Roanoke’s Public Health Studies is an interdisciplinary approach to the health care arena, offering students diverse perspectives on health through courses in both life and social sciences. Public Health Studies also helps students find a niche in the health field that matches their own personal passions, and gives an advantage over those who’ve pursued a purely technical approach to health education. Through rigorous investigation and analysis, Public Health Studies provides individuals with a strong foundation for a range of careers in the health field, such as administration, advocacy, counseling, medical practice, public policy, research & analysis, social work and occupational & physical therapy.
Repost! Environmental Studies senior, Vashawn Gray learned much about the complexities of running a museum from his internship at the Virginia Museum of Natural History in Martinsville. He converted an existing pollinator garden into an exhibit display, adding educational information about the plants in the pollinator garden and the types of native pollinators in the local area and created a mascot graphic for the pollinator exhibit to help make the information more colorful and attractive to children. Wonderful work!
Bella, a Senior at Roanoke College, is conducting an independent study and honors in the Art History major with a continuation of her summer work. Bella’s semester work will result in a paper that allows her to elaborate upon her research and compile her findings into an academic paper to submit for publication in a peer-reviewed journal in the field of Ancient Near Eastern Archaeology. From this project, Bella presented her independent research at the Showcase of Experiential Learning this past September and placed second overall. She gained experience presenting with confidence and authority and it helped her think about her project big picture while explaining complex concepts to people with no previous experience learning about archaeology. Great work!
This past week, two current students (Hannah Petty and Jacob Barret), four former students (Erin Kosmowski, Dandre Amos, Sean Ryan, Lucas Jones), and Dr. Lassiter had their manuscript accepted for publication in Environmental Toxicology and Pharmacology. Follow the link in the profile to find the publication. Congratulations!
This semester Ethan is researching gender conformity and how it may predict poor adjustment in young adults. Also, he is researching whether relational aggression (i.e., gossiping, spreading rumors) plays a role in this relationship. Dr. Findley-Van Nostrand and Ethan are working on drafting an abstract to submit to the Reid Conference at UVA for undergraduate psychology students. Wonderful work!
During her time at Roanoke College, Tess has conducted research in several departments on campus and presented her research at multiple conferences. This semester, Tess worked on a project for the Theatre department. She was the dramaturg Roanoke College’s production of The Children’s Hour (Feb 24-26 2022). The play is about two schoolteachers, Karen Wright and Martha Dobie, who run a boarding school for girls in the 1930s. They get accused of having an affair by one of their students and the play follows their downfall and life after the accusation. Tess performed all the historical significance research behind the play from the nuances in the script to women’s education to life in 1930s Connecticut. She took an artistic approach to display her research in designing a costume to convey the biography of the playwright, and a 6’ wardrobe that contains Joseph Cornell boxes relating to all the areas of research she performed. Tess says the most rewarding part of the process was articulating why a 1930s piece still resonates with audiences today. Tess won the Literary Managers and Dramaturgs of the Americas (LMDA) Kennedy Center fellowship for the region for her lobby displays and will be competing in Nationals in April. Fantastic work!
This week we are excited to highlight Sarah Jane! For her Honors Distinction Project, she planned and facilitated a theatrical workshop aimed at middle school students with a focus on differentiation techniques for a variety of differently-abled students. She created a basic lesson plan that focused on several specific Virginia Standards of Learning for 6th-grade theatre students – many of these standards revolve around promoting positive self-image and confidence, skills that are vital to any young person’s life and education. Theatrical pedagogy is especially effective at instilling these values and she believes that this workshop not only fulfilled a learning requirement but also enriched the lives of these students. She differentiated this lesson to accommodate a variety of different students using vetted educational and theatrical research to determine the best technique to do so. This work also proves the validity and necessity of theatre education in schools and the fundamentality of arts programs for student success. She will be presenting her research at the Southeastern Theatre Conference in Memphis, TN on March 12th. Great work!
