Arts & Culture Story Archives - Page 325 of 331 - West Virginia Public Broadcasting

New theme music for West Virginia Morning

Listen for new open and closing theme music on West Virginia Morning this week.

Local composer Matthew Jackfert, a part time board announcer at West Virginia Public Radio, was commissioned to write a new theme for the weekday news program.

Click to listen to the old theme music here.

Listen to the new theme here.

WVMOpen.mp3

New theme music for West Virginia Morning will debut Tuesday, November 12, 2013

WVMClose.mp3

Here is the one minute closing theme

Many thanks to the talented musicians who performed this stunning new work.

Joseph Cevallos — Violin, Pennywhistle

Alasha Al-Qudwah — Viola

Jim Lange (W.Va. Public Radio classical music host) — Guitar

John Query — Djembe (hand drum), triangle, suspended cymbal, shakers

How To: Portable Iron Pour with 'Sputnik' the Iron Furnace

“Anybody who wants to carve a mold, we have some right here,” WVU sculpture area coordinator Dylan Collins said to a crowd who gathered. “It’s going to be just like a cooking show! You see your ingredients there, art will get made here. So don’t be shy! And, Welcome! Let me know what you need!”

The inaugural iron pour of ‘Sputnik,’ the portable iron furnace, was both very cool and very hot at the same time…

It was a cool day—downright cold in the shade when the wind blew, but the iron furnace, pet-named Sputnik, fired up pretty quickly and was soon melting iron. The event lasted well into the darker hours, with pour teams pouring some 1,500 lbs of iron.

“This kind of started with myself and my friend Jeremy Entwistle, the sculpture program coordinator at Fairmont State University,” Collins explains. “We’ve been working collaboratively for the last year, going to cast iron conferences, getting our students together to work collaboratively together casting in iron, and we thought it would be a great idea to make a furnace where we could get a lot of metal out.”

Entwistle already has a furnace at Fairmont State but it doesn’t have as much capacity as Sputnik. So the idea was to create a larger furnace that would also be portable and go on the road for various iron casting events in the region.

They set to work, and the beauty of getting sculptors to build, well … anything, is that they consider beauty while designing. And Sputnik is certainly a fun thing to look at!

http://youtu.be/JbgGutA3jGM

**video courtesy of WVU alumna, Emily Walley

“It looks like a machine that has landed from another planet,” Collins said. Thus the spacecraft-based nickname.

Graduate sculpture student Megan Gainer said many sand molds were in the works for weeks leading up to the iron pour. She said invitations to collaborate were also sent out to other schools and community members.

“And we’ve invited a couple other universities, I believe there’s Shepherdstown, Fairmont, and even Virginia Tech here,” Gainer said, “as well as a couple other people from the community, and later today there will be a couple people from the Tamarak Foundation coming to see what we’re doing.”

Local businesses, including Construction Supply Company (CSC), 3 Rivers Iron and Metal, and Jack’s Recycling, contributed to the WVU Iron Pour event by donating materials and supplies.

The Iron Pouring Process:

Heat furnace with coke to get it up to temperature. (Coke is coal that has been cooked in an anaerobic environment.)
Once up to temperature, begin filling it with charges. (Charges are buckets of premeasured broken up iron, and more coke.)
Repeat. Continue to feed the furnace and the well inside starts to build up molten metal.
Tap out the little bot that keeps the metal held back, and let ‘er flow down a trough into ladles (high temperature cups)
Pour teams distribute hot metal into premade resin-bonded sand molds.

Collins says the sand molds are the handiwork of students, faculty, alumni, and members of the public. He says and that the object of the day is not only to make art, but also to celebrate history.
“We’ve kind of merged the past and the present,” Collins said. “We’re bringing together these two different eras and helping people engage with this really rich industrial history which is a real mark of the culture here.”

Collins hopes to be able to take Sputnik around the region, celebrating history and art, beginning with a trip to Fairmont State in the near future.

Homeschoolers cooperate

As efforts to improve West Virginia’s standing in the ranks of academic achievement continue, some parents are opting out of the public school option and…

As efforts to improve West Virginia’s standing in the ranks of academic achievement continue, some parents are opting out of the public school option and homeschooling their children instead.

“‘Homeschool’ is a misnomer. We’re rarely home! It’s not like we’re sitting at home just by ourselves, looking at each other. We’re out there every day.” –Homeschool mom, Ericka Rhodes-Edwards

Ericka Rhodes-Edwards decided to homeschool her two young children, but says making that decision wasn’t easy. She had to overcome misconceptions, do a lot of research, commit to an education plan, make sacrifices. She says she and her husband had to recognize priorities.

“I loved school,” Rhodes says. “I really enjoyed going to school. I loved my friends. I didn’t want my son to miss out on THAT. That was my fear—that he was going to miss out on something really fun and special. So I think this program, LEAP, did it for me. If this weren’t available, I’m not sure I would have made the same decision.”

Rhodes found LEAP—Learn, Explore, and Play—in Marion County, a new co-op for homeschooling families.

