PROFESSIONAL DEVELOPMENT GRANT AWARDS CYCLE 10 in 2017-2018 for 2018-2019

2018 Awards. In February, 2018 a subcommittee of the UMRA Grants Committee reviewed 10 applications for the Professional Development Grants for Retirees and recommended that 9 be approved. In March, Allen Levine, Vice President for Research announced the recipients of the 2018 Professional Development Grants for Retirees . The recipients represented the fields of Medicine, Art History, Indian Studies, Education, Design, Indian Studies, Information Studies, Graphic Arts, History, and Psychology. 

PROFESSIONAL DEVELOPMENT GRANT ABSTRACTS CYCLE 9 2017-2018

Betty Cooke, Lecturer, Department of Curriculum and Instruction, College of Education and Human Deveolpment, University of Minnesota-TC.
Parent-Child Interaction Video Production: Updating The Reflective Dialogue Parent Education Design. The Reflective Dialogue Parent Education Design (RDPED) is a research-based approach to group discussion with parents. It is designed to strengthen the quality of parent-child interaction by promoting parent’s socio-cognitive development through the use of teaching methods that promote reflection and dialogue. Paired contrast sets of video scenes are used to draw out parent perspectives and provide images of sensitive, responsive parenting. They are also used as teaching materials in UMN parenting educator classes. Because the videos were recorded in the mid-1990’s, they are in the process of being updated through the Professional Develop ment Grant for Retirees funds granted for 2017. Further funding will support the production phase of creating up-to- date and culturally relevant contrasting video scenes for enhancing and adding depth to parent education practice and professional development and for research.

Joanne Eicher, Joanne Eicher, Regents Professor Emerita, Department Design Housing and Apparel, College of Design  University of Minnesota-TC.
Analysis of Traditions of Kalabari Living Abroad.A request for travel funds to attend a Kalabari festival in Baltimore, MD, May 25-27, 2018 organized and attended by Kalabari people living away from their homeland in the Niger Delta of Nigeria. This opportunity allows me to include current data about the Kalabari, as many travel back and forth. Funds allow me to photograph and interview attendees at the festival and incorporate this data in my concluding chapter for my book manuscript on the Kalabari. They have been involved in a global world since the 15th century when they first began importing textiles and items of dress, which will give readers a new perspective on one African group.

Donald Johnson, Retired Curator of Ames Library of South Asia; University Library, University of Minnesota-TC
Lucy Truman Aldrich and Indian textiles.Collections of Indian textiles in museums in Britain and India rigidly follow narrow approaches which do not reflect the depth and variety of textile expression in the subcontinent. Lucy Truman Aldrich made three trips to India in the 1920s and while there collected over 100 textiles that subsequently were given to the museum of the Rhode Island School of Design. The textiles she collected did not reflect museum attitudes. Lucy and her sister Abby Aldrich Rockefeller were extremely close and wrote each other every day. The letters written during her trips to India discuss her concerns and issues related to textiles and why she collected what she did. This project analyzes the correspondence between the two sisters to determine the new approaches they brought to collecting textiles.

Tarald Kvalseth, Professor Emeritus, Mechanical Engineering, Institute of Technology, University of Minnesota-TC
Conference Attendance and Paper Presentation. This grant application is for my attendance and presentation at the conference: Entropy2018: From Physics to Information Sciences and Geometry, May 14-16, 2018, Barcelona, Spain. The conference is organized by Entropy, an open access journal by MDPI, and accepted papers will be published in a special issue of Entropy. My paper,
“On Normalized Mutual Information: Measure Derivations and Properties,” which I plan to present at the Conference, has already been accepted for journal publication. This grant application would help to cover the expenses for attending this conference and presenting my paper.

Wayne Potratz,  Professor Emeritus, Department of Art, College of Libral Arts, University of Minnesota-TC
Participation in the 8th International Conference on Contemporary Cast Iron Art. I seek funding to participate in the 8th International Conference on Contemporary Cast Iron Art, to be held at the Historic Scranton Furnaces in Scranton, PA May 28th -June 2nd, 2018. I will be speaking on “Materiality and Community” on the “Iron in the 21st Century” panel and I am Chair of the “Iron Sculpture: Twentieth Century History” panel. As chair, I will interview the other elder sculptors in the movement about the rise and development of iron as a material in contemporary sculpture.  I will also be participating in an iron pour event and my work will be in the group exhibition “Size Matters” at the Steamworks Gallery in Scranton, PA. I am the co-founder [along with Professor Emeritus Thomas Gipe from Southern Illinois University in Edwardsville] of the International Conference on Contemporary Cast Iron Art. Professor Gipe and I co-directed the first conference in 1988 at Sloss Furnaces National Historic Landmark in Birmingham, AL.  I have served on the steering committees for 6 subsequent conferences, including the 2nd  [also Sloss Furnaces], 3rd and 4th [Johnson Atelier and Grounds for Sculpture, Mercerville, New Jersey], 5th Ironbridge, Surry, England], 6th Kidwelly, Wales, and the 7th [at Pedvale, Latvia] in 2014.

