Poetry on faith. Piano in China. Creativity in the classroom.

Check out five advancements faculty made this past summer thanks to Lipscomb's Summer Faculty Grants.

Janel Shoun-Smith | 

 

Poetry exploring faith. A curriculum on creativity. A chunk of a biography on W.P. Kinsella. A new music festival in China. And research on radiation therapy and chemotherapy drugs.

These are the five advancements that Lipscomb University faculty made this past summer thanks to the annual Summer Faculty Grants awarded by the university. This fall the five faculty grant honorees gave presentations on what they accomplished thanks to the grants.

The five grant winners for 2016 were:

Jerome Reed

Forty Chinese piano students of all ages gained new insight this past summer as Reed spent two weeks in Weihai, China, co-coordinating the East/West International Piano Festival, a creation of his colleague David Northington, Powell Distinguished Professor of Piano at the University of Tennessee-Knoxville.

After attending a music festival in Italy, Northington approached Reed about developing a similar festival in China. Such festivals are held in attractive locales around the world to draw professors and their students to participate in private lessons, master classes and concerts in a culturally-rich environment. After attending a music festival in Italy together, Northington noted to Reed that no such festivals were currently held in China.

The two took on the challenge and coordinated a program with five Chinese faculty and themselves at Shandong University in August. Chinese participants were taught by Northington and Reed, his first time performing in China. American participants were taught by the Chinese professors, many of whom are nationally and internationally known.

Christian Johnson, a Lipscomb senior music major from Dickson County, Tennessee, attended the festival with Reed. He said his time with Dr. Peng Cao taught him a lot about notes he had been overlooking. “His playing was crystal clear,” Johnson said.

“It showed me how dedicated they are to music but also how to look at music in a new way,” Johnson said. “Seeing music from a different perspective from across the world, reminded me that there are so many different views of one piece.”

“Chinese students have wonderful technique, but they don’t often really understand the music they are playing. The American students understand the meaning of the music they are playing, but aren’t as strong on technique,” Reed said. The main goal of the festival was “to help student compare the two cultures, to see what makes American and Chinese playing special, and to realize that they need both approaches,” Reed said.

Many community members came to hear the final concerts at the festival, and one of the Chinese professors at the festival, Jie Yuan, will perform a concert at Lipscomb on Feb. 20, at 7:30 p.m. in Ward Hall. Yuan is recognized as one of the "Top Ten Chinese Pianists" by China Central Television Company.

Reed and Northington plan to hold the music festival again next year.

 

 

Willie Steele

Steele is already a published author on the writings of W.P. Kinsella, who was famous for his baseball fiction in particular, but thanks to a summer spent working hard to complete a large portion of a biography, the reading world should soon have the first biography of Kinsella.

Kinsella wrote Shoeless Joe, the book that the movie Field of Dreams is based on. After seeing the published book version of Steele’s dissertation, A Member of the Local Nine: Baseball Identity in the Fiction of W.P. Kinsella, Kinsella contacted Steele in 2012 about writing his biography.

The two began a four-year relationship that included Kinsella turning over his diaries spanning 34 years to Steele, an endless stream of interviews with business colleagues, friends and family members, many visits to Kinsella’s Hope, British Columbia, home  and countless e-mails with follow-up questions. The author gave Steele more access to his personal life than any other non-family member alive.

Steele says he didn’t quite know what he was getting into when he agreed to write the biography. The process has been long and more consuming than he ever imagined. Steele has researched all of Kinsella’s writing and his presentations, visited the Canadian National Archives and organized boxes and boxes full of Kinsella’s old papers and notes, even old junk mail.

“Every interview leads to four others, which leads to seven others,” he said. Steele was grateful to be awarded a faculty summer grant as it allowed him to get the bulk of the biography down on paper this past summer, an extra blessing considering that Kinsella passed away in September.

After Kinsella’s death, Steele found himself as a sought-after expert when Kinsella’s literary agent referred media to his biographer for comments on his death. Steele’s name appeared in media throughout Canada and the United States including the New York Times and the Washington Post.

Interest in Kinsella was stirred in 2015 when The Essential W. P. Kinsella was published to honor his 80th birthday, Steele said. In fall 2017, a new collection of Kinsella’s work called Russian Dolls will be released.

And now Steele’s literary agent, who was also Kinsella’s agent, is shopping his biography around to major publishers. Steele hopes to have the manuscript completely finished by the end of 2016.

 

 

Marcia Stewart

Creativity: every teacher’s ultimate goal, but one where many regularly fall short.

