July 29, 2004
Day of Acadian Music and culture to be celebrated at StFX
ANTIGONISH, NS --- Saint Francis Xavier University in Antigonish is inviting everyone to attend a day of cultural exploration and celebration at the Keating Millennium Centre on Friday, August 6.
StFX University is celebrating our region's rich Acadian heritage with the toe-tapping tunes of "Louisiana's Rockin' fiddler," Waylon Thibodeaux. A fully licenced celebration of Cajun Acadian and Canadian Acadian music will begin with Thibodeaux's special guests, Cape Breton's Acadian Driftwood. Doors open at the Keating Millennium Centre in Antigonish at 8:00 p.m.
The Louisiana state fiddling champion's high-energy music is a mixture of Cajun with Zydeco and a pinch of New Orlean's sound, South Louisiana 'Swamp pop', a taste of country and a little rockin' roll. Thibodeaux began his professional career at age 13 and has performed in front of sold out crowds at festivals across North America. In tune with his Acadian heritage, Thibodeaux entertains audiences in both English and French.
That afternoon, Acadian musicians Weldon Boudreau, Gary Gallant and Michelle Boudreau-Smapson present an interactive workshop that will explore the culture of the Acadian people through their music, crafts, food and dancing. All are invited to attend the public workshop beginning at 1:00 p.m. in the Keating Millennium Centre conference rooms.
Shawn Pitre will compare and contrast the music of two cousin cultures based on historical, cultural and linguistic sources in a multi-media presentation. This free public workshop begins at 4:00 p.m. in the Keating Millennium Centre conference rooms.
The KMC is host to other activities during the Congrès mondial acadien 2004 celebration. There will be six family reunions on campus with StFX's new apartment-style residences providing accommodations for the families. Public workshops educating and celebrating Acadian heritage will be held in the Keating Millennium Centre conference rooms throughout the celebration.
Irene Bernard of Saint Francis Xavier University's School of Education says she is excited about the potential of the event to educate and celebrate our rich Acadian culture at StFX.
"StFX has a long history of links with the Acadian community and we wanted give everyone the opportunity to learn about and celebrate our rich Acadian culture. It is a great chance to enjoy fabulous Acadian music and attend public workshops that explore the culture of the Acadian people."
The day promises to be a terrific celebration that will continue to support the Acadian connection at StFX with event proceeds from the Acadian Music Rocks event supporting a bursary for a student of Acadian heritage entering the B. ED program specializing in French Education at StFX.
For all event information, please contact the Keating Millennium Centre Box Office at (902) 867-3304 or 1-866-259-8169 or visit the website at www.keatingcentre.com and click on "Events Calendar".
July 29, 2004
StFX Grad Kathleen Brennan awarded $2,500 Dietitians of Canada Scholarship
ANTIGONISH, NS --- Kathleen Brennan, a 2004 StFX University Human Nutrition honours graduate from Fredericton, NB, has been selected as the 2004 recipient of the $2,500 Dietitians of Canada (DC) Undergraduate Internship Scholarship sponsored by Kraft Canada Inc.
Kathleen has been accepted into the Integrated Dietetic Internship program offered through StFX, to be completed by spring 2005.
While at StFX, Kathleen has been actively involved in many organizations, including Dietitians of Canada, the Canadian Association of Foodservice Professionals (CAFP), the Nova Scotia Nutrition Council, and the StFX Human Nutrition Society. Kathleen considers volunteer involvement to be an integral part of her life. Most recently, she has been volunteering for the campus food bank and at a local bakery, which provides meaningful work for people with special needs. Previous awards received include the 2004 Dairy Farmers of Canada undergraduate award, NSERC undergraduate student research awards, two CAFP student awards sponsored by EcoLab, and New Brunswick Youth Volunteer awards.