LEAP

In West Virginia, school is mandatory for kids 5 to 17. But anyone with a high school diploma or GED can homeschool their own kids. Parents or guardians just have to prove that the methods they choose are effective with annual testing and/or a portfolio review. So that’s what founder and co-coordinator of LEAP Erika Fishel decided to do.

Fishel says her husband was brought up homeschooled, so it’s not a foreign concept. But after a brush with some bullying in the public school system, Fishel contacted her county’s board of education to make arrangements to homeschool her son.

So Fishel started a new co-op for homeschooled kids ages 4-8. $125 per family per semester pays for basic supplies and covers facility fees. The group meets once a week from 10-2. Parents collaborate to offer classes in the morning, then they eat lunch together, and in the afternoon they play, or field trips, or venture to the nearby park.

“Being able to see your kid have that moment where they GET it? That’s priceless.” –LEAP co-coordinator Erika Fishel

Science, art, reading, and geography are among the subjects LEAP is exploring in this pilot year. Rhodes says her son Kaleb LOVES LEAP.

LEARNING

“The information that they’re learning here is good information to have but it’s not like they’re going to be tested on Venice in Kindergarten. Right now, it’s just, this is HOW you learn. This is a learning environment. It’s not necessarily important what they learn; it’s that they’re learning to learn,” Rhodes says.

The environment at the co-op sort of harkens back to the days of the one-room school house where a wide age range existed in a single class. Rhodes says the diverse age range creates social dynamics that bear edifying benefits.

“These kids range in age from 2 – 10 years old. So there’re probably about 15 kids here on a full day. We’ve not had any discipline issues, no one cries, no one fights, no one is mean, no one is hurt. They have good role models in the older kids and the older kids feel responsible for the younger kids. There’s compassion. That’s what they’re learning and it’s really beautiful,” Rhodes says.

SUPPORT

Dani Glaeser is also a coordinator of LEAP along with Erika Fishel. Glaeser has been homeschooling her kids for several years and has been involved with other co-ops as well. She stresses the importance of the co-op’s function as a support group for families. Glaeser says it’s important to be able to compare notes, as well as interact with other kids and adults.

“It’s a support network.” –LEAP co-coordinator Dani Glaeser

“If your child loves dinosaurs so you spent a full year studying every sort of dinosaur that exists, but that’s not on the test! Regular school systems, they don’t teach like that,” Glaeser says. “So it’s a support network. You’re always wondering if you’re doing enough. As a mom you’re always wondering and homeschooling, to have a support system is really important because then you can have somebody just say, ‘You’re doing just fine.’”

Glaeser explains that there are many different types of co-ops throughout the state, secular and religious, who interact in a variety of ways, but for her family, LEAP is a good fit. She says her daughter is easily overwhelmed by to too much sensory information and so the small co-op provides a gentle environment for her to learn to socialize and make friends.

LEAP kids at Rich’s Farm

“We were at Rich Farms a couple weeks ago, and she is terrified of slides. And she was in this big bouncy house with a slide. I thought she would just stay in the first part but then I came around and she was sitting at the top of her slide with her sister Hunter, her friend Gavin, and Kaleb, from here, and they were talking about her being scared. Kaleb puts his arm around her and says, ‘We’ll do it together.’ And they all come down the slide together. She went on that slide the rest of the afternoon,” Glaeser remembers.

“So I watch these kids here and their gentleness and their kindness when they play together and tell stories together and THAT is what it’s all about—kids coming together and reaching out.”

Festival of Ideas lecture to focus on WVU’s struggle to self govern

As part of Mountaineer Week at West Virginia University, WVU’s Festival of Ideas lecture series will host the author of a new book about WVU’s history over the last six decades.

Ronald Lewis is Professor Emeritus of history at WVU and the author of the new book, “Aspiring to Greatness: West Virginia University since World War II.” In the book, Lewis focuses on three significant factors that influenced the university and others like it across the nation:

Growth
Diversification
Commercialization

“These are actually transformative periods of higher education,” said Lewis. “Where after them, higher education is no longer the same than the period before.”

In his book, Lewis explains that federal programs after World War II, such as the GI Bill, allowed millions of people to attend college and led to WVU’s expansion.

The expansion forced WVU and other schools across the nation to expand facilities, create programs and hire more faculty. But Lewis says the usual pipeline of middle class white males who went to college dried up in the 1960’s and diversification of WVU’s student body came into play.

“I mean the United States was transformed by the civil rights movement,” Lewis said. “…the university has changed but I think it is because the country has changed profoundly.”

This expansion and diversification happened so dramatically that it revolutionized WVU’s infrastructure and ideology. Lewis also explains how one trend led to another, and that’s where we come to his third theme: commercialization. As public funding for public institutions, including WVU, has decreased in recent years, universities are looking at other sources for revenue, including grants, tuition and fundraising. Lewis also says this time period has universities thinking more like a business.

