Microsoft’s state-of-the-art truck is loaded with exciting new technology products and includes a hands-on interactive environment packed with workstations featuring Microsoft’s latest products. Live demos of new products will also be offered.

Consolidated Integrative Services is partnering with the Department of Electrical Engineering to bring this free opportunity to our students and the community.

More than 100 teachers, artists, administrators, researchers, and professional development providers from 24 states attended the forum. They explored and analyzed current practice in arts integration instruction and examined defining characteristics of research-based professional development models.

Third grade students from Brown Academy reviewed sentence structure, learned to read dance symbols, choreographed a dance sentence and informally performed their choreography for each other under the direction of Jody Cassell, Teaching Artist from Durham, North Carolina. This dance-integrated lesson demonstrated the program READ! DANCE! WRITE! After the lesson, Marissa Nesbit, SCEA Director of Dance Education, engaged forum participants in a discussion of the instruction and its use in the professional development of educators in arts integration.

In a visual art integrated lesson, Andrea Gelfuso of Oscar J. Pope Elementary School in Lake Wales, Florida, engaged fourth grade students from Brown Academy by reading from a picture book. The session involved reading comprehension, creative writing and art appreciation.

Dr. Janet Barrett, author and music education professor at Northwestern University, presented the keynote address “The Curricular Imagination: Arts and the Interdisciplinary Mind.”

For more information about the forum and the Southeast Center, visit the center’s website.

Tanner’s 35-year career at the University began as an instructor in the Department of Human Ecology. Today Tanner is a Guerry Professor, awarded to faculty members on the basis of distinguished service to education through teaching, research, scholarship and contribution to the University. She holds the position of Dean of the College of Health, Education and Professional Studies. During Tanner’s tenure as dean, the Doctor of Education degree (Ed.D.) in Learning and Leadership was established as well as fifteen additional initiatives to benefit students.

Tanner serves on the national board of Kid Fitness, is a trustee of the Tennessee Aquarium, and sits on the boards of eight local nonprofits, including Allied Arts, United Way and the Community Foundation. She has responded to the needs of numerous boards seeking her expertise as an educator.

Tanner is a past chairman of the Academic Department Heads Council at UTC, is a graduate from Leadership Chattanooga and volunteers with Friends of the Festival.

Two UTC alumnae were also honored as Women of Distinction. They are:

• Kim Hudson White, president and Chief Executive Officer of Luken Holdings, president-elect of the UTC Alumni Board and a member of the executive board for the UT National Alumni Association.
• Nancy Collum, vice president of loan review at Northwest Georgia Bank. This alumnus has served the University in a variety of roles: as UTC Alumni Council president, vice president of the UT National Alumni Association, on the UTNAA board of governors and on the UTC Advisory Board for Accounting and Finance. She sat on the 1987 UT Presidential Search Advisory Committee, and served on the UC Foundation and Chancellor’s Roundtable.

The Council made accreditation decisions for 21 schools and now accredits 112 in the United States and one outside the country. The Council conducts voluntary reviews for schools with professional journalism and mass communications programs.

“The stamp of approval from the Accrediting Council on Education in Journalism and Mass Communications (ACEJMC) indicates that the UTC communication department meets the basic nine standards of quality,” said Dr. Kittrell Rushing, head of the Department of Communication. “To repeat a now much overused cliché, it does ‘take a village’ to meet the standards of accreditation quality.”

Rushing, who has served as department head for nearly 18 years, will step aside from that position next month.

“I sincerely cherish the support over my time as the department head from students, faculty, alumni, and professionals,” Rushing said. “WE have taken what was 18 years ago a small, unaccredited program with big dreams to a program, accredited, and recognized nationally as one of the better state university small programs.”

UTC’s communication curriculum prepares students to enter the professions related to journalism and mass communication. Through training in the liberal arts and sciences coupled with professional skills development, the program provides a foundation for success in an ethnically diverse and culturally varied environment.

For more information about Department of Communication, visit the website or call (423) 425-4400.

First row, left to right: Elizabeth Gailey, Betsy Alderman, Beka Bromley, Charlene Simmons, Kelly Griffin. Back, left to right: David Sachsman, Kit Rushing (not present for the photograph is Felicia McGhee-Hilt).

UTC communication students with Scrappy.

UTC alumnus Davan Maharaj was recently named Managing Editor of the Los Angeles Times. Maharaj had been the business editor at the newspaper since February 2007.

