Display poster for Beaverdam Gallery

This small gallery hinges on fresh work and a unique location accessible from the Parkway and Merrimon Avenue in North Asheville. Community relations has been a key to building traffic, a part of which stems from long-time media contacts, a part of which grows out of the work of everyone involved--especially owners Maggie Smith and Adelaide Key--to distribute flyers and bring friends to opening events. This in-gallery poster positions the people and the work as woven into the community and its ridge-and-cove environment. Designer Ron Zisman and I worked tightly with Maggie and Adelaide on all elements, including an artist-oriented web site at beaverdamgallery.com.

Fresh Art. Fresh Air.

A new gallery for emerging artists

After a car crashed into clay sculptor George Handy's former workshop and gallery, Adelaide Key and Maggie Smith wanted to bring together young and young-of-heart artists who live and work in the neighborhood by creating a new gallery space on the old site. George moved his business to the river, Adelaide and Maggie bought the building, and six artists came on board in this "arts incubator" effort. Logo design: my partner Ron Zisman of the Hudson River school of design.

Mountain Area Information Network: Quilting our mountain city with wireless broadband.

A David v. Goliath project--wireless broadband v. dsl and cable--where MAIN's offering deserves, at the very least, equal consideration. Here, via a mini-site, we wanted to plainly present our case, describe rates and options, and involve the reader in the vital mission of building community. Art director: Benjamin Finch of Robin Easter Design.

Grief counseling for children at UT: "I'm looking for my friend."

Tricia McClam tells the story of a fourth grader in East Knoxville who shows up early for an appointment in her school’s library.

When asked why she’s there, she says, “I’m looking for my friend.”

Her friend is a graduate student who meets with her each week, reads to her, plays with her and listens to her, as part of a grief outreach program begun in the fall of 2008 by the University of Tennessee.

The children in the program are dealing with major, usually stunning, instances of loss and grief. They face circumstances that involve divorce, abandonment, suicide, murder, custody battles or a parent who’s been taken off to prison.

“Incredibly tough issues,” says Dr. McClam, professor and associate head of Educational Psychology and Counseling at the university. “The referrals I get, from school counselors, from principals, from social workers, take my breath away. It might be an uncle who was stabbed, a family member with a terminal illness or a parent who died during the night.”

“Three of the four children I’ve met with,” says graduate student Ashton Fisher, “have fathers in jail. And when you have one or both parents missing, it can have a major, major impact on self-esteem. They want someone to trust. They want to know that whatever they say is okay; that it won’t get them into trouble.”

For 25 graduate students in the College of Education, Health and Human Sciences engaged in grief counseling in the spring of 2009, signs of success may show up in “the little things,” says Dr. McClam.

“We all get together every Thursday morning and meet and talk about what’s going on for an hour and a half,” she says. “You might hear someone say that their client had started to talk, or ‘we had a great session,’ or ‘my client showed up yesterday.’ Little things.”

Little things that add up.

“The issues these children face have a major impact on performance in school and peer relationships,” Dr. McClam says. “We stay with them until they reach a point when they’re back on track academically and you can see behavioral changes in the classroom.”

“You cater to where they are,” says Ashton, “You give them the tools they need. Help them refocus on strengths. Then that ability gives them the control to move forward. It spills over into every other area of their lives.”

Grief Outreach from UT, what Dr. McClam calls “the most powerful kind of learning,” began as a simple, heart-stirring experience.

It began with a child named Aliyah at Sarah Moore Greene Elementary School where Dr. Bob Rider, dean of the College of Education, Health, and Human Sciences, had been reading with students every Wednesday for four years.

When Dr. Rider asked the first-grader to read a book about Mother’s Day aloud to him, she told him her mother had died on the previous Valentine’s Day. Because of her grief, she had been held back in school, not adjusting socially and academically.

“I was at a loss for words,” Dr. Rider says. “I was thinking, ‘We have wonderful counseling programs at the university and other support services.’ I wanted to know how we could help.”

On October 1, 2008, the program that Dr. Rider’s experience triggered began accepting referrals. Graduate students training to become school psychologists, mental health counselors, and school counselors immediately signed on. And they continue to sign on, as part of a cohesive team, taking an active role in choosing those clients they feel they can best help.

“Our students come into the experience committed,” says Dr. McClam. “They have to be. They know how important it is.”

“It’s a very individual thing, getting to know your client,” says Ashton. “You don’t know how resistant they might be to being with you, to talking. In the four cases I’ve had, there was no resistance. These kids were hurting and they needed an outlet.”

The artfulness in drawing out the thoughts and questions and hurt the children carry is taken up in listening and patience.

“We talk about things and we skirt some things,” says Angela Mounger, another graduate student who has worked with four children, “but if you listen, you can hear between the lines and ask a question and get something going.

