Professional Announcements

David Walls, Sociology, presented a paper entitled "Marching Song of the First Arkansas Colored Regiment:’ A Contested Attribution,” at the Arkansas Historical Association’s annual meeting in Little Rock on April 28, in the 50th anniversary year of the Little Rock High School integration crisis. The paper reviewed the evidence and resolved the rival claims of Sojourner Truth and Captain Lindley Miller to be the primary authors of the song, which has been recorded in the modern era by Pete Seeger, Tennessee Ernie Ford, and Sweet Honey in the Rock. His session, on Black Soldiers in Civil War Arkansas was held at Central High School, now a National Historical Site supervised by the National Park Service, as well as an active high school. Highlights of the program included a dinner at the Clinton Presidential Library and lunches at the Old Statehouse Museum and the Central High School cafeteria, the scene of a noted confrontation between black and white students in 1958. Walls paid tribute to Melba Pattillo Beals, one of the Little Rock Nine, who came to Santa Rosa to finish high school while living with foster parents SSU professor George McCabe and his wife Kay.

Jayne DeLawter, Education Emeritus, hosts a group of Taiwanese faculty and teachers for school visits in Sonoma County in August 2007. They will observe classrooms in two Petaluma elementary schools (Mary Collins and Penngrove) and consult with educators and students about constructivist and holistic teaching practices. This is the second delegation of Taiwanese professional educators DeLawter has organized since 2005.

In December 2006, she conducted a week of workshops at two Taiwan universities - National Taitung University and National Taipei University of Education. Participants included faculty members from departments of Education, English, Early Childhood, Language and Literature, and Chinese Literature & Language, student teachers from each institution, and local elementary and secondary teachers. The workshops focused on literacy development in first and second languages, children’s literature, and curriculum development. Featured in DeLawter’s presentations were lessons and projects of student teachers and mentor teachers at Mary Collins School in Petaluma and graduate students in the Reading/Language programs at SSU.

Stephen Norwick, Environmental Studies and Planning, has had a book published by Mellen Press entitled "The History of Metaphors of Nature: Science and Literature from Homer to Al Gore, Vol. 1 and 2." The volumes are a study of the history of metaphors that inform human understanding of the natural world. Each chapter in the book is a parallel longitudinal history of a word or phrase which represents the whole of nature, and which has influenced natural science and general literature, and especially North American Nature writing. Ironically, as natural science developed and enabled a technological society to destroy natural areas more and more rapidly, science strengthened the fundamental images of nature and was used by nature writers to encourage a revaluing of the natural world.