Author: vermontnews

The University of Vermont was one of three institutions of higher education whose work to address high risk drinking and other substance misuse was honored with a Prevention Excellence Award at the ninth annual Campus Prevention Network Summit in Boston on June 12. The award was presented by EVERFI, Inc., a leading technology innovator.  

The Campus Prevention Network is a nationwide initiative of over 1,700 institutions dedicated to creating safer, healthier campus communities.

“While there is more work to do, the clear progress we’ve made in reducing high risk drinking at UVM, an issue that challenges all of higher education, is cause for celebration,” said Tom Sullivan, president of the University of Vermont. “I want to thank our staff, faculty and students for their hard work in bringing this important and prestigious award to our campus.”

To be eligible for the award, colleges and universities in the Campus Prevention Network completed the Alcohol Diagnostic Inventory, a comprehensive research-based assessment of an institution’s prevention programs and practices grounded in a decade of peer-reviewed literature on best practices in prevention.  

Awardees were selected based on their Alcohol Diagnostic Inventory scores, Campus Prevention Network staff interviews with campus professionals and a careful review of each institution’s effort.

The final three awardees were chosen from a field of 85 schools who filled out the ADI – placing UVM among the top 3.5 percent of all those who applied. Villanova University and Endicott College were also honored in the high risk drinking and other substance misuse category.

Combination of programs leads to clear progress

UVM’s efforts to reduce high risk drinking have resulted in progress in a number of areas:

• Binge drinking rates, defined as five drinks for males or four drinks for females within a two-hour period, declined by approximately a third over the last five years.  
• The number of students requiring medical attention as a result of excessive drinking declined by over fifty percent during the same period.
• Calls for service for issues including noise, intoxication and disorderly conduct by the Burlington Police Department to traditionally student neighborhoods declined by one third over the last three years.

“We’ve seen that a combination of factors – including transparency in naming the impact of high risk drinking on the safety, health and successful engagement of our students; determination; and using interventions grounded in science – can result in real progress on this issue,” said Dr. Jon Porter, director of UVM’s Center for Health and Wellbeing.

“While it’s gratifying to see this progress, we’re also clear about the importance of continued focus and hard work over the long term,” Porter said.

Actions UVM has taken over the past five years aimed at reducing high risk drinking include the following, organized by constituent group: 

University-wide

• Joining the National College Health Improvement Project, a group of higher education peers who shared strategies and interventions to reduce high risk drinking.
• Creation of the President’s Committee on Alcohol, Cannabis, and Other Drugs, composed of 70 staff, faculty, students and community partners. The group developed an action plan for addressing drug and alcohol use on campus and established a data collection/analysis infrastructure.

Parents

• Engaging parents in addressing students about the impact of high risk drinking and substance use on the quality of life at college. Parents are informed about high risk drinking as an important issue affecting their student’s safety and engagement and are encouraged to have a conversation with their student about choices related to alcohol.

Students

• Aggressive institution of alcohol-free programming for students during higher risk events/weekends.
• Review and revision of UVM’s judicial sanctions for violation of alcohol/cannabis policy in accord with best educational practices.
• Institution of BASICS (Brief Alcohol Screening and Intervention for College Students), initially for mandated students and now being used proactively with specific student groups.   
• Reduction of the turnaround time from violation of alcohol policy to adjudication in campus judicial system.
• Institution of universal screening for the misuse of alcohol and other substances (SBIRT) in the University’s primary care office. Placement of a behavioral health position in the primary care office, designed to ensure a “warm handoff” from clinician to further evaluation or referral for treatment.
• Launch of the Wellness Environment in 2014, a substance free on-campus residence hall and learning community that incentivizes healthy student choices. Enrollment has increased from 80 to 1,200. 

Faculty

• Survey and focus groups carried out by dean of the Honors College to assess faculty perspective on alcohol, cannabis and other drug abuse.
• Revision of academic calendar to move reading days to the weekend and assist in maintaining academic focus during finals.