“It’s not really a business even though it kind of has to run like one. We don’t manufacture things, we generate knowledge and technology through research so that’s why we have to find a way for it to work for us,” said Lewis.

But according to Lewis, there is a fourth influential factor to WVU’s aspirations to be a great university. The struggle for self-governance is the focus of Lewis’s Festival of Ideas lecture Tuesday, Nov. 5.

“Self-governance is recognized by most higher education experts as one of the key ingredients in becoming a great university, that distinguishes a great university,” Lewis said.

According to Lewis, WVU struggled to govern itself in the 1970’s when the Board of Regents in Charleston controlled some of the university’s operations. Lewis will discuss more past and present-day issues that impact WVU’s quest to be among the great universities in the country at the Festival of Ideas lecture in the Mountainlair Ballrooms at 7:30 p.m.

Diane Jeanty is a Journalism Student at West Virginia University.

WVU law school promotes cultural ties with Mexico’s University of Guanajuato

West Virginia University’s College of Law hosted three visiting professors from the University of Guanajuato last week. “Mexico Week” at the law school featured lectures and panel discussions giving students an opportunity to better understand life south of the border.

Perhaps the longest standing relationship WVU has with a sister school abroad is with the University of Guanajuato. In continuing with that tradition, professors from the school in the small university town of Guanajuato came to share their world with students.

La Ley

Patricia Bengné is a professor of law at the University of Guanajuato who has made several trips to Morgantown over the years. She came to Morgantown to dispel cultural misconceptions, to impart a sense of the history of Mexico, and also to give students a sense of that country’s legal system.

“Mexico and the US, we do not follow the same legal system,” Bengné explained. “Mexico is under the civilian tradition, and the US has a common law system. The main difference in my opinion is that the legal system here in the US is based on the judge-made law. I mean the judges can make the law. And in Mexico it is very different; we have to follow very rigid statutes—the legal rules, I mean, we call codigo. It’s a very rigid system where we have to find the solution to the problem in these books.”

Bengné explains that the origins of Mexico’s legal system are both ancient and classical, based on the Roman and French legal systems. She says the Mexican system shares more in common with other legal systems throughout the world than with the Common Law system in the U.S.—especially those law systems practiced in Latin America and most of continental Europe.

Bengné says efforts are underway in Mexico to change the legal system into one more flexible and efficient.

“I have been in Chile recently and in Chile it took ten years to transition from one system to another. So in Mexico I think it will take much more time than that. It’s not easy to do that—to change the mind and way of thinking of lawyers, police officers, magistrates, every person involved in the judicial branch? It’s not easy, believe me.”

But Bengné has seen some relatively rapid changes in Mexico. She was among four women in a class of fifty who graduated from the law school in Guanajuato in 1978.

“Being a female lawyer in those years? Oh it was impossible in Mexico. When I went to practice law—because you need to practice in order to know what you’re doing—I was like an invisible woman. It was very, very difficult.”

But today, Bengné says 56 percent of the students graduating from the law school in Guanajuato are women, and today more than ever, women are taking up judicial roles.

“Let me tell you, in my home town in the state of Guanajuato we have a woman as the president of the court—tribunal local estatal, we say. She was the president of the state court in Guanajuato and she was my student. We are very proud of having that,” Bengné said.

El Gobierno

“We have been a democracy roughly for more than 20 years or so, so we’re still a baby democracy,” says Fernando Patrón, the Director of the Public Management Department of the Law, Politics, and Government Division at the university.

Patrón also spoke with students about changes and challenges Mexico faces. He talked about the return to power of the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) which was the dominant political party in Mexico for most of the 20th century, during which time Mexico was run under an authoritative rule.

“My perspective is that there is no peril of regression to authoritarianism in Mexico whatsoever, considering, of course, what this party’s return to power means,” Patrón said. “I think that the political system is mature enough to hold democracy. Our main concern in Mexico is not with the political system, but with the rule of law, for instance, corruption, transparency, accountability, poverty, which are not minor problems. No they’re very serious, big problems. So in order to consolidate democracy, we really need to improve those aspects of our country, otherwise our democracy could be in peril.”

The culminating event of Mexico Week at the law school was a panel discussion which included topics such as engineering in Mexico, the role of indigenous people politically, as well as organized crime.

Parts of Monongahela National Forest closed for logging

Hunters and anglers who use the Monongahela National Forest will have to avoid a large area while timber is being harvested. The U.S. Forest Service and…

Hunters and anglers who use the Monongahela National Forest will have to avoid a large area while timber is being harvested.

     The U.S. Forest Service and the state Division of Natural Resources say they’ll have to steer clear because of safety concerns while helicopters move logs.

     The work was set to begin Friday and could last as long as six weeks, depending on weather.

     The Forest Service says the closed area is bounded by state Route 150, the Williams River, Little Laurel Creek, the National Forest boundary north of Edray, and Forest Road 115B.

     The Williams River Road will not be closed.

     District Ranger Rondi Fischer apologizes for any inconvenience but says safety is more important.

     Travelers should also expect delays of up to an hour on state Route 50.