Faculty Focus-September 17, 2024
Faculty members put their knowledge into action so students and others are able to benefit from it. Recently, faculty have been podcast guests, debuted films, and received lifetime achievement awards.
Jeff Frank
Professor of Education Jeff Frank was named an editorial board member of the journal Educational Theory, a leading international journal for the philosophy of education. In August, Frank gave a doctoral seminar at the University of Iceland on “radical hope,” a theme of the course he taught at St. Lawrence during the spring semester. In July, Frank’s work was cited in a Syracuse.com editorial seeking reader input, “Should New York State Ban Phones in Schools?” Frank also published an article in vocation matters, the publication produced by the Network for Vocation in Undergraduate Education (NetVUE), exploring “Dependability as Calling: Facilitating Freedom in Our Polarized Age.”
The podcast Academic Minute featured Frank, who spoked about “Thinking Philosophically About Screentime in Schools,” in its Aug. 19 episode.
Zane Griffin Talley Cooper
Assistant Professor of Digital Media and Film Zane Griffin Talley Cooper recently released an expansive online exhibition, “Geographies of Digital Wasting: Electronic Waste from Mine to Discard and Back Again.” Funded by a generous grant from the Internet Society Foundation, the project works to broaden the way we think about electronic waste by exploring waste generated at all points in the tech supply chain. Through this lens, e-waste becomes less a collection of discarded objects, and more an ongoing process of "digital wasting" that encompasses everything from rare earth mining in South Greenland, to semiconductor manufacturing in Taiwan, to Amazon data centers in Virginia, to post-consumer e-waste policy in Zimbabwe. This exhibition is intended as a resource for researchers and classrooms, and the research team is currently working on expanding it with more collaborators and field sites. The physical exhibition has been shown at the University of Pennsylvania, the Association of Internet Researchers 2023 Annual Conference, Virginia Tech, and is currently looking for new exhibition partners.
Anna Fahr
“Valley of Exile,” the debut narrative feature film of Assistant Professor of Digital Media and Film Anna Fahr, was theatrically released in select Canadian cinemas on July 4. The film premiered at Cinequest Film Festival in August 2023, where it won the Jury Award for Best Feature Drama. It has since screened in 15 international festivals on four continents, winning nine awards, including the Emerging Canadian Director Award at Vancouver International Film Festival and DGC Award for Best Director at Canadian Film Fest.
Jon Rosales
Professor of Environmental Studies Jon Rosales, a climate change scientist focused on the impacts of climate change on native peoples in the Arctic, was featured in the podcast Academic Minute on July 30. His piece, “Indigenous Knowledge and Practice as Scientific Methodology” shares his scholarly focus on developing scientific field methods that measure traditional ecological knowledge of arctic climate change. Threaded through his work is a call to align human institutions within natural limits by challenging “monocultures of the mind,” or fossilized ways of thinking, that overwhelm the planet. Indigenous ways of living can offer one such version.
Robin Lock
Robin Lock, professor in the Math, Computer Science, and Statistics Department, received the 2024 George Cobb Lifetime Achievement Award in Statistics Education. This award is presented to an individual who, over an extended period of time, has made lasting contributions with broad impact to the field of statistics education especially, but not limited to, the teaching and learning of college-level statistics.
Over the course of his 40-year career at St. Lawrence, he has given more than 130 presentations, with at least one regional, national, or international conference presentation per year since the early 2000s. In addition, he has co-led nearly 60 national/regional workshops on teaching statistics.
Lock has co-authored several well-respected statistics textbooks, including Statistics: UnLocking the Power of Data and Stat2: Modeling with Regression and ANOVA. The Lock5 textbook has become a popular choice for an introductory statistics text due to its innovative use of randomization-based methods to introduce statistical inference, the support provided by the authors through workshops (18 since 2011) and webinars (10 since 2013), and the free online tool StatKey. The statistics on StatKey usage are astounding – since it went live in 2012, StatKey has had over two million cumulative users and has been accessed by at least 100 devices in 88 countries.
Lock is a highly sought-out mentor for senior capstone projects, having mentored more than 50 independent senior projects.