In the future, she intends to pursue graduate studies in nutrition, hopefully with a focus on cardiovascular health. Kathleen says: "I am extremely honoured to be recognized by DC and look forward to an exciting career in the field of dietetics. I would like to thank DC and Kraft Canada for this award and the encouragement it brings."
This annual scholarship of $2,500 sponsored by Kraft Canada Inc. is awarded to a DC student member, presently enrolled in a dietetic internship, to help support his or her internship studies. Selection is based on academic excellence, personal merit and potential to advance the dietetic profession.
July 29, 2004
StFX welcomes Lynne Murphy as University Librarian
ANTIGONISH, NS --- StFX University is pleased to welcome Lynne Murphy as University Librarian, effective July 1, 2004, Dr. Ron Johnson, Academic Vice-President and Provost has announced.
Ms. Murphy is responsible for the operation of the Angus L. Macdonald Library, which has a staff of 45 including nine professional librarians.
She comes to StFX most recently from the University of Prince Edward Island where she was head librarian for six years. She is a graduate of McGill University, including master's degrees in Library and Information Systems as well as in Islamic Studies.
"I'm really happy to be here," Ms. Murphy, who has an obvious passion for her job, noted in an interview from her office at the Angus L. Macdonald Library.
She says she enjoys not only the heritage and tradition of the StFX campus, but its relatively small size, which enables staff to reach people quickly. She's also quick to point out that the library has access to as many data bases as many larger universities creating a more level playing field for our researchers.
"Libraries are very interesting places," she says. "They're going through so much change." Part of this change has come with the advent of the Internet and various data bases which are presenting an added challenge since patrons feel they no longer have to come to the library to access services. Knowledge is becoming so complex, that libraries have to become learning communities themselves, she says, to ensure staff can provide expertise and teach what they offer. "What I'm looking for is to build a learning community in response to what the faculty and students need, so it's an exciting time."
Ms. Murphy was born in Halifax and as a child moved with her family to Montreal. She worked for about 20 years at McGill as a librarian in technical services. Her career took her next to Leeseburg, Virginia to help open a small academic institute in Islamic Studies.
She returned to the Maritimes, first to PEI and now home to Nova Scotia. She says she is pleased to be back in Atlantic Canada in part because of her love of the sea, sailing, photography and beachcombing. Her other interests have seen her volunteer with the PEI Storytelling Festival, tutor young children in Arabic, and teach cataloguing at Concordia.
Dr. Johnson says StFX is fortunate to have been able to attract a senior librarian of Lynne Murphy's stature to the staff.
The University Librarian has senior administration responsibilities and is an ex-offico member of Senate. Ms. Murphy replaces Rita Campbell who was University Librarian for 10 years, overseeing the digitization of the extensive holdings.
July 28, 2004
StFX Researcher, Institute, Looking At How Babies And Children Develop
ANTIGONISH, NS --- "I've just been tricked," StFX University psychology professor Tara Callaghan says with a broad smile as she walks from her research lab into her office. "It's just what I hoped would happen."
Minutes earlier, she had been in her lab with her assistant and a five-year-old girl. She had told the child she was looking forward to playing with a particular toy when she returned. When Dr. Callaghan left the room, her assistant asked the girl if she would like to play a trick, and move the pictures on the front of the boxes that indicated what was inside. Then she asked the girl where she thought Dr. Callaghan would look for the toy when she returned.
The child picked the box containing the picture of Dr. Callaghan's favorite toys, not the box where they actually were, indicating she understood that Dr. Callaghan would use the picture to help remember where her toys where.
"The child at five starts to think of what's in my mind," she explains. "The milestone is they start to think that other people have thoughts and beliefs. Up until that point, their view of the other's world is really coloured by their own knowledge and experience."
She says a child of three, for example, will almost always pick the box where the toys really are, and where the child knows they are even though the picture on the front is deceiving, while the five-year-old will believe the person will think it's in the box that has the appropriate picture on the front.
This major social cognitive achievement is the understanding that people act based on their perception of reality, rather than reality itself.
