the tale into a documentary, Lest We Forget: A French Village Recalls 1944. The film will get its public premiere on Saturday, November 10, 2012—Veteran’s Day weekend—at 4:00 p.m. in UAB’s Hulsey Center Recital Hall, room 108.
Path of Honor
The story owes its life to Jacky Emery, a French citizen whose hobby is finding villages in areas of France where Allied soldiers died or were wounded. “He does it simply because he is so grateful for what they did during the war,” Mack says. “He goes to the towns and suggests that they use their next building project—a new road, building, or bridge—to honor the soldier.”