Maharaj was managing editor of the UTC student newspaper, the Echo in 1988. He graduated in 1989 with a double major in political science and communication. Maharaj received the master’s degree in law from Yale University.

In a blog titled “Readers Representative Journal” on the Los Angeles Times website, Editor Russ Stanton published this message in a piece called “Changes at the top.” He also mentions John Arthur, recently promoted to Executive Editor:

“In this key position, Davan will assume oversight of Foreign, National, Metro, Sports, Business, and Science — shaping coverage, deploying people and overseeing personnel decisions along with me and John. The editors of these sections will report to Davan. He will also supervise the formation of the new topic teams that we will be rolling out later this year.

One of Davan’s primary responsibilities will be to work with the section editors to keep the story pipeline to A1 and John, and the website and Meredith Artley, full of the great journalism we produce each day. He will report to me.

Davan’s outstanding management and editing skills make him the ideal person to take on this assignment. His broad range of experience will serve him and his new departments well. Working for The Times from Orange County, Los Angeles and East Africa, he reported with distinction in each of these areas.

Among the highlights from his more than 20 years of reporting was the six-part series “Living on Pennies,” his collaboration with photographer Francine Orr, which won the 2005 Ernie Pyle Award for Human Interest Writing. The series inspired readers to send tens of thousands of dollars to aid people and agencies working in Africa. Closer to home, Davan’s investigative piece about a Leisure World attorney who inherited millions of dollars in stock, land and other “gifts” from his clients changed California probate law.

Once Davan put down his notebook, he became an assistant editor in Foreign, helping supervise coverage around the world, and then served in Business, first as a deputy editor, then as section editor.

Under his leadership, Business refocused its coverage on consumer issues, producing a stream of A1 stories and a redesigned Sunday section that has been a big hit with readers. Business has been among the most advanced departments in improving our report on latimes.com, a crucial part of our success going forward, and has excelled at developing nontraditional ways of telling stories in print…Anyone who has worked closely with Davan knows him as a passionate advocate for good stories, and for the people who work hard to produce them. His energy and enthusiasm are infectious. There’s no question that we are engaged in serious challenges for our industry, but Davan manages to keep things upbeat and fun amid the daily pressures we face.”

The Chattanooga sports of wrestling and football produced single-year APR score improvements of 145 and 112 points respectively, both meeting NCAA benchmarks.

The APR was developed to better assess a team’s academic performance as opposed to the graduation rate calculation.  The system awards two points each term to student-athletes who meet academic-eligibility standards and who remain with the institution.  A team’s APR is the total points earned by the team at a given time divided by the total points possible.

“We have worked extremely hard with our coaching staffs and with our administrators to give them a better understanding of how this formula is calculated and how it can impact our programs,” Athletics Director Rick Hart said.  “We have initiated educational tools for our coaches and our student-athletes to assist in their academic successes and retention and are certainly proud of the advancement we have made from last year to this year.

“While we are pleased that our efforts have resulted in short-term success, this cannot be a one-time thing.  We must continue to be diligent in this area to ensure that our upward progress continues for all sports.”

The Athletics Department has taken several steps to improve its academic progress.  Those include: the development of a formal APR improvement plan with input from University faculty and staff;  participation in NCAA and Southern Conference training and educational seminars; meeting biannually with all student-athletes and providing guest speakers and seminars in education and career guidance; assigning a department representative to the Campus Retention Committee;  providing academic coaches to teams;  performing a closer monitoring system for current and incoming student-athlete academic progress and increasing its financial commitment to summer school and post-eligibility aid.

The UTC student-athlete graduation rate continues to be higher than that of the overall UTC student body.  May commencement included 27 student-athletes–seven former football players and five former wrestlers.

The APR calculates a multi-year figure over a four-year academic period with 925 points out of a possible 1,000 points being the benchmark.  In Tuesday’s public report, wrestling’s multi-year score rose to 883 and football’s rose to 855.

Retention also figures into the APR formula, and both these sports have been penalized over the last few years for student-athletes leaving the programs for various reasons.  In the case of the wrestling team, a coaching change after the 2005-06 season contributed greatly to a low score the following year.  The wrestling team earned a perfect APR score of 1,000 for fall 2007.

While both football and wrestling remain in the penalty phase, each program was given a slight reprieve from the NCAA due to the significant improvements each made over the course of the year.

