Faculty publish, perform and direct during spring semester

Pitt-Bradford faculty members published, performed and directed during the first semester of 2018.

Dr. Jonathan Chitiyo, assistant professor of special education, and Dr. Wayne Brinda, associate professor of education, teamed up to research and publish a paper about the practice of co-teaching.

Co-teaching involves two teachers in teaching a group of diverse students, including those with disabilities. The faculty members developed their own survey to determine how prepared teachers are for such a collaboration.

Chitiyo and Brinda found that while most teachers were open to the practice and understood what it was, they would benefit from additional training in order to practice co-teaching.

The faculty members used the information to adjust the training they provide for teacher candidates. In addition, they modeled the practice through teaching collaboratively themselves.

Their paper about the study, “Teacher preparedness in co-teaching,” was published in the journal Support for Learning.

Chitiyo also published several other articles: “Factors predicting the sustainability of the school-wide positive behavior support model” in Preventing School Failure, “Factors that may hinder the implementation of the school-wide positive behavior intervention support model” in Journal of the American Academy of Special Education Professionals, and “Challenges to the use of co-teaching by teachers” in International Journal of Whole Schooling.

Dr. Joshua Groffman, assistant professor of music, has been busy performing and presenting scholarly work.

His composition for electric guitar, piano, violin and live electronics, “Notes from the end of an empire: summer,” was performed at the Electroacoustic Barn Dance Festival in Jacksonville, Fla.

He also saw the premiere of an original composition commissioned by Fordham University at the Voices Up! concert series in New York Series. “Laud-Absolution” was the name of the composition for soprano, baritone, harp and piano.

Also this spring, Groffman presented two papers at the College Music Society Northeast: “Home is a fire: competing representations of community in New York's Hudson Valley” and “Visual mapping as a tool to promote independent music making,” written in collaboration with Zora Wolfe.

This summer, Groffman will travel throughout New York State for an ongoing book project on soundscapes of the Hudson Valley.

Art instructor Rick Minard had a solo exhibition this spring at the Crary Art Gallery in Warren, exhibiting the woven paintings for which he is known.

“In my newest endeavor, I decided to return to the (human) figure as the centerpiece of my woven paintings. But instead of exploring relationships, as in my previous work, I wanted to explore the effect of light and shadows,” he said.

Writing instructor Karen Bell has published four pieces recently: “Jagged Space” in the social activism magazine The Seventh Wave; “How to Bake and Crumble a Virtuous Woman” in Harpur Palate, the literary magazine of Binghamton University; “Art Exposure” in Still Point Arts Quarterly; and “Price for Five Minutes” in Flash Fiction Magazine.

Dr. Hashim Yousif, professor of physics, also published during the spring term. His paper “The differential equation of an arbitrary reflecting surface” appeared in the European Journal of Physics.

Dr. Kevin Ewert, professor of theater, directed the world premiere of “Master Builder” by Tamara Kissane for Little Green Pig Theatrical Concern in Hillsborough, N.C. The play is based on Henrik Ibsen's “The Master Builder.”