Burlington community

• Mapping of five types of Burlington Police Department “calls for service” related to alcohol in the city’s Area C, where the highest density of students resides. 
• Weekly review of data, visits to residents of problem units, houses, streets by a team consisting of BPD, UVM, code enforcement.
• Communication with landlords of problem units reminding them that they are accountable for issues caused by tenants. 

“With so much recent emphasis on the shortcomings in campus prevention and response efforts, EVERFI aims to shift the narrative by highlighting campuses doing exemplary work,” said Rob Buelow, EVERFI vice president of prevention education.

“The Prevention Excellence Awards give us the opportunity to share and celebrate the tremendous commitment institutions are making and continue to make in comprehensive, data-driven, evidence-based and researched informed prevention efforts to build communities that encourage students to thrive,” he said.

Source: UVM News

Nicolas Fabien-Ouellet, a Master’s degree student in UVM’s Food Systems Graduate Program, has been all over the news recently, both in his native Canada and in the U.S.

The cause of the media’s feeding frenzy? An unlikely Quebeçois concoction made of french fries, gravy and cheese curds called poutine, which Fabien-Ouellet says has been the victim of cultural appropriation.

Once mocked by Canadians as declassé junk food favored by the lower strata of Quebec’s French-speaking community, poutine is now routinely celebrated as Canada’s national dish. That transformation absorbs, dilutes and ultimately weakens the culture of the Quebeçois minority that created it, Fabien-Ouellet contends. 

Poutine’s elevation in status and its cultural implications had been of interest to Fabien-Ouellet, a Montreal resident with an undergraduate degree in bio-resource engineering from McGill University, for some time. 

But it was an event in Washington, D.C. several months after he started at UVM that really piqued his scholarly curiosity. 

Poutine was on the menu – presented as an emblematic Canadian dish – when Justin Trudeau, Canada’s new prime minister, visited with then President Barack Obama in March 2016.

“I was very curious about how poutine got to the White House” during an official Canadian state visit, Fabien-Ouellet says.

He began tracking poutine references in Canadian and U.S. print and online media, on TV shows and radio talk shows. “Everywhere I could find people talking about poutine, they were presenting it as Canadian.”

In search of a substantive topic for his first major paper in the program, this one seemed perfect. His advisors agreed. They liked the final product so much, they encouraged him to submit the paper to a journal for publication.

In December, Poutine Dynamics appeared in the peer-reviewed, open-access journal CuiZine: The Journal of Canadian Food Cultures, and Fabien-Ouellet was invited to present the paper at the Congress of the Humanities and Social Sciences at Ryerson University in Toronto. 

Then all heck broke loose.

A leading Canadian newspaper, The National Post, interviewed Fabien-Ouellet and published the first story. Radio Canada wasn’t far behind. VICE, the online culture magazine, and the Huffington Post came shortly after, then a host of live TV and radio shows, then Seven Days and Vermont Public Radio in Vermont.

“I knew that the concept of cultural appropriation would be of interest, but I could not have predicted that I would have to wake up every morning to a live interview show or go to live TV or do interviews over the phone for a week nonstop,” he says.

All told, more than 30 stories on his paper have appeared to date.

Far from being bothered, Fabien-Ouellet is grateful for the attention. “I’m just happy that the findings of the research are getting to the general public and don’t just stay in scholarly circles,” he says.

One important question is left unaddressed in his paper, however. What’s the best poutine in the Burlington area?

“The Mule Bar is good,” he says of the popular Winooski watering hole, adding that he hasn’t tried all of the Queen City’s offerings.

“But always, the best poutine is the one you share with your friends.”

And ascribe to its true cultural origins. 

Source: UVM News

Two of the most important roles in Kate McCann’s life—high school math teacher and mom—recently came together as she helped her seventh-grade daughter solidify her skills in, uh, a certain subject. Some extra work in the evenings helped her turn the corner, and McCann ’96 G’98 was gratified to hear her daughter say on the way to school one morning in May, “You know, mom, the more I understand, the more fun it gets.”

Helping her students at U-32 High School in East Montpelier reach that magical turning point is what it’s all about for the 2017 Vermont Teacher of the Year. “It’s true for everyone,” she says. “We have a lot more fun when we see progress. It takes practice, but students have to truly believe that they can work harder and turn those corners. I think that’s one of our biggest challenges in the classroom right now.”