Riv-Ellen Prell, Professor Emerita, Department of American Studies, College of Liberal Arts,  University of Minnesota-TC
Research and development for the second phase of the website “A Campus Divided” exhibit on the University of Minnesota. I curated A Campus Divided: Progressives, Anticommunists, Racism and Antisemitism at the University of Minnesota 1930-1942, an exhibit at Andersen Library, that revealed that in the 1930s the campus was divided over Jewish, and racial, segregation of student housing, and student rights to protest war and to assert political perspectives. A web-based version of the exhibit I curated includes an archive of documents and narrative essays about them. I propose to translate my further research about the period and the key relationships on campus to expand the website and create a new interactive graphic to display relationships among key actors. It will allow users to understand how information, which was often secret, moved between those competing for power to define the University. Through this innovative interactive graphic, users will understand the dynamics of power by discovering how documents such as memos and letters by administrators and politicians linked them to one another as they (secretly) spied on students, created segregated dormitories, and stopped the Minnesota Daily from publishing articles. At the same time, articles in the Daily, student documents asserting their rights or challenging segregated housing can be accessed to reveal how alliances were successfully built to protest these policies.

Jonathan Ravdin, Nesbitt Professor Emeritus, Department of Medicine, Medical School,  University of Minnesota-TC.
Utilizing Biostatistical Analysis of Case Management Data to Enhance Future Outcomes of the Youth and AIDS Projects. The research hypothesis for this UMRA proposal is that: improvement of the outcome of clients (ages 13-24) receiving case management services at the AIDS Prevention Project (YAP), requires a critical biostatistical analysis of case management data. Methods utilized include data storage within HIPAA- compliant BOX, Redcap and Xcel. The team includes four undergraduate research scholarship students under Dr. Ravdin` s mentorship, efforts of Co-Investigators Meghan Rothenberger (Med. Dir) and Marcie Ravdin (Admin.), and a biostatistician mentored by Prof. John Connett`s (Director of the Biostatistics and Data Management (BDAC), within the Clinical and Translational Science Institute (CTSI)). Data storage and management, a goal of the 2017 UMRA grant, has been achieved. The 2018 proposed research UMRA grant plan includes demographic and knowledge-based client surveys to define predictors of youth acquiring HIV; determining if YAP case managers effectively address client demographic factors known to impede treatment of HIV; why a subset of YAP clients fail to get drug treatment and, lastly, analyzing all YAP retrospective case management data from 2014-2016 to determine which client characteristics are associated with effective HIV treatment. All of the research data has already been successfully entered in BOX or Redcap.

John Romano, Professor Emeritus, Department of Educational Psychology, College of Education and Human Development,  University of Minnesota-TC
Collaborative Research: Advancing International Prevention Science to Promote Empowerment and Global Partnerships. Travel support to present at the 2018 American Psychological Association (APA) Convention in San Francisco (see attached letter). Prevention science is ideal for this collaborative session. Five APA divisions (Counseling, International, Community, Developmental, Family) are co-sponsoring the session (1 hr. 50 min), and presenters are university scholars from four countries (Israel, Spain, Italy, US). As Co-Chair I will focus on prevention science globally, and potential partnerships.  One purpose of this session is to encourage future collaborations among international scholars and psychological specialties. There is need to develop opportunities for international collaborations as prevention science is relatively new and growing specialty within
psychology, and many of the societal and health problems facing countries are similar (i. e. family trauma, alcohol/drug problems, work place stress, school bullying, non-communicable disease, discrimination). WHO has emphasized prevention and health promotion globally. Collaborative presentation sessions are unique and relatively new for the conference, and, I believe, acceptance is more competitive than typical sessions. The session continues my UM scholarship in prevention science as well as my international emphasis [co-edited Cambridge Handbook of International Prevention Science (2017)]. I was nominated for two awards to be presented at the convention; if awarded, a secondary reason to attend.

Jack Zipes, Professor Emeritus, Department of German, Scandinavian and Dutch, College of Liberal Arts,  University of Minnesota-TC
The Folk and Fairy Tales of Charles Godfrey Leland, the Forgotten Folklorist. The contributions to the study of American and European folklore made by Charles Godfrey Leland (1824-1903) have largely been neglected by folklorists and the general public. Yet, in his time, Leland was considered one of America’s most talented journalists and humorists and wrote well over 30 books on diverse topics. My book will be an anthology of his tales to restore the credit he deserves also as one of the most versatile and original folklorists of the nineteenth century. To this end, I shall write a long introduction about his life and publish about 60 unique tales from five of his most notable books: Hans Breitmann’s Ballads (1869), The Gypsies (1882), The Algonquin Legends (1884), Legends of Florence (1895-96), and The Unpublished Legends of Virgil (1901). Leland had an enormous interest in magic, witchcraft, and the customs of marginal groups. Not only did he speak and write German, French, and Italian, but he was also fluent in two Native American languages and the Romani of British gypsies. By republishing and editing some of his most unusual tales from five different books, I hope to demonstrate how significant his work is for folklorists, anthropologists, and sociologists, not to mention the general public. In addition, I hope to uncover additional tales in the collections of his papers in Philadelphia and Washington D.C.