April 2009 Articles
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Victory for Kim, Savage, and Svoboda Is Victory for 502 by Nancy Stanko
Health Librarian Grateful to Lend a Helping Hand by Debra Smith
Honors Stories by Chikako Kumamoto
On the Phone by Karin Evans
Accolades - Last Call for Spring! by Konkel & Hagman
Victory for Kim, Savage, and Svoboda Is Victory for 502 by Nancy Stanko
What's good for the citizens, families, and students of District 502 is good for faculty, too.
This is the highest principle that came into play in past months as Trustee
candidates and platforms emerged, stories were told, and public interest built.
We won—we all won. The College of DuPage won. The students, the staff, the faculty, everyone. This is a victory to celebrate and a time to thank the people who had the vision and put forth the effort to make it happen.
Thanks to the candidates: Tom Wendorf, Kim Savage, Sandy Kim, and Nancy Svoboda. We are thrilled to welcome Kim, Nancy, and Sandy to their new role at COD. Tom may have lost the election, but he won our hearts, and we hope we'll still be seeing him around here.
Thanks to the PAC leadership, the many volunteers and donors, the journalists, the IEA staff…I could go on thanking people for the next 24 hours, and I couldn't run out of names.
I am eager and excited to work with these newly elected candidates to return the college to a focus on its mission. I believe that the faculty and Board of Trustees can and should be aligned on basic principles—to provide the best quality of education to the people of the district, in the best possible conditions for teaching and learning.
Although the faculty and the BOT may not always agree on every issue, I am confident that we can develop and maintain better communication based on common vision. We must recognize that the new BOT will face daunting challenges. The voters have given them a mandate to find a new and better direction for the college, while ensuring the college's excellence in academic standards and programming.
We will have facts and figures to report in the days coming—accounting for time, materials, resources, and strategy will be critical to understanding our success so that we can repeat it in the future! But we will particularly remember how fortunate we were to have such fine candidates in the BOT election of 2009. They committed themselves to the highest ideals of public service. They endured challenges, they committed their own time and money, they mobilized and inspired their own campaigns. They stepped up to meet the public with a positive message, and we can be proud to be associated with their names.
Health Librarian Grateful to Lend a Helping Hand by Debra Smith
Five years ago, I packed my belongings and moved from Rochester, Minnesota, leaving a fulfilling
career at the prestigious Mayo Clinic for what has proven to be the most
rewarding experience of my life to date: faculty librarian at the College of DuPage. "What's
this?" skeptics grouse, "How could you have given up an elite medical librarian post for a
community college position and consider it more rewarding?" That answer is
easy…because I make a difference here. Where else could I directly advocate for
and assist current and future health care professionals, patients, community members, COD faculty,
staff. AND students? Beyond that, I have taken advantage of national opportunities to deliver
consumer health teleconferences, instruct hands-on workshops, develop and teach health and
wellness TLC courses, and even mentor medical library students from across the United States.
You've heard the expression "pay it forward," I'm sure. What I do every day is an example of this concept. I maintain a medical collection supporting a health sciences curriculum taught by phenomenal educators (many of whom are also practicing health care professionals) that prepare students to step into professional health care careers. The information literacy skills that I help teach students today influence how they perform as students and, ultimately, how they do their jobs. It also helps them to be more proactive about their own health and wellness. If I'm successful, students become life-long learners, not only enhancing their own professional skills but also successfully finding the right information to assist the patients in their care.
Every time I meet with health science students, I'm reminded that what happens in that classroom will directly impact patients. For me, medical librarianship is all about the patient. After all, who IS the patient? At some time or another, it is you, or your loved one, your friend, your colleague, neighbor. After five years of teaching health information literacy, advocating for patients, and sharing my knowledge about locating medical information at COD, I am rewarded when I hear "Hey, you're my medical librarian" in restaurants, malls, grocery stores, doctors' offices and once, even as I lay in a surgical suite being prepped for surgery. "Yes!" I proudly reply, "Yes, I am your medical librarian—How may I help you to help yourself and others?"
