Faculty News
Clarke Schools for Hearing and Speech, in collaboration with CREC-Soundbridge, hosted a free introductory webinar on infant hearing loss at noon EST on Wednesday, January 23, 2013. The webinar is titled From the Ears to the Brain and covered auditory perception in infants and toddlers and the development of the listening brain.
This engaging talk was presented by Janice Gatty, Ph.D. (Clarke Northampton), Barbara Hecht, Ph.D. (Clarke Boston), and Elizabeth Cole, Ed.D. (CREC Soundbridge). CART reporting (live captioning) was also available to all registrants.
The webinar is the second in Clarke’s 2012/13 Wednesday Webinar Series. The first webinar, Childhood Hearing in the 21st Century, took place on November 28, 2012 and attracted nearly 200 participants from throughout the United States and Canada. An archive of the webinar, as well as a full transcript, is available at clarkeschools.org/edresources. Future 2013 topics include Family Centered Practice for Infants and Toddlers with Hearing Loss and How Do Infants and Toddlers with Hearing Loss Learn to Listen and Talk? Visit clarkeschools.org/webinars to learn more, view the full schedule or register online.
Carol Berner, a Smith College lecturer in the Department of Education and Child Study and regional coordinator for River of Words, an environmental art and poetry project in collaboration with the Connecticut River Watershed Council, was recently featured in an article in The Greenfield Recorder. Berner collaborated with Nancy Meagher, the art teacher in the Gill Montague Public Schools on the River of Words project.
Berner conducted poetry workshops with the students in the spring to help them express in words what they had spent the school year drawing.
The poetry and images created last year have since appeared in a collection of 10 postcards and the book “A Children’s Guide to Turners Falls,” with pictures and poetry by the children accompanied by descriptions written by honors students in the University of Massachusetts art program. Bridging Communities: How Does the River Connect Us? highlights K-6 artwork and poetry from Gill-Montague and includes a description of the project.
Two current Smith College students have also been involved with the River of Words-CT River Project. Smith senior, Jacklyn Majewski, spent last fall writing place-based poetry with second graders at Montague Elementary School, as her fieldwork for the Children Learning to Read class that Berner teaches. Another Smith College senior, Abby Dornbusch, will be doing an independent study this spring on communicating environmental concepts like watershed to a broad range of audiences. Abby is student teaching in middle school math and science in Springfield this semester.
Carol Berner teaches several courses for the Department of Education and Child Study at Smith College, including Children Learning to Read and The American Middle and High School. Smith students interested in working with Professor Berner on this project should contact her at cberner@smith.edu.
Rosetta Marantz Cohen, Sylvia Dlugasch Bauman Professor of
Education and American Studies gave her inaugural speech, "Teaching,
Prestige and the Cult of Service," on Monday, November 19 at 4:30 p.m.
Rosetta Marantz Cohen's research and writing was featured in an article about teaching in the Christian Science Monitor: Teachers who excel: A lesson from Miss Smoot
Al Rudnitsky and a team that includes Glenn Ellis from the Department of Engineering were awarded a very prestigious major National Science Foundation award that builds on their long-term work around knowledge building and narrative-based idea stories.
Project Summary: Smith College and Springfield Technical Community College (STCC) propose a full-scale development project designed to engage children and young teens in engineering through the use of narrative in their native digital medium. The project will apply innovative approaches to learning that are emerging from the learning sciences, including Imaginative Education and knowledge building. Together these approaches will support deep learning and address the critical need of preparing young learners to participate in the knowledge age society. Specifically, this proposal will address the unmet need of providing an engaging resource designed to improve attitudes toward engineering, provide a deeper understanding of what engineering is about, and support the development of cognitive tools and specific engineering skills.
