The Steinhardt School will recognize its graduating students at Baccalaureate, Valedictory, and Doctoral ceremonies this year.
Representing the graduating class at this year’s Baccalaureate and Valedictory speakers are Joseph Kopriva, far right, from the Department of Teaching and Learning and Kristen Ranieri, center, from the Department of Applied Psychology. Robert Moeller, right, of the Department of Applied Psychology is the speaker at Steinhardt’s Doctoral Convocation.
As part of the sixth annual NYU Steinhardt Music Technology Open House, the program will host its first music recording competition, sponsored by Avid Technologies, Saturday May 12 at the NYU Steinhardt James L. Dolan Recording Studio, located at 35 West 4th St.between Greene St. and Washington Sq. East.
“NYU students will have an excellent opportunity to have their work critiqued by several professional sound engineers and producers,” said Paul Geluso, master teacher in Steinhardt’s Music Technology program. “We will be holding listening and critique sessions with GRAMMY award-winning recording engineers Brandie Lane and Jim Anderson who will listen and critique the finalists. This is such a unique and exciting opportunity for students and we are so happy that Avid has agreed to partner with us.”
Student critiques will begin at 4:00 p.m. and are open to the public. Categories in the competition include: acoustic recording, studio recording, electronic, and sound for the moving image. Winners in each category will be announced at the Music Technology Open House award ceremony later that evening.
The annual Music Technology Open House is an event for students to share the work they are doing with each other and the general public. Topics include electronic music composition, interface and instrument software and hardware design, audio for games, interactive audio, recording projects, sound for video and the web, audio/video pieces, sound art and installations, research papers in music informatics, immersive audio, music cognition, acoustics, and many others.
In March, Ana Fernandez, Emma Exley, and I travelled to Suhareka, a small town in Kosovo, to participate in an arts-based community development project.
We spent a week teaching at the Fallbach-Haus, a community cultural center that provides a variety of educational activities and classes for children and youth in the local area. Fellbach-
Haus programs focus on peace and reconciliation in response to the former war in the Balkans. During that war in the late 1990s, 90% of the houses were damaged or destroyed in Suhareka and a significant portion of the population lost family members and loved ones. More than ten years later there are still plenty of reminders of the war in Suhareka. It was interesting to visit a community that is still in the process of redefining their collective identity in the wake of such a tragic event.
Teaching at Fellbach-Haus was a unique and exciting experience because the community is committed to the arts and culture as an economic focus for the region. Throughout the week we implemented a variety of workshops to engage children and youth in exercises in animation. We were particularly interested in exploring the possibilities of cultural and community development through the arts by introducing art and design skills that students could potentially use for personal growth as well as future economic benefit. We also aimed to balance play and proficiency by providing students with opportunities to approach familiar media, such as drawing and painting, in new and different ways. In this sense, we also hoped to encourage critical as well as creative thinking.
During our week at Fellbach-Haus we taught three separate classes – one more advanced group with students ages 15-19, one youth group with students ages 14-16, and one group of younger students ages 7-12.
With the younger students we used popular Claymation cartoon Wallace and Gromit to engage them in a series of playful and imaginative stop-motion animation projects. With the older students we used the work of South African artist William Kentridge as a source of inspiration. Kentridge uses animation and drawing as a tool for exploring the resilience of memory in the face of destruction. (Like post-apartheid South Africa, Suhareka is still in the process of recovering cultural memories that were suppressed by military and political powers.) In just a few short, days, the older students created individual narratives, completed a series of drawings, and then photographed and edited their own animation videos. At the end of the week Fellbach-Haus premiered Suhareka’s first animation film festival.
Robert McCallum (PhD ’07) , a faculty member in Steinhardt’s art education program and Cindy Maguire (PhD ’08) of Adelphi University’s art education program, originally invited us to participate in the programs at Fellbach-Haus. Maguire and McCallum began this work in 2010, organizing annual workshops via collaborative curriculum design with Refki Gollopeni, artist and resident arts educator, and Mejtim Bytyqi and Ismet Suka, Directors at the Fellbach-Haus.
Refki Gollopeni says that this year’s workshop will be the inspiration for a larger project he will work on with students to tell the story of Suhareka through drawing and animation. Several of this year’s animations have also been submitted to Rotoball, a collaborative global animation project for secondary school students. Additionally, we hope to submit some of the animations to the Sharjah Children Biennial, an international celebration of children’s art hosted in the UAE.
Ana, Emma and I certainly hope to return to Suhareka next year with Maguire and McCallum to continue this project and develop new relationships with the cultural center.
Dana Helwick, Ana Fernandez, and Emma Exley are graduate students in Steinhardt’s Department of Art and Arts Professions program in art education.
(Photos: Ana Fernandez working with our advanced group of students. Teachers and students (left to right): Gresa Berisha, Diellza Elshani, Dana Helwick, Mirela Hoxha, Anita Ramshaj and Emma Exley)
The Players Club is gearing up for Grad Alley, NYU’s commencement eve celebration on Tuesday, May 15th. A student organization, whose home-base in Steinhardt vocal performance program, the Players Club’s provides performance opportunities to aspiring artists at NYU.