“I was meeting with a boy who’d lost his father and he talked about a movie he didn’t like. I asked him about what it was about and he said it was about a boy who’d lost his dad. That opened things up. Behind the silent stretches, there can be intense sadness and anger. So you want to give them a vocabulary, a way to label what they’re feeling,” Angela says. “They’re mostly in a family where everyone is hurting over what happened, so they have no one to talk to. They can’t bring up anything at home. As a result, they’re looking for a safe place.”

The grief initiative has largely focused on a single area of high poverty, some 16 square miles in East Knoxville, designated an “Empowerment Zone” in 1998 under a Clinton administration urban rebuilding program. But Dr. McClam is also receiving referrals from other areas of Knox County, saying that the number of children dealing with grief and loss in our community “is much greater than we anticipated.”

As Angela Mounger puts it, “I was overwhelmed by the amount of need out there.”

Beneficiaries of the program are not only the children themselves and their families, but graduate students who pour in their skills and time, commitment and heart; who wait patiently for signs.

“There’s no time line. It’s a process. We go at our client’s pace. And, moving that way, we watch them grow,” says Angela. “It’s very rewarding.”

“They’re resilient,” Ashton says. “It’s also impossible not to love them.”

For information and referrals, Dr. McClam may be reached at 865-974-3845 or mcclam@utk.edu.

Bringing Physics to Fentress County: Because a mind so inclined is a terrible thing to waste.

For Tammara Garrett, a high school senior in Fentress County, Tennessee, “doing a lot of electro-magnetic stuff and viewing the ultraviolet spectrum” became a welcome part of her day in this rural community where studying physics had previously been about as rare as spotting an ivory billed woodpecker.

Thanks to an innovative application of distance learning developed at the University of Tennessee, 30 college-bound science students in the county, along with their classroom teachers, were able to seize upon a jewel of a learning experience at a time when they really, really wanted it.

“For a serious student, this is great,” Tammara says, “I like the physical sciences and I saw this as an opportunity. I especially liked the hands-on work.”

Much of the course, taught as a block segment in the fall of 2008, did engage teachers and students in hands-on exercises illustrating the immutable laws of physics. But the basic teaching structure flowed out of interactive videoconferencing between the Nielsen Physics Building on the UT campus and a classroom in Fentress County where students from Clarkrange High School and the Alvin C. York Institute gathered up and took part in lectures and discussions.

The first inkling of an idea around this creative venture into distance learning emerged as Dr. Lynn Champion, director of Academic Outreach and Communications for the College of Arts and Sciences, considered the significant shortage of qualified physics teachers in the state.

“We had very capable and knowledgeable physics teachers here at UT Knoxville and interested Tennesse high school students without teachers,” she says. “The option that came to mind was distance education.”

According to Dr. Jon Levin of UT’s Department of Physics and Astronomy, a professor heavily involved in the project as both planner and instructor, there are fewer than 200 out of 300 public high schools in Tennessee that offered physics last year.

“Many rural schools in the state don’t have accredited teachers,” he says, “so we identified two we could target with distance education. The primary reason we’re doing this is to get teachers certified.”

Typically, teachers work toward accreditation by participating in a two-week class in the summer.

“The tact we’re taking in Fentress County,” Levin says, “has to do with teachers learning over a semester right along with their students. It fosters a deeper understanding than blitzkrieg types of courses. Plus there’s great leverage involved, since one certified teacher can teach physics to thousands of students over the course of his or her career.”

The program addresses, for both physics-teachers-in-training and students, a national and state priority to increase college graduates in science, technology, engineering and mathematics, the so-called STEM disciplines.

“Physics is at the root, the most fundamental of the sciences,” Levin says and, as Tammara Garrett, whose long-range goal is to teach high school biology, recalls, “I took a lot of notes.”

Kelly Ramey, a certified chemistry and biology teacher at Alvin C. York and Tammara’s instructor, remembers, “I got super interested when UT called. We had 40 kids who wanted to take the course at York and enrolled 24. There were also six from Clarkrange, which is a much smaller school. I went to Clarkrange myself.”

“Science is coming back to the forefront,” she says, “and I’m learning with the kids. My ultimate goal is to be certified in physics so I wanted to get involved.”

Linda Jordon, a science consultant for the Tennessee State Department of Education, recommended Fentress County Schools for the pilot program mainly because of the school’s enthusiasm for the project. The College of Arts and Sciences at UT provided significant funding from private gift endowment earnings that support K-12 outreach projects. Other extrarodinarily important team members in the venture have been Physics Department Head Soren Sorensen, department teaching assistant Erica Johnson, and the Office of Information Technology at the university.

