Category: news

Antioch hires last of first-year tenure-track faculty

This week Antioch College leaders announced that they had hired the sixth, and last, of the college’s first year tenure-track faculty members. Based on the recommendation of the search committee, Antioch College President Mark Roosevelt hired Anneria Coria-Navis as assistant professor of Spanish.

Coria-Navia comes to the position after a decade of teaching Spanish in both k-12 and college-level classes, and two decades of teaching music education in the U.S. and abroad. Most recently, she has taught a beginning Spanish class, Spanish for Health Professionals, at Kettering College, and she also teaches beginner and intermediate-level Spanish at Wright State, where she also serves as a faculty supervisor in the Teacher Education Program.

Coria-Navia has taught Spanish at the Redlands Adventist Academy in Redlands, Cal., and at St. Mary’s Catholis School in Ann Arbor, Mich. She has taught music education at Andrews University in Berrien Springs, Mich., Lake Michigan
College and the Universidad Adventista de Montemorelos.

 

She is the final tenure-track faculty member hired for the revived college’s first year. Previously, faculty have been hired in the fields of cultural anthropology, philosophy, literature, chemistry and art.

 

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Spanish Language Professor Anneris Coria-Navia to Join Antioch College Faculty

YELLOW SPRINGS, Ohio – July 12, 2011 – Based on the recommendation of a search committee, Antioch College President Mark Roosevelt has hired Anneris Coria-Navia as an assistant professor of Spanish.

Coria-Navia’s experience includes a decade of K-12 and college-level Spanish instruction, as well as two decades of music education in the U.S. and abroad. Currently, she teaches a beginning Spanish class, Spanish for Health Professionals, and a music appreciation class at Kettering College. Additionally, she teaches beginner- and intermediate-level Spanish classes at Wright State University, where she also serves as a faculty supervisor in the Teacher Education Program.

Previously, she taught a variety of Spanish courses, including Advanced Placement Spanish, at the Redlands Adventist Academy in Redlands, California, and at St. Mary’s Catholic School in Ann Arbor, Michigan. During her time at Redlands, she also developed a cross-age teaching program that prepared second- and third-year Spanish students to teach at the elementary level.

As a music educator, Coria-Navia has also taught courses in appreciation and performance at Andrews University, Lake Michigan College, the Universidad Adventista de Montemorelos, and in elementary, middle and high school settings.

Coria-Navia earned a B.M. in piano performance and music education from the Universidad Adventista del Plata in Entre Ríos, Argentina. She earned her M.M. in music education and an M.A. in education at Andrews University. She completed her doctorate in education leadership at the University of Southern California and, finally, an M.A. in Spanish from Miami University in Oxford.

Submitted in 2010, Coria-Navia’s master’s thesis reports on the analysis of audio recordings of conversations with twelve subjects from Ohio and California to determine the frequency and characteristics of code switching within a given time-frame. Her doctoral research, submitted in 2005, examined the effect of social relationships in work satisfaction among beginning elementary school teachers.

Coria-Navia is the sixth and final tenure-track professor hired at Antioch College this year. Professors of anthropology, chemistry, literature, philosophy, and 3-D art were also hired based on the recommendation of search committees, which were comprised of former faculty, emeriti faculty, and alumni and friends of the college who are subject-matter experts or serve as members of faculty at other liberal arts colleges.

Candidates for faculty positions are assessed on their subject-matter expertise; ability to teach their subjects; ability to interact with students, faculty colleagues and community members; ability to collaborate effectively; knowledge of and comfort with the three C's of classroom, co-op and community; and their interpersonal style and ability to engage in effective discussion. All finalists for faculty positions visit the campus in Yellow Springs for a day of interviews and meetings with college personnel.

About Antioch College

A private, independent nonprofit liberal arts college in Yellow Springs, Ohio, Antioch College will offer a four-year, undergraduate residential experience to a new class of students beginning in the fall of 2011. The College curriculum puts equal emphasis on rigorous liberal arts learning, work (cooperative education), and community engagement. Students will complete individualized majors based on one of 11 concentrations, a language minor, and six full-time work experiences. The institution, originally founded in 1850, is now completely independent of Antioch University, the multi-campus system it founded.

MEDIA CONTACT:
Gariot P. Louima ?
Chief Communications Officer
Office: 937-319-6131
Mobile: 937-581-8201
glouima@antiochcollege.org

College fills key positions

Louise Smith was recently named dean of community life by administrators of the revived Antioch College. (Photo by Diane Chiddister)

Louise Smith was recently named dean of community life by administrators of the revived Antioch College. (Photo by Diane Chiddister)

On June 22 Antioch College President Mark Roosevelt announced that former college theater professor Louise Smith has been hired as the college’s new dean of community life. In her position Smith will report to the president and serve on the college’s senior leadership team.