CMU is ranked 12th overall in Ph.D. programs, 7th in the College of Engineering and 2nd in Computer Science and Engineering according to US News and World Reports. Not only did this prestigious institution choose Whitney– her husband, Jesse, a December 2007 UTC graduate will pursue his doctoral degree at CMU in Computation, Society, and Organization in the School of Computer Science.

“I will look at organizations, societies, companies, really any complex systems and work to better understand it through computational analysis and modeling,” Jesse said.

After he finishes his work at CMU, Jesse would like to find an industry or government research position before he moves into academia. His work has already been nationally published in an MSNBC.com story citing Jesse’s research in swarm intelligence. Read the article at http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/23888902/.

Moving to Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, will be a new experience for Whitney and Jesse, both natives of Chattanooga.

“This is going to be a major transition for the two of us. However, our experiences at UTC have shown us how to take advantage of every opportunity,” Whitney said.

Whitney’s past blends nicely with her plans for the future. In high school, she enjoyed entertaining others with stand-up comedy and improv. She played weddings and special events as a member of a string ensemble. Her artwork also provided a creative outlet.

“By day I may be a mild-mannered computer science student, but in my spare minutes I am honing my drawing skills through practice, classes, and countless online tutorials. Otherwise I am a very organized and neat individual, but my art materials are often strewn through every room of my house for easy access. I had always hoped for a career in Entertainment Technology, but I felt dwarfed by the competition,” Whitney said.

Career opportunities for Whitney will emerge as her graduate program schedules networking opportunities with prospective employers at Google, Microsoft, Electronic Arts, and Apple and a required internship.

“Many students graduate and then sign on with the company they have already formed a relationship with, though I was happy to learn that most students have several choices about where they end up,” Whitney said.

While Whitney calls the computer science program at UTC “solid,” and “getting better all the time,” she admits feeling initially conflicted with her decision.

“When I was first looking for an undergraduate institution, UTC wasn’t the first thing that came to mind. My siblings had both been accepted into Ivy League schools, and my educators at Girls Preparatory School definitely urged the student body to “aim high.” But I fell in love with the boy across the street, and decided that perhaps staying here and going to UTC didn’t sound that bad after all. Of course all of my friends were very skeptical. They worried that I wouldn’t be able to see out my full potential. I worried a bit, too. I blush to think of all that, remembering how naïve we all were about college… it’s a wonder that any of us ended up in the right place.

“The truth is that college is entirely what you make of it… whether you’re at Harvard or UTC. If you walk into your college determined to prove yourself and your abilities, then you will succeed. It’s as simple as that,” she said.

For Jesse, the size of the computer science department at UTC allowed him to better know his professors and allows professors devote more personal attention to students.

“UTC has all the resources needed to give you the opportunities that larger universities provide, without the cost. Professors at UTC are ready and waiting to mentor students and to help them to achieve their goals. For me, I can say with absolute certainty that I wouldn’t have the success that I am currently enjoying without my experience at UTC,” Jesse said.

The trusteeship committee of the University of Tennessee Board of Trustees will meet in Nashville Thursday, May 8. Read more…

The Alpha Scholastic Honor Society is one of the University’s oldest and most prestigious honor societies. Organized on the UTC campus in 1918 to recognize outstanding achievement. The Alpha Society elects new members annually from graduating seniors, faculty, administrators, distinguished alumni and community members.

This year’s new student initiates are: Tesha Adams, Joan Benefield, Whitney Black, Amy Bogard, Raj Brahmbhatt, Catherine Coffman, Natalie Counts, Kenneth Croft, Rachel DeVan, David Elliot, Cyril Fider, Tammy Fisher, Clay Higdon, , Linda Howerton, Lauren Jeffries, Amber Jones, Sarah Kennedy, Jamie King, Ronald Kuhns, Yoonji Lee, Heather Lemons, Laura Lomenick , Zachary McCool, Jessica Merchoff, Jeff Nastoff, Nelson Taylor, Ulyana Pugina, Drew Randolph, Whitney St. Charles, Karin Tillstrom, Daniel Varnell, Megan Clark Vaughn, Amanda Weaver, Christina Wells, and Andrew Wood.

New faculty members include: Dr. Ted Miller, Dr. Marcia Noe, Dr. Sarah Jo Sandefur, Dr. Chris Stuart, and Dr. Cecelia Wigal.

Linda Howerton was awarded the Ann Tinnon Scholarship.