Before she was a teacher herself, or was even considering becoming one, McCann learned how a good math teacher instills confidence from Ken Golden, UVM professor of mathematics who retired in 2016.  McCann remembers being deeply challenged by the exams in his high-level math courses, but she soldiered on, “showed her work,” as they say.

Regardless of whether her answers were correct, Golden praised the thoroughness and insight he detected. “This is really great. You’re a superb math student,” was Golden’s overriding message.  “What do you mean? I didn’t get any mathematical answer right,” McCann recalls thinking.

“Now, what I take with me into my teaching is there is more than one way to get a right answer—it is about the process, not the product. Sometimes it takes pulling that kid aside, finding a special time, sitting down and looking at things together to really draw out what a student knows and can do.”

As a UVM senior, McCann put a couple of openings in her class schedule to use in exploring education courses, which would provide the spark of her evolution from math major to math teacher. Lia Cravedi, senior lecturer in the College of Education and Social Services, placed McCann into field experience at Burlington High School. Coupled with later experience via AmeriCorps, McCann knew she’d found her calling. “I knew at that point that I wanted to be a teacher. I wanted to make connections with young people and really try to help them realize their potential.”

McCann is dedicated to pushing herself to continually learn and improves as a teacher. That means achieving national board certification, videotaping her class, writing reflections about her teaching, serving on the board of the Vermont Council of Teachers of Mathematics. “I’m always looking for the next thing,” she says. That next thing included a #observeme social media campaign that invited fellow teachers to attend one of her classes and offer critique. “It’s scary,” McCann admits. “Scary to ask for that feedback and not know what I’m going to get in return.”

Scary, but no more so than what her students face when confronted with this thing called algebra, and being able to relate as a learner ultimately makes her a better teacher. “That’s what feeds me. How do I reach more kids? How do I make the biggest difference and impact on their lives in the short time that I have with them?” McCann says.

In April, she traveled to the White House to be honored together with the other top teachers from states across the nation. Media coverage noted that many of the honorees felt slighted by President Trump, who did not give the ceremony the attention of recent presidents. McCann concurs that it was an odd encounter in many ways. But she also found affirmation in her fellow dedicated teachers at the White House and a visit with Sen. Patrick Leahy in his office. “I love that man, love our state, love my profession, love my students,” she says.

Source: UVM News

The Internet was abuzz for the 2017 Scripps National Spelling Bee this week, and for good reason: The impressive 291 spellers who entered the competition Tuesday are among the top 0.000026 percent of the more than 11 million students who participated in bees around the country.

Ananya Vinay, a 12-year-old from Fresno, California, won the contest after correctly spelling “marocain,” a dress fabric.

Fans also celebrated another fixture of the bee on social media: UVM classics professor Jacques Bailly, official pronouncer for 15 years running. See what the Twittersphere had to say about Dr. Bailly, 1980 bee champion, as the finals aired on ESPN.

 

Source: UVM News

This week, UVM professor of classics Dr. Jacques Bailly assumes his post as official pronouncer of the Scripps National Spelling Bee. Bailly, who was bee champion in 1980, is in his 15th year as pronouncer after having served 12 years as associate pronouncer.

You can catch Bailly and the bee live on national television Wednesday, May 31 and Thursday, June 1.

• Preliminary Rounds: Wednesday, 8 a.m. –  6 p.m. (ESPN3 and WatchESPN)
• Finals, Part 1: Thursday, 10 a.m. – 2 p.m. (ESPN2)
• Finals, Part 2: Thursday 8:30 p.m. – 10:30 p.m. (ESPN) 

Among the 291 spellers competing for the coveted title of bee champion is Vermont native Lucinda Maybelle Storz, an eighth-grade student at Thaddeus Stevens School in Lyndonville, who’s making her third appearance at the competition. Another notable speller: kindergartener Edith Fuller, a six-year-old from Tulsa, Oklahoma, the youngest-ever bee contestant. 

Follow UVM on Twitter for live updates from the bee.

 

Source: UVM News