“This is a critical, central job for the college as we move forward,” Roosevelt said in a press release. “We found the right person with the right set of skills to do this work. I’m so pleased to be welcoming Louise back to Antioch College.”

The new position “is a crucial one,” Smith wrote in an e-mail this week. “Along with really walking the talk of fostering a healthy community life on campus, what it also needs to do is strengthen the bridge between campus and Yellow Springs in ways that are deep and enduring. The name of the poisition reflects the desire on the part of the college to be inclusive, to think about community in its broadest sense.”

Regarding her appointment, “I have been overwhelmed by the expression of support I have received in both the Yellow Springs and the Antioch communities. I am honored and a little bit terrified at the expectations and needs the position carries with it,” Smith wrote in the e-mail. “ I feel extremely grateful to have the opportunity to contribute to the shaping of the new college and its relationship to the village. I am also aware of all of the hard work that has been done by my colleagues in the college and at Nonstop. I want to honor everyone’s efforts: faculty, administrators, staff, alumni, villagers — by moving forward in the best ways possible.”

The position is equivalent to a dean of student affairs position, although “the shift to community life in the title signifies the importance of community building” at Antioch, according to Hassan Rahmanian, the college’s vice president for academic affairs. “This position is broader and deeper than the traditional one.”

“I’m very excited” that Smith was chosen for the job, Rahmanian said, citing her history with Antioch College before it was closed in 2008. A 1977 graduate of the college, she later came back as theater professor, then chair of the theater department, then associate dean of faculty.

“In all of those positions, she proved a successful leader,” Rahmanian said, citing Smith’s tendency to be “very fair and very firm” and to express herself directly regardless of the popularity of her position.

“She speaks the truth and the community appreciates that,” he said.

About 60 candidates applied for the job, Rahmanian said, describing the process as an effective one with a “strong pool of candidates.”

Ultimately, he said, Smith rose to the top due to her deep knowledge of the college and her personal skills and strengths, including her “insights about community, her leadership skills and skills in listening, her ability to form community and her creativity.”

An actor and performance artist, Smith after graduating from Antioch in 1977 worked in New York, touring nationally with Julie Taymor, Ping Chong and Company, Meredith Monk and Illusion Theater, among others. She won an Obie Award in 2003 for her performance in “A Painted Snake in a Painted Chair.”

Smith returned to Antioch as theater professor in 1994, a position she held until the college was closed in 2008. She holds a masters in playwriting from Antioch University and a masters in community counseling, with licensure from the University of Dayton. After the college closed, Smith worked in mental health in the Dayton area.

“It means a great deal to me to do this job well,” Smith wrote this week. “I bring an interest in making things lively and fun.”

Tenure-track professors hired

This week the college also announced that it has filled the fourth and fifth of its six tenure-track positions, with the hiring of Chicago artist Sara Black as the new assistant professor of 3-D art, and Geneva Gano as assistant professor of literature.

For the past five years Black has taught in the performance and sculpture departments at Northwestern University and the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Previously, she taught beginning, intermediate and figure drawing at South Suburban College, led an arts apprenticeship program at the nonprofit Street-Level Youth in Chicago, and taught 3-D visual language and experimental design at the University of Chicago and Illinois Institute of Technology.

Black’s solo and collaborative exhibits have been featured at a variety of spaces, including the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago, the Experimental Station, Gallery 400, the Hyde Park Art Center, and the Park Avenue Armory.

She holds a masters of fine arts from the University of Chicago, a bachelors in environmental studies and art from Evergreen State College and a bachelors of fine arts in sculpture and painting from the University of Wisconsin at Eau Claire.

Gano was most recently a visiting assistant professor of American Studies and Latino Studies at Indiana University in Bloomington. Her teaching and research has focused on 19th- and 20th-century American literature and culture; Chicana/o literature and film; and GLBTQ and gender studies, among other topics.

Before Indiana University, Gano was a lecturer in the Department of English at UCLA and a postdoctoral teaching fellow at Stanford University.

She earned a bachelors in English, with honors, at Stanford, and a masters and PhD at UCLA. She is currently expanding and revising her dissertation for publication as Un-American Places: Geography, Race and Nationalism in Modern Literature.

