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Supporting Creative Teaching
director. It doesn’t get any better than that!”
Sage Foundation Supports Artistic Excellence
Artwork by Jamie Good
A $100,000 gift from the Sage Foundation has established an “Artistic
Excellence” fund for the visual and performing arts at Siena Heights.
Art, music and theatre faculty can apply to the fund for support of creative projects designed to enhance their individual craft and artistry
as well as their teaching. The program aims to support artistic
activity that is imaginative and experimental, and goes beyond
the traditional notion of faculty development.
“This is an exciting concept,” said President Artman,
“and can help arts faculty explore a new idea, practice
a new technique, prepare a new composition, enhance a
class, and grow as artists and teachers.” This campaign
commitment from Melissa Sage Fadim and the Sage Foundation supports the academic programs component of The
Campaign for Siena Heights University: Education With a
Mission.
wouldn’t have gotten my Ph.D. if you hadn’t
given me the right tools.’ And, I’ve had those
calls.”
As a youth, Carl planned to be a physician.
By the time he was in high school, he had
been at the bedside of three people who
died, and worked as an externist with hospital patients. It wasn’t until he was a senior in
college that he gave teaching a thought.
“At the hospital, I noticed there was a lot
of pain caused by physicians in the name of
treatment or to diagnose. It bothered me,” he
remembers. It was a medical school admissions dean who changed Carl’s career path.
“We talked about my experiences and he
said ‘you don’t want to be a doctor, you
want to teach doctors.’”
Susan Matych-Hager
(Music)
For Susan Matych-Hager, doing her job is
like living a dream. “I think I would do this
even if I wasn’t paid,” she says.
“I wake up and say, ‘I am one of the really
lucky people—I get to do what I love.’” And
that love inspires her students. “The singers
know whether you are excited about something. They’re looking for that excitement
and want to be touched by it.”
In music, Sue says, magic happens “when
everything comes together and all of a
sudden there’s this sound that’s greater than
any one of us individually. It transcends us
and that transcendence is magical.” Best
of all is “when students accomplish some-
thing that they didn’t think they could do,
or achieve something they’ve really strived
for,” she says. “Those are special moments
for me both as a musician and a teacher.”
Trudy McSorley
(Theater & Speech Communication)
“Teaching is a performing art,” says Trudy
McSorley, who directs Siena’s child drama
program as well as teaches in the theatre
department. “Once a teacher walks into a
classroom with students, something is transferred. We process the work together.”
For Trudy, teaching is a “collaboration of
drama and teaching. That process is particularly exciting at Siena, because our
students are able to take all of that experience—what we
do in theater and
in teacher education—and put the
two together. We
believe they will
be
profoundly
different teachers,” because of
Chris Reising, Art
that experience.
Saleem Peeradina
(English)
A class with Saleem Peeradina is about
more than English and literature. It’s about
exploring the world, the external as well as
the internal world. Saleem uses his reading
and writing assignments to expose students
to different cultures and countries and controversial issues. By “turning minds upside
down and inside out,” he challenges his students to examine prevailing conventional
ideas.
He also encourages students to travel and
spend time outside the U.S. if possible.
“How you define your boundaries affects
what is available to you,” he says. “There’s
nothing to stop you from thinking of the
whole world as your neighborhood.
“When I was 8 years old, I stood at the edge
of the Arabian Sea and wondered, ‘What is
beyond that horizon?’ I set a goal then. I took
myself across H