“Physics by distance” will most likely stream into a classroom from an over-sized television screen at York Institute in the fall of 2009. Students and instructors will again hold atmospheric conversations that touch on entropy, friction, impedence, repulsion, apogee, causality and centripedal force. In such a rural part of Tennessee, economically depressed, where close to 60% of all students qualify for free lunches, it seems particularly rewarding that the intellectual gifts of learning physics are not only accessible but also capable of kinetically influencing students toward note-worthy achievement in college, career and life in general.

“It’s not an easy subject,” says Dr. Levin. “It’s a grind to learn and you learn best by doing. But with these kids, we’ve been very pleased, and we so appreciate the connection.”

As Tammara Garrett succinctly puts it, “I got to learn a lot.”

Footnote: Kelly Ramey and her team of science students, including Tammara Garrett, recently won the state of Tennessee’s Envirothon competition, sponsored by the United States Department of Agriculture, which teaches students to view their environment as a dynamic, integrated system and encourages comprehensive systems management as a team.

The Clarence Brown High School Workshop: Permission to fall down, get up, find your own voice.

High school students who participate in summer workshops at UT’s Clarence Brown Theater come into the program from a wide sea of circumstance. One painfully shy. Another adrift in grief from the loss of a parent. A third, street-smart and angry, and worried about acceptance.

But for each teenager who makes the commitment, something invariably happens to change things. By the end of two weeks of voice lessons and improvs and performances, there’s a shift. The heart lightens, the world offers a new slate of possibilities, there’s a willingness to take risks that wasn’t there before.

“To begin with, there’s a lot going when you’re in your mid-teens,” says Carol Mayo-Jenkins, UT resident artist and workshop coach. “You’re trying to figure out who you are, how you fit in. You’re discovering you’re different from your parents. You’re learning to use your own voice, maybe for the first time.

“Then we get into this work, nine to four every day. It’s a lot of physical work. There are exercises and games and technique development in the morning, scenes and musical numbers to run through in the afternoon,” she says. “We set up a very positive experience. We suspend judgement. We encourage a sense of daring. So everyone is more willing to take risks. And when someone falls down, everybody supports them. We dust them off and they get right back in the game, usually with a lot of laughter.”

The Clarence Brown Theatre High School Acting Workshop, founded in 2001, enrolls a total of thirty to forty high school students each summer in two separate intensive workshops. Past participants, from Tennessee and seven other states, have worked on skills that include basic acting, improvisation, voice, movement and musical theatre technique.

“There’s no audition,” says Terry Silver-Alford, UT Theater Department faculty member and director of the program, “just an interest in performance.

“Over the past few years,” he continues, “we’ve added in a musical theater component. Students are assigned duets from Broadway musicals, receive voice coaching, and learn one or two large ensemble numbers which require singing and dancing. All these pieces are presented in a final showcase, which includes acting scenes from major American plays.”

For each student, the theater at hand is a theater of change and growth.

“You meet your coaches—like Carol and David Alley—and they’re really accomplished actors with great careers and you realize, ‘You know, they’re people too. I can do this,’” says Rachel Winfrey, a workshop participant for four years and a recent UT theater graduate. “What’s going on opens you up emotionally. And, let me say, there is some awesome socializing. You’re part of a family.”

Rachel, who has assisted in the workshops, talks about students adapting to games, to improv situations, to different ways of thinking and doing things.

“You might jump rope while delivering lines from Shakespeare,” she says. “It’s amazing. And it’s amazing to see how much it can mean.”

In a stage exercise, one young man wrote a rap song to his father who he had never known. “It came out of a big group scene where the actors stepped forward with a monologue they had each written,” says Carol. “It was extraordinary. All the monologues were stunning.

“The most surprising experiences for me are those times when this sort of unrealized ability just comes out in one of the kids. I don’t really know what talent is but I do know when a student puts something of themselves forward that is amazing. Often it’s just for the moment—something they are able to reach inside themselves—something unforgettable.”

And, says Carol, “I think when it pops loose, when it comes up in a performance, yes, I think they recognize it too.”

“These are kids from across every spectrum,” Rachel says, “and they’re pushed at the same level. They grow, they learn, they come into a light heart.”

In addition to Carol Mayo-Jenkins and Terry Silver-Alford, David Alley, another honored professional actor and UT resident artist, takes a major role in workshop coaching, as well as Jimmy Brimer who has musically directed a raft of shows at the Clarence Brown over many years of service to the university and to its theater.

“In Tennessee,” says Terry Silver-Alford, whose own daughter is a recent participant, “there’s nothing quite like these workshops.”

For further information, contact Terry via email at tsilvera@utk.edu or phone 865-974-6011. Student participants pay a fee for workshop attendance.