The college has previously filled the tenure-track positions in chemistry, philosophy and cultural anthropology, and has one more position, in Spanish, to fill.

 

Glen may become conservancy

The Glen Helen Nature Preserve has been saved from development several times in its 82-year history. In the 1920s, plans to sell the land to an amusement park developer prompted Arthur and Lucy Morgan to find donors to buy the first properties that became the Glen. Later, in the 1960s, the Glen Helen Association fought off efforts to re-route U.S. 68 and the Village sewer line through the preserve.

If efforts now underway are successful, Glen Helen will be permanently protected from development in a few years. That protection effort took a major step forward this month with a renewed commitment from the 1,000-acre nature preserve’s owner, Antioch College, and a new partnership with the Trust for Public Land.

“We’re closer than we’ve ever gotten to permanent protection,” said Nick Boutis, executive director of the Glen Helen Ecology Institute, in an interview last week. “We’re working to establish a modern conservation easement that hardwires in protection, regardless of changes in politics and economics.”

Under the proposed arrangement, the title for the Glen would be held by a newly-created nonprofit — the “Glen Helen Conservancy.” The Trust for Public Land, a national conservation group, would secure private and public funds to purchase the land and the conservation easement. The Tecumseh Land Trust, best known as a farmland preservation organization, would hold and monitor the easement that limits development. The Ohio Environmental Protection Agency would provide funding for a strict environmental covenant protecting the most ecologically-sensitive areas of the Glen. And Antioch College would place the funds raised in an endowment to allow for the ongoing operations of the preserve.

After the deal is complete, the Glen would be protected in perpetuity no matter what happens to Antioch College, Boutis said. And the college, which would receive a one-time cash payment for the property, would continue to utilize the Glen as a vital resource for its students and faculty through the Glen Helen Conservancy, whose founding members will include representatives from the Antioch College board.

“The interest of the college is protecting the Glen for future Antiochians,” said Gariot Louima, Antioch’s director of communications. “Antioch College sees [the Glen] as an educational resource, and that won’t change.”

Preserving the Glen has been a goal of the village and college for generations, and some protections are already in place. Those who purchased the land intended for it to be preserved in perpetuity. In Hugh Taylor Birch’s original deed of 850 acres to Antioch, Birch gave the land “to the end that the students and faculty of Antioch College and its successors may forever have available, adequate facilities for the study of varied forms of life, for the exploration of past forms and conditions of life…” In the 1960s, Ken Hunt organized country commons on about 70 acres of Glen in which neighbors took out easements on each other’s property.

More recently, 250 acres around Birch Creek and Yellow Springs Creek were protected as a National Natural Landmark, 2.5 miles of the Little Miami River were designated a National Scenic River, and in 2009 the Ohio EPA approved $1.2 million to the Glen to protect its most ecologically-significant areas. That funding will come through once an environmental covenant is signed by the new Glen Helen Conservancy. But most of the Glen has no such protections and even the protected areas remain vulnerable, according to Boutis.

“None of the [protections] have teeth enough to ward off a vigorous legal challenge and none cover the whole preserve,” Boutis said. The new easement and covenant will assure that the Glen cannot be subdivided, developed, or used for commercial purposes. In more pristine areas, the environmental covenant would require EPA consent to even relocate a trail or build a bridge.

Involving the Trust for Public Land is seen as an important step in the process since the group, founded in 1972, brings substantial experience in preserving natural land that the public can access.

Efforts to prepare an appraisal of the land’s development potential and survey its ecological significance have already begun. While the monetary value has yet to be determined, the land’s ecological value is clear, according to Boutis.

“There are few areas in this part of the country as large as this parcel with as many significant areas that have never been logged and farmed,” Boutis said. Most of the Glen has never had development pressure since it went from a Native-American hunting ground, to a resort, to being part of Antioch College, Boutis added.

Within the Glen are several places of historical and ecological importance, including mounds, earthen enclosures, 450-year old trees, scenic rivers, slope wetlands and uplands and other diverse habitats, Boutis said. The Glen is host to rich wildlife, including at least 90 species of birds that were counted in the Glen this spring.

The Glen additionally filters and purifies the area’s water supply, since the Village wellhead recharge zone is largely within the Glen, said Krista Magaw, executive director of the Tecumseh Land Trust, which holds easements, or is in the process of completing easements, on over 19,000 acres of agricultural and natural land in Greene and Clark counties.

“This is our home and the Glen has always been a part of our sense of place to our board and members,” Magaw said. “This is so we know [the Glen] will remain several generations down the road.”