Creative thinking is noted as one of the four crucial 21st century skills by the Partnership for 21st Century Learning. Bloom’s Taxonomy of Cognition was revised in the early 21st century to place creative thinking as the highest level of thinking.

Yet, creativity has been increasingly neglected as schools have been pressured to emphasize convergent thinking and standardized tests, said Marcia Stewart, education professor, who used her summer grant to help teachers boost creativity in their classrooms.

“Children are naturally inquisitive, yet somewhere along the way, they quit asking questions. Teachers may be doing a disservice to students with such emphasis on convergent thinking and filling in the blank,” she said. “If we encourage a student’s creative side, it’s going to benefit the problem-solving side as well.”

In fall 2015, Stewart team-taught a general education course on creativity, “Creativity in Wonder, Work and Worship,” and could not find a book or textbook that covered all three areas covered in the class: personal life, the workplace and worship.

This summer she worked to create a curriculum guide that does just that, using lessons learned from the pilot creativity course.

“Creativity excites students about learning,” Stewart said. “It motivates them to take ownership of their learning, and it provides for deeper learning. If a teacher’s job is to stimulate higher thinking, then creativity is what you want. Thinking creatively and critically will then translate into better performance on standardized tests.”

Stewart will have an article on her creativity project published this fall in the Delta Kappa Gamma Bulletin: Collegial Exchange.

 

 

Lee Camp

Camp spent his summer working on a collection of poems in three types: lamentations, the rightful ordering of affections, and gratitude and joy.

Camp said he became interested in combining theology and poetry because theology concepts can often appear trivial (or even annoying, like Job’s friends) in a world reeling from pain and turmoil. “Poetry helps us see things that we cannot see otherwise,” he said at his October presentation, where he read some of the poems for an audience for the first time.

The poems presented images of parents and family members who have lost loved ones; some were inspired by Collins Gulf in the Savage Gulf State Natural Area in Tennessee; and some are prayers. As part of the project, Camp said he cataloged various prayers that he has given at events throughout his tenure at Lipscomb, including prayers at a 9/11 remembrance vigil or after the Virginia Tech shootings in 2007.

Camp said he enjoyed learning about and crafting poems of lament, which explore” learning to love God again,” he said.

 

Collins Gulf
By Lee Camp

The laurel hums the beauty
The water sings the praise
The gulf sits quiet, undaunted
Humility from countless days.

The cypress like Pentecostals,
Arms thrown, to the skies
Branches broken, blown aside
No pity, no queries why.

The moss, it kneels in silence
Mute, but, shouting glory
The river runs white and heedless
Its path long trod and hoary.

Day to day still pours forth speech,
Boulder, and winter smell of pine,
The precipice weeps, the limestone laughs,
And all for joy, for — joy.

 

 

Austin Privett

Privett spent his summer working to improve the effectiveness of radiation therapy and to understand the adverse effects green tea has on a chemotherapy drug, largely through running computer simulations.

Privett came to Lipscomb with expertise in computational chemistry, using computer simulations to understand molecular reactions. As a Ph.D. candidate at Texas Tech University, he used computational chemistry to research proton radiation treatments for cancerous tumors, working to help doctors plan more efficient and effective clinical treatments in the future.

What happens at the molecular level during proton radiation treatments is poorly understood; however, it is this understanding that can lead to improved clinical use of the technology, Privett said.

At Lipscomb, Privett is using computer simulations to continue his work by simulating proton collisions with water molecules (the human body is mostly made of water). The precise data provided through the simulations shed insight on the molecular details leading to cell death and are used to more precisely calculate how to plan clinical therapy that spares healthy cells but targets cancerous tissues.

He plans to submit his findings to the publication PLOS ONE, published by the Public Library of Science, this fall.

In addition, Privett and his student research assistants worked this summer on a project to help determine why green tea appears to counteract the positive effects of the chemotherapy drug Sunitinib. The experiments of another Lipscomb professor, Matt Vergne, demonstrated the negative effects of green tea, but the experiments did not reveal the whole story of the fundamental molecular behavior causing the observed data.

One of Privett’s student researchers “kept the computer busy all summer” with computations to determine the most likely ways the chemotherapy drug interacts with the molecules in green tea. This molecular-level understanding could be used to identify new drugs that do not have the negative interaction with green tea. Vergne and Privett are collaborating on a manuscript to publish these findings in the near future.

Privett made presentations on these projects at the Southeastern Regional Meeting of the American Chemical Society.