Stetson Commons 1994-5-2

__ I Commons A Newsletter for Parents of Stetson Students Winter 1994 Volume V No. 2 Alumni, parents, friends, and prospective students and their families are "refocusing Stetson" at a series of receptions this year. In the photo, left, '93 biology grad Melissa Pilgrim (right), demonstrates a snake to Seabreeze High School student Shannon McLaughlan (left) and her father, Bob McLaughlan, during the Daytona Beach event. In the photo, right, parents Edward and Lynda Ossi talk with Dawn Rodak (left), Career Services at the Jacksonville ^^ reception. Stetson working with Disney school STETSON IS playing a major role in The Celebration Learning and Teaching Center, which will be part of a new community being developed by the Walt Disney Company south of Orlando in Osceola County. A state-of-the-art public school and teaching academy scheduled to open in 1996, the Center will serve approximately 1,400 Osceola School District students and 1,500 educators per year. It is planned as a model of how educators can meet the challenge of the 21st Century. The Center is a collaborative effort by the Osceola County School District, Stetson University, and Disney Development Company. Disney will design the Center, working with the state and the school district; the district will operate the Learning Center. Stetson is expected to run the teaching academy, which will give teachers throughout Florida and the nation the opportunity to study and practice the most effective applications in a unique learning environment. The Osceola School Board has given the project a green light, and specific contracts are being negotiated. Dr. Larry Rosen, director of the Academy for Excellence in Education and the univetsity's representative on the planning group, sees many opportunities for students: internships in the learning center and teaching academy, on-campus speakers from the academy, and contact with national education experts. Kresge Foundation Gives $450,000 Science grant STETSON HAS received a $450,000 Science Initiative grant from The Kresge Foundation which could insure state-of-the- art natural science and computer science instruction at the university into the 21st Century. The grant provides $225,000 now, for Stetson to use in completing the purchase and installation of $675,000 in new scientific instrumentation. The remaining $225,000 functions as a challenge grant. The terms of the challenge require the university to raise $900,000 in new endowment, for repairing, maintaining, upgrading, and eventually replacing science equipment, by no later than March 1, 1995. "The Kresge Foundation has given us a tremendous challenge, and opened the way to an exciting role for Stetson in educating future scientists," said Stetson Vice President for University Relations F. Mark Whittaker. The Science Initiative Endowment Campaign will begin immediately, Whittaker said. Present and future Stetson students, regardless of their majors, will benefit significantly from the Kresge award, Dean of Arts and Sciences Gary Maris said. Science majors learn most effectively by actually doing science, and innovations in teaching science are directly linked to the quality of available equipment, he said. Science equipment also is important to Stetson's genetal education program. All business and music students are required to take one lab science course, and all arts and sciences majors must take at least two. The Kresge Foundation makes gtants towards projects involving facilities construction or renovation and the purchase of major capital equipment. Winter Term accents diversity of cultures, interests FROM QUILTS to music, this year's Winter Term theme, "Understanding Cultural Diversity," helped students broaden their understanding of today's world. Among the speakers: ♦ Dr. Maude Southwell Wahlman, an authority on the history and art of African- American quilts; ♦ University of Notre Dame anthropologist James O. Bellis; ♦ Georgetown University environmental historian John R. McNeill; ♦ Black feminist author D. Soyini Madison from the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, author of The Woman That I Am: Literature and Culture by Contemporary Women of Color; and ♦Composer-writer Milton Babbitt, from The Julliard School. Introducing the theme was a late fall semester lecture by Dr. Ivan Van Sertima, a Rutgers University specialist in Aftican and African-American culture.