It's the type of research that fascinates Dr. Callaghan, the director of the Centre for Research on Culture and Human Development (CRCHD) at StFX.
This interdisciplinary institute is dedicated to research relevant to infant and child development across cultures of the world with an aim to use the knowledge and tools from many disciplines to come to an understanding of all the forces that affect children's development.
With the support of HRDC and SSHRC, she and her colleagues have been looking at what happens to babies in their early years that helps to prepare them to become part of their bigger family, community and culture. Together with 14 youth international interns, they have looked at the development of babies and children in seven countries: Canada, Grenada, Peru, Samoa, Japan, Thailand and India.
Their research looks at the first five years of development, from when babies start to look at the world of objects and other people until they start to look behind the surface, thinking about what is in the mind of others. Although there are many differences between the cultures studied, the preliminary findings suggest basic similarities in the milestones of early development. "We have found that imitation may be higher in one country, but children in all countries do it around the same age," she says.
"Although adults here in Canada may do a lot of play with children, this was almost never found in other cultures. Mostly children played with their older siblings. In spite of this, children in all settings showed a similar effect of the nature of the toys they played with: there were higher levels of symbolic play when we gave them toys that resembled what they represented and lower levels when the toys did not have an obvious link to anything."
Some of the other questions addressed in the research include how babies and children are helped by others to understand symbols, how they imitate others, how they relate to familiar people and strangers, and how they use information from others to help them learn about the world.
Dr. Callaghan is now analyzing the large amount of information they've gathered on children's development, including parents' ideas on what's important in this development. In the future she plans to focus on studies of a variety of forms of symbolic development (language, gesture, visual, play) to get closer to an understanding of the role that the child's own cognitive systems play in comparison to the role that support from others play in this most complex and ancient of human activities, coming to be a symbol user.
July 26, 2004
Humanities in Medicine
Anne Simpson to be artist-in-residence at Dal's Medical Humanities Program
ANTIGONISH, NS --- Antigonish writer Anne Simpson's career path will take an interesting turn this fall when she will have a chance to experience the connection between literature and medicine.
Simpson, the former coordinator of StFX University's Writing Centre, has been invited to be artist-in-residence at Dalhousie University's Medical Humanities Program for the fall of 2004.
"This is a two-month residency for artists, writers, or musicians, funded by the Canada Council and by the Dalhousie Medical School to allow an artist (in the broad sense of the term) to work closely with medical students," says Simpson, who will teach a course at StFX in the winter/spring term.
The residency was established by Dr. Jock Murray to offer medical students a more humane way of thinking about medicine. Since 1990 -- when it began with Robert Pope giving informal presentations about the way his own experience with cancer had informed his art -- many artists, writers, and musicians have been in residence. Writers have included Glen Downie, Carol Sinclair, and storyteller Linda Clarke; visual artists have included Verle Harrop, Heather Spears, Renée Forrestall, and Jeffrey Burns.
"Since I'll be working on a third book of poetry that has to do with the portrayal of the body during the Renaissance (particularly in terms of da Vinci's anatomical studies), I was interested in applying to be an artist-in-residence," Simpson says.
"I'll be guiding students who want to write, or who may be interested in motivating patients to write, and at the same time I'll be engaged in my own work."
July 13, 2004
StFX nursing prof nets grant for research on child and youth services
ANTIGONISH, NS - Looking at ways to help improve services for children and youth in eastern Nova Scotia has netted a StFX nursing professor a substantial doctoral grant.
Charmaine McPherson has received a $40,060 doctoral student research award from the Nova Scotia Health Research Foundation (NSHRF). The presentation was made July 13 at a press conference in Halifax.
"It's an honour to receive the first one associated with StFX," Prof. McPherson says.
"It's recognition of the calibre of my work, and to me it's recognition of the work that needs to be done for children and families in the province. The foundation is recognizing that."