“For Grad Alley we are bringing together the members of the club and performing for all seniors graduating in the University. We’ll be singings Broadway classics that represent this special time of year and songs about prosperity in the future world ahead,” said Brian Hajjar, a Steinhardt freshman who is organizing the event.
The Players Club gives students an opportunity to direct, produce, choreograph, and stage manage productions. Recent productions include: Bat Boy, an Ideal Husband, Eurydice, Twelfth Night, The Real Thing, One Step Closer: The Music of Alan Menken, and Romeo and Juliet.
“The Players Club is running and thriving today because students and artists are overwhelmingly passionate about what they do. All we do is simply provide a place to start,” Hajjar said.
NYU Players will be performing at Grad Alley in E and L auditorium in Kimmel Center from 5-8pm.
Performing at Grad Alley are: Ben Bartels, Hayley Beigel, Rose Bisogno, Joe Concieson, Emily Crowley, Josh Greenblatt, Brian Hajjar, Michael Hajjar, Lauren Krause, Sarah Merten, Juliet Morris, Curtis Reynolds, Meyers Rhoad, Nikil Saboo, Jake Satterfield, Kaylee Verble, Megan Tischhauser.
Howard Schiffman, a visiting associate professor of environmental conservation education, took part in a UN side event sponsored by the Earth Child Institute during the United Nation’s Commission on Sustainable Development meeting on April 30, 2012. Current and former NYU Steinhardt teaching and learning students presented information about the “Global Action Classroom,” a project undertaken during their internships with the institute. The Earth Child Institute works to facilitate dialogue globally between children and policymakers on issues related to climate change, water, and environmental health.
Schiffman’s presentation was titled, “Environmental Education as a Tool to Achieve Sustainable Development.”
(Photo: Howard Schiffman, center.)
Gabriela Richard, a doctoral student in the Steinhardt’s educational communication and technology program, received the AAUW American Dissertation Fellowship to complete her dissertation titled, ”Understanding Gender, Context and Video Game Culture for the Development of Equitable Educational Games and Learning Environments.”
Richard’s dissertation seeks to understand the influence that player’s culture and gender has on learning.
“My interdisciplinary study is grounded in the learning sciences and informed by research on stereotype threat, school climate, game theory, social constructivism, and gender studies. It is an ethnographic investigation and mixed methods examination of how gender interacts with game culture, which ultimately hopes to inform equitable game design that is sensitive to social and contextual challenges in meeting learning outcomes with video games,” Richards said.
Richard received one of 58 dissertation fellowships awarded by AAUW this year.
The Center for Multicultural Education and Programs, a department in NYU’s Division of Students Affairs, has announced its 2012 Nia Awards. The Nia (Swahili word meaning purpose) recognize the achievements of members of the NYU community who promote diversity and social justice in their work for NYU and New York City communities.
W.E.B DuBois/ Nelson Mandela Commitment to Dialogue and Education Award
Maurice Shirley (Graduate)
Mahatma Gandhi/Rigoberta Menchu Tum Innovative Response Award
Lizza M Dauenhauer-Pendley (Undergraduate)
Urvashi Vaid/ Melinda Paras Inclusive Programming Award
Zaneta Rago (Graduate)
Faculty Award
According to the researchers, foot pain affects 15-37% of all people, and is particularly prevalent in women and older people.
“We found that wearing high heels preferentially increases the workload of certain muscles, and that some individuals seem to adapt to high heels more effectively than others,” Rao says. The study, funded by the American College of Rheumatology Research and Education Foundation, appears online in the Lower Extremity Review. Rao, a physical therapist, studies how and why movement can lead to foot pain.
(Photo: Smita Rao by Brady Galan.)
On April 27 – 29th, the NYU Forum on Theatre for Young Audiences (TYA) convened, “Which Way TYA? New Directions for Theatre for Young Audiences,” a three-day conference that took a broad look at the past, present, and future of the field through the eyes of its artists, directors, writers, and audiences.
The conference offered presentations by an all star-cast of theatre luminaries, including Dr. Gerd Taube (Frankfurt, Germany), Dr. Manon van de Water (University of Wisconsin), Martin Drury (Irish Arts Council), Mary Rose Lloyd (New Victory, New York), Kim Peter Kovac (Kennedy Center, Washington DC), Peter C Brosius (CTC, Minneapolis), Roxanne Schroeder-Arce (U of Texas) and David Wood (London, England).
The event was curated by Tony Graham, visiting professor in in Steinhardt’s educational theatre program, and chair of the forum. Read On Art and ‘Ought:’ An Interview with Educational Theatre Maverick Tony Graham.
(Photo credit: The Little One and the Sea of Letters, Trusty Sidekick Theater Company. Photo: Leah Reddy.)
“Our ability to love and to live with a sense of psychic wholeness hinges on our ability to resist wedding ourselves to the gender binaries of patriarchy,” writes Carol Gilligan. In Joining the Resistance (Polity Books), Gilligan, an NYU University professor and Steinhardt professor of applied psychology, reflects on a lifetime of creative process and the evolution of her thinking about gender and human development. The author of In a Different Voice: Psychological Theory and Women’s Development (Harvard, 1982), Gilligan’s work on girls’ psychic development laid the groundwork for a new understanding of female development.
Learn more about Carol Gilligan’s work in In Studies Across Disciplines, Social Scientists Challenge Deeply Held Beliefs about Gender.
