News from Colleges
MARRIOTT SCHOOL OF BUSINESS
Students in Experience Design and Management traveled to Europe where they learned how to best design events by participating in numerous once-in-a-lifetime experiences like attending fencing school in France with an Olympic medalist, paragliding through the Swiss Alps, and rowing gondolas down the canals of Venice, Italy.
“We gave students the opportunity to learn and have experiences so we could apply the principles of experience design to the staged experiences that were being offered,” said Professor Brian Hill, who accompanied the students on the trip. “We participated in some of the most unique experiences of any study abroad I’ve ever been on.”
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MCKAY SCHOOL OF EDUCATION
Karen Strong and Jason Benson, two educational doctorate (EdD) students from the David O. McKay School of Education traveled to Stonefields Elementary School in New Zealand, to experience first-hand their unique learning environment. Pamela Hallam, chair of the Educational Leadership and Foundations Department (EdLF), and Sam Brown, director of International Student and Scholar Services at BYU, accompanied the students to study teacher self-efficacy and collective teacher efficacy at the school.
The research team interviewed faculty and staff at the school to learn about how the beliefs, preconceptions, and predispositions of teachers influence their individual teacher efficacy, and collective teacher efficacy, which may increase student achievement.
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COLLEGE OF FAMILY, HOME, AND SOCIAL SCIENCES
With recent hurricanes and specifically the tsunami in Palu, Indonesia , Chad Emmett, a BYU geography professor, is taking action to make sure that no matter how devastating earthquakes and tsunamis can be, lives do not have to be lost in the process.
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FINE ARTS
The Department of Theatre and Media Arts offers the London Film Study Abroad every two years. The purpose is to expose students to the best repertory programs, the most thorough retrospectives, and the mostwide-ranging commercially distributed film offerings in the world, as well as a host of exemplary scholarly resources (lectures, artist interviews, scholarly notes) relating to the films.
Spring 2018 participant Isaac Wright said, “Mostly we focused on international cinema. We spent time at the British Film Institute and watched a lot of movies there. My favorite film was Lean on Pete. It was great to see movies that we would not have seen otherwise.”
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The Department of Dance did something new in 2018. In June, faculty and students from the department traveled to Brussels, Berlin, Amsterdam, Prague, and Vienna for a contemporary focused study abroad.
Students participated in international dance festivals and learned from and networked with artists throughout the world. Some students also had the opportunity to perform while attending the New Prague Dance Festival.
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LIFE SCIENCES
A BYU team is working with Samoan health professionals to address the unique challenges of preventing and treating strep throat and its potential fatal results.
“We’re trying to address the needs of Samoan children in as many ways as we can to eliminate suffering,” said BYU Professor Richard Gill, one of three BYU faculty members involved with Rheumatic Relief. “Meanwhile, the BYU students are seeing how service is directly connected to education.”
In summer 2018, twenty-two public health, pre-med, and graduate students made the trip, along with program director Lori Allen, cardiologist Marv Allen, and BYU faculty and staff, where they worked with children on the islands of Samoa and American Samoa. During their trip, they visited twenty-four schools and screened 6,288 children.
Since Professor Steve Thygerson’s first research trip to Nepal in 2014, he dreamed of bringing BYU students to Nepal. This year that dream became a reality as Thygerson, Johnston, their family members, and a group of BYU students flew to Kathmandu for three weeks of intense field school on the local brick kilns.
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RELIGIOUS EDUCATION
This summer five BYU students majoring in Ancient Near Eastern Studies (ANES), led by Professor Mark Ellison of the Department of Ancient Scripture, spent four weeks working on archaeological excavations at the ancient Jewish village of Huqoq near the Sea of Galilee. BYU is one of the consortium universities participating in the Huqoq excavations, which have been directed by Professor Jodi Magness of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill since the project began in 2011.
This season’s discoveries included two rows of mosaic panels in the north aisle of the synagogue.
For more on these discoveries and their significance click here.
COLLEGE OF NURSING
Teaching Professor Sheri Palmer has had an incredible year spending time in Paraguay for two significant nursing projects including a Fulbright Scholar Award.
Studying Teenage Pregnancy in Paraguay
This past August, Palmer with two other faculty members and five nursing students went to Paraguay on a research project to learn more about teenage pregnancy in Paraguay.
Fulbright Scholar Award
For six weeks from mid-October to the beginning of December, Palmer stayed in Paraguay to help teach the nurses, teachers, and students about nursing with her Fulbright Scholar Award. The Fulbright Scholar Award allows her to be a visiting scholar to the national university in Paraguay (National University of Asuncion). Palmer taught nursing classes to faculty members and students of the college in five cities.
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COLLEGE OF ENGINEERING AND TECHNOLOGY
From police shields to backpacks and solar panels to dishware, BYU engineering and design students are using Japanese origami principles to innovate and problem-solve.
Origami-inspired products by BYU engineers and industrial designers were featured in the exhibit, “Folding the Future: Theoretical Origami Devices” at the Japan Information & Culture Center, a part of the Embassy of Japan, in Washington, D.C., from Oct. 24 to Dec. 21 of 2018.
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COLLEGE OF PHYSICAL AND MATH SCIENCE
In spring 2018, students took their study of math equations from the orderly classrooms of BYU campus to a much larger classroom: South America.
Michael Dorff, chair of BYU’s Department of Mathematics, led the three-week study abroad tour through four South American countries: Brazil, Chile, Peru, and Argentina. The trip allowed sixteen STEM students to study math in a real-world, culturally diverse setting. Students toured various companies including Itaú Bank, Walmart, General Motors, and Laureate.
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