What are some of the needs of students, community members and staff that I routinely address? In addition to traditional medical research, I also help people research particular doctors and/or health care facilities by looking up licensure, certifications, statistics, and a wide range of other information. Students come to me for job-hunting and career information as well as board review materials. As a patient advocate, I help people find information on diseases and conditions, treatment options and surgical interventions. I also teach health information seekers how to develop lists of questions to ask their health care team based on the information that we discover.
My job is not to diagnose or recommend treatment (that's what the medical professionals are for), but I certainly can help individuals find quality information that can be shared with professionals who will then apply it to a patient's particular case. Do you need to prove that eating dark chocolate everyday is more than just a guilty pleasure—that it actually helps to keep you healthy? Have you ever wondered which is better for your heart—cardio exercise or strength training? Are you in need of a book that will help explain cancer to a 6-year-old? If so, give me a call and I'll help you find what you need!
I close this essay with a bit of free association…who am I? On any given day, I am a colleague, a seeker of knowledge, a patient advocate, an information professional, a sleuth, a compassionate listener, a planner, a part of the health care team, an organizer, a patient, an instructor, a web-page designer, a friend, a resource, a questioner…I AM a medical librarian…and for those of you in the 502 district—health professionals, and patients, COD students and staff, fellow faculty—I humbly submit that I am your personal health librarian!
Honors Stories by Chikako Kumamoto
Pieced out by many fine and all-able pens, the story of the College of DuPage Honors Program
reads like a never-ending saga full of high adventure and true grit. As
the Program dreams, grows, and expands, it is also tested, challenged, rearranged, and
ameliorated. Heroes and heroines abound, so do villains, villainesses, and dark intrigues, just
to keep readers on edge. Simply titled Honors Stories, the Program's manifold plots always end
with a good moral.
Its first plot arose early in 1980s in the mind of a small group of trailblazing faculty who dreamed about having a formal honors program at COD.1 Despite initial objections and concerns, in Spring Quarter of 1984 a pilot program was given with limited offerings of basic general education courses that would have a broad appeal. They included English 101, Humanities 101, and Psychology 230. Already the key features of the current Program were in place: focus on academic excellence, smaller class sizes, content-rich rather than advanced courses, higher-thinking kinds of work rather than more work, and a faculty coordinator running the program, with the support of a group of full-time faculty serving as an advisory body. Barbara Hansen Lemme was the first coordinator, a position which Allan Carter, Alice Snelgrove, and Joyce Fletcher later carried on. In time, IC Room 2010 became the office of the Honors Program, equipped with highly skilled administrative assistants.
Since its first full-year program launched in 1984-1985, the plot ripened and characters multiplied while more courses were added and the student population and faculty involvement grew. The Honors Scholar Program came into being as well as theme-centered, interdisciplinary seminars. Field trips and on-campus lectures and social activities have added to the narrative thrill. Special transfer openings also have helped students' success stories. Now the Honors Program fills a crucial chapter in the ever evolving COD story contributing to the college's own success story and attracts the most qualified who are carefully sifted and whose status is strictly kept.
Honors Stories have been told in various genres of their own, but the most enjoyable and enduring are those told by our students who dare to go beyond the usual borders, cross traditional lines, and break barriers, while engaged in the full range of intellectual inquiry—and all of this assisted by their faculty who move their spirits and help to shape their minds.
A recent success story of six Honors Scholars is a case in point. At the annual conference of the Honors Council of the Illinois Region, our students told their intellectually exciting original tales as presenters of research papers to their peers from other two-year and four-year institutions. Their scholarly and thoughtful subjects ranged from the timeless father-son dynamics in Antigone the Hip Hop dance's role in our society, audiences' attraction to fantastic places like Harry Potter's Hogwarts, acupuncture and modern medicine, the gender issues depicted in Mrs. Doubtfire, and a critiques of today's reality television show like America's Next Top Model.
Fifty-seven Honors students have told another kind of Honors Story through the college's academic journal ESSAI since 2002. Their success stories are born of multiple intellectual inspirations: Biology, Anthropology, Math, Composition, Literature, Chemistry, History, Philosophy, Speech, Art, Architecture, Earth Science, Astronomy, Political Science, Sociology, and Film Studies. Others tell their stories through their visual art by designing the covers of the journal.