During the press conference, Antigonish MLA Angus MacIsaac recognized her achievement. "In particular, as the MLA for Antigonish, I would like to celebrate the success of one researcher in particular," he said. "Charmaine is with the School of Nursing at St. Francis Xavier University - and is the first graduate student award recipient from StFX. StFX, of course, is known for the high calibre of its students - and its graduates. On behalf of all of us here today - and all of us who sport an X ring - I would ask Charmaine to stand and be recognized.
"Charmaine's research project will explore the factors that support and inhibit child health networks, developed to address children's services options. That exploration can have important ramifications for all of us."
Networking child services is a fairly new phenomenon, Prof. McPherson says. Currently a number of organizations ranging from school boards and child welfare to mental health and probation services are working together. "It's the whole idea of integrating services," she explains.
"Children's services are so complex. Usually when you have a child with high needs, they usually use multiple services. It can be difficult to communicate (between organizations).
"It bridges that, and from a policy perspective, we can get together and see where the best place to spend the money is, and what's best for the kids and families we serve.
"To do the best, we have to work together."
In her research, she will look at understanding how this network develops and achieves its mandate.
Prof. McPherson has been a member of the StFX School of Nursing since 2001, and had been with StFX's distance nursing program as a consultant and contract professor since 1990.
She worked five years as the director of the Network for Children and Youth of Eastern Nova Scotia (NCYES), and has also worked as a family therapist in several hospitals.
She completed her undergraduate degree in nursing from StFX and a master's of science with a clinical specialty in mental health nursing from Boston College. She's currently completing her Ph.D. at McMaster University.
Friday, July 9, 2004
$200,000 gift from TD Bank Financial Group jazzes up Music Program at St. Francis Xavier University
Donation to provide Jazz Studies Program with student bursaries, new instruments, and enhance jazz library collection
ANTIGONISH, NS - St. Francis Xavier University is pleased to announce that earlier today, TD Bank Financial Group (TDBFG) presented a donation of $200,000 to enhance the university's unique Jazz Studies Program.
The donation will create two annual incentive scholarships which will enable students with exceptional promise to enter the program. The gift will also allow the Jazz Studies Program to improve its offerings to students through the purchase of badly needed musical instruments, including baby grand pianos. Additionally, the funds will allow the program to expand its current library holdings of important jazz literature and CD collections.
"Today's announcement builds upon TD's commitment to support youth and education in Canada through exceptional programs such as the Jazz Studies Program at StFX," said Tim Hockey, Executive Vice President of TD Canada Trust. "We're extremely pleased to support the work StFX has done to further music education by providing options for students who want to pursue the jazz music genre. I'm confident that many more graduates of the StFX Jazz Studies Program will become the next stars of the TD Canada Trust Atlantic Jazz Festival for years to come."
"TD's substantial gift is a real boost to the Jazz Studies Program, one that will help increase student accessibility through program bursaries while helping renew essential resources such as instruments and library holdings," said Dr. Sean Riley, President of StFX. "We are proud of our talented music faculty, and of our alumni, some of whom rank among Canada's greatest musicians. We are pleased to join with TD in investing in artistic excellence for the future."
Founded in 1883, the Department of Music at StFX is one of the oldest in the Maritimes, and has garnered attention from across Canada and around the world. The music faculty has a curriculum that focuses on jazz studies and contemporary music. StFX offers two jazz programs: a diploma in Jazz Studies, which prepares students to enter commercial music, and a graduate diploma in Jazz Studies, designed for professional or amateur musicians.
TD Bank Financial Group is committed to supporting music and jazz in Canada. In addition to supporting ten jazz festivals across Canada (including the Atlantic Jazz Festival which kicks off today and runs until July 18), TDBFG sponsors Learning Through The Arts, a public school program created by the Royal Conservatory of Music, the National Youth Orchestra of Canada and the Canadian Opera Company. TDBFG also supports a variety of local, regional and national programs across Canada promoting health, education and the environment.