Hip Hop as an Educator’s Tool

By Don Sawyer, Instructor of Sociology

I recently had the privilege to present at the first New England Regional Conference on Teaching Sociology on April 13 at Stonehill College.  This conference was sponsored by the Association for Humanist Sociology; the Society for the Study of Social Problems -Teaching Social Problems Division; and the Department of Sociology and Criminology at Stonehill College.  This one-day conference was dedicated to best practices in teaching sociology (and social science in general for affiliated faculty in Criminology, Anthropology, Political Science and other interdisciplinary fields). The Conference featured traditional paper and poster sessions, a discussion panel of distinguished teachers in the social science disciplines, and open-group discussions oriented around important themes related to teaching in the social sciences.

Giving Back to Our Community

By Sujata Gadkar-Wilcox, Assistant Professor of Legal Studies

In the spirit of community action, service and initiative we hope to see in our students, several Quinnipiac faculty members including Jill Martin, Deborah Clark, Diane Ariza, Xi Chen, Nancy Burns, Karen Bliss, Courtney Marchese, and Sujata Gadkar-Wilcox came together to give back to the community as part of the Big Event on Saturday, April 6, 2013.

The Big Event is a day of service organized and run by students in universities and colleges across the nation to express gratitude to the local community. The students form teams that participate in a variety of largely non-profit community organizations dedicated to issues such as social justice, children and elderly services, and health initiatives, among others. We hope this day provides students with more than an artificial engagement with community action. Perhaps instead this will be one of many opportunities for students to become involved in their local community, understand the importance of community action, and grasp the reality that so many community members are struggling to meet the most basic needs.

Baseball and Statistics

By Stan Rothman, Professor of Mathematics

From 9 AM on March 26 to 12 PM on March 27, I had the privilege of spending time with two special people. One man, Rico Brogna, was a former Major Leaguer; the other man Gabriel Costa is a Catholic priest.

My 27 hour adventure begins with Rico Brogna’s visit to my baseball and statistics class at Quinnipiac University on March 26. What follows in this posting is a summary of Rico’s presentation to my class on the scouting philosophy for one ML team. The first new thing I learned about scouting was that a ML team has two scouting departments. One department scouted only the amateur players; the other department was assigned to scouting the professional players. Rico scouted the professional players.