Equally noteworthy are Honors Stories told by peer tutors who have facilitated in Peer Tutoring. Their stories are sought after on the main campus as well as online. Honors Phi Theta Kappa inductees are another type of storytellers of leadership and service as well as of their unique scholarship. Honors Stories also come from students who have gone to advanced education, meaningful careers, and community activism. Powerful testaments to our Honors Program, all these stories will be writ large in the annals of COD.
This widening circle of Honors Stories will keep turning, growing. Meanwhile, revision is a part of good storytelling, and the Program's plot must refresh and reinvigorate itself from time to time. But its center will hold and so will the constant that is our honorable students and instructors. So prospective story tellers among us, please join in the wondrous world of the Honors Program and bring your innovative, fresh tales about Darwin, Shakespeare, Hypatia, Nightingale, Picasso, Curie, Hawking, Bach, Herodotus, Marx, Machiavelli, Montessorie, Kant, Pythagoras, Mead, Mercator, Lady Murasaki…
1Ben Whisenhunt provided the history of the COD Honors Program. For various genres of Honors Stories, the credit is gratefully given to all faculty who have come in contact with our past and current Honors students (space consideration regrettably disallows the listing of names).
Image is of COD students at the Honors Council of the Illinois Region Conference, 2009
On the Phone by Karin Evans
The print is small the list is long the stack is very high… I arrived at the first night
of phone banking at the Naperville IEA office and saw an enormous pile
of paper—thousands of names and phone numbers of IEA members, and we are going to call them
all. Well, ok, it's just the first night. Here's Mary Hill, Tom Tipton, Jackie McGrath, Nancy Webb.
Nancy Stanko appeared later and passed out foil-wrapped bunny chocolates to keep us going. By that
time I had the hang of it. Lots of messages, those are pretty easy, just read the script and sound
like you're still interested in saying the same thing over and over!
"Hi, my name is Karin Evans, and I'm a teacher at the College of DuPage. I'm calling you as a fellow IEA member. We're asking everyone to turn out and vote in the election for COD trustees on Tuesday, April 7th."
"Can you take a moment to write down the names of our candidates? Sandy Kim, Tom Wendorf, Kim Savage, and Nancy Svoboda, s-v-o-d-o-b-a." One woman says cheerfully, "I'm Polish, you don't have to spell that for me."
Some people answer their phones—they answer just like I would—they are in the middle of something, they only have a minute, they are polite but obviously they are praying this won't take long. Spouses are patient, taking messages or letting the phone ring a second time so we can leave a message.
I struggle with the list. The columns are wide and I have trouble keeping track of where I am. I dial very carefully—I am bad with numbers. I am sure I need a new prescription for my glasses. I do not like talking on the phone, when will this hour be over? I am grateful for every blessed IEA member who lets their voicemail pick up—I'm sorry, I'm not proud of this, but I'm a classic introvert and really I would rather just leave a message…
Jackie says that we phone-bank from the IEA offices so that their identification appears on CallerID. And IEA members really are reasonably happy to hear from us, most of them anyway. Sometimes they want to talk—but not always—the phone bankers stopped early the night of Obama's televised press conference; people didn't like being interrupted while they were busy being engaged citizens!
I do the best I can… I finish a whole page of names on each of my three phone bank shifts. A week before the election there is a call for more people on the phones. I look deep within myself and find that, no, I cannot do any more calling. Someone else must put butt on chair, ear on phone, eyes on script and list. I will go back to my computer, though… and write more emails… for Trustees We Can Trust!
Accolades - Last Call for Spring! by Mary Konkel & Ida Hagman
Pass on the good news! Create some positive spin!
Accolades returns in May for the last time this academic year. We would like to highlight your educational achievements and degrees, publications, program development, awards, athletic achievements, musical/theatrical accomplishments and more. We want to hear about your personal accomplishments as well as your professional ones. Consider highlighting someone who has worked behind the scenes without recognition.
Send your submissions to Accolades column editors Ida Hagman or Mary Konkel by April 22 so we can publicize them in the May issue of The Advocate.
