Rape-Myth Attitudes Are Still about Gender, IUP Criminologists Find

Posted on October 3, 2011 by Ms. Michelle S. Fryling

I keep coming back to the IUP Criminology Department for feature stories and experts.

First of all, these professors are so accessible. They are busy teachers and researchers, but they are willing to talk with me and to talk with the media when reporters have questions about current issues in criminology.

Second, the work they do is just plain interesting. They ask questions that I might never have thought to ask, and these studies almost always have relevance to reporters and writers.

Criminology professor Jennifer Roberts (who recently was promoted to the rank of professor–congratulations, Dr. Roberts!) did research with one of her doctoral students, Laura King, to try and determine if hometown types have an impact on how people think about rape. She surveyed a sample of IUP undergraduate and graduate students for her study.

You’d think that urbanites, who probably have more exposure to news about crimes like sexual assault, would have a different opinion about these crimes than people from small towns, where the crime rate is lower and there are fewer media reports on sexual assault.

Not so, they found. It’s not about the hometown, but it is about gender. Men were still more likely to accept rape myths than women.

Dr. Roberts and Ms. King’s “Traditional Gender Role and Rape Myth Acceptance: From the Countryside to the Big City” was published in the 2011 Women and Criminal Justice Journal, showing that hometowns have little to do with the acceptance of “rape myths.” Rape myths are stereotypical beliefs about rape.

Dr. Roberts and Ms. King explain that rape myths traditionally blame the victim, excuse the perpetrator, and minimize the severity of the attack based on a number of situational and background characteristics.

Okay. Interesting, but it begs the question: Why does this study matter to the media (which means you and me)?

Here’s why: Accepting these myths influences how survivors are treated AND contributes to the underreporting of this crime, Dr. Roberts says.

That’s the big headline for this story.

But there is some good news in this research to add to the headline. The overall rape myth acceptance within the pool of students she surveyed was lower than in similar studies conducted decades ago.

There is still much more to be done, Dr. Roberts stresses. Unfortunately, the acceptance of rape myth is still prevalent enough to warrant additional attention through things such as educational programs focusing on myths about rape and dating violence.

Safety Protocols Everywhere, and No One Paying Attention?

Posted on September 30, 2011 by Ms. Michelle S. Fryling

I don’t really think much about safety in the workplace. Maybe because the most dangerous thing that could happen to me in my third-floor office in Sutton is that I get overly caffeinated (I love coffee and have my own personal Keurig).

But thankfully for people at job sites that have dangerous chemicals and machinery, there are people who do think very strategically about workplace safety.

I really enjoyed a recent meeting with Jan Wachter, associate professor of Safety Sciences. Dr. Wachter has a very diverse past, including study at a theological seminary. He’s not your typical safety professional, but he’s incredibly knowledgeable and has extensive experience in many different work sites. What intrigued me about his current work was that he was looking at safety from the perspective of the worker, not management.

Dr. Wachter got a $90,000 grant from the Alcoa Foundation to study “worker engagement” in the safety process.

WAIT! Don’t click away just yet. I promise, it’s interesting.

Here’s what that means. If workers have an accident, even if it’s because of a mistake that they make, it might not really be their fault, Dr. Watcher argues. It might be that they just aren’t buying into safety protocols and guidelines.

So the fault, dear reader, is not in their stars, but with management.

Here’s what he says: “While human error has been associated with the majority of incidents in the workplace, motivation and worker engagement may be the keys to human-error reduction.”

Dr. Wachter hopes that the outcomes of this research, once instituted in the workplace, could reduce lost workdays due to accidents by 20 percent.

The key difference in this study, as opposed to other research on safety in the workplace, is that Dr. Wachter will investigate how well–or how poorly–workers are engaged, or buying into, a shared accountability for identifying at-risk situations and responding to them.

There’s more about Dr.Wachter on the Research at IUP website, and I encourage you to stay tuned. I expect some very out-of-the-ordinary results from his research.

Rocking the Classroom

Posted on September 28, 2011 by Dr. Michael J. Powers

If you walked by Cogswell Hall this morning, you might have heard “Louie Louie” ringing through the halls. A lot of “Louie Louie.” As in, a full hour of “Louie Louie.” After all, it’s “Louie Louie” Day in Gen Choral.

“Gen Choral” is what students call Music professor Laura Ferguson’s General/Choral Methods class. And although Ferguson admits it has a reputation as “the rock band class,” it’s actually a class that teaches music education students the “very traditional” skills they need to lead choirs and choruses–along with general musical training to help them work with the many other ensembles they may be asked to lead, including world drums, microphone techniques, steel drumming, and, yes, rock band.

The mix of skills taught in Gen Choral derives from new thinking about what school music programs should provide for students. “There’s this real disconnect between the kinds of music we make in schools and the kind of music we find authentically in our culture,” notes Ferguson. Instead of making students fit the mold of what we already have–concert band, choir, orchestra–why not fit the mold to them? Why not open the door wider so more students participate in school music programs?

Ferguson is not the only music educator asking these questions. More primary and secondary schools are bringing popular music into their music curricula each year, and there is a growing body of research on the approach. In Britain, an organization called Musical Futures trains teachers to build upon students’ “existing passion for music.” And in the U.S., Little Kids Rock supports “teaching methods that are rooted in children’s knowledge of popular music forms such as rock, rap, blues, hip-hop, and more.” (Check out the New York Times‘s “Fixes” blog for more on Little Kids Rock.)

But Ferguson believes she is the first person to create a college course for music educators that revolves around these new approaches to teaching music.

A key element of Ferguson’s approach to the rock band part of the course is separating music students from the instruments they have spent years learning to play. It’s not an easy transition for many, as years of musical training have convinced them that they should not play music at all unless they can play it very well. But not playing the instrument they usually play forces music ed students to be more “like their future students.”

Hence “Louie Louie” Day.

Within a single class session, Ferguson’s students pick up the electric guitar, electric bass, and sit at a drum kit for the first time. They learn their first three power chords and start playing a recognizable song. For many, it’s a completely new way to learn music–and they are surprised to see how quickly beginning music students can start making music that they enjoy.

It’s a lesson these future educators will take with them when they graduate. So don’t be surprised if you hear “Louie Louie” coming from the choir room at a high school near you.

A Gen Choral Sample

While “Louie Louie” Day isn’t open to the public, the Gen Choral concert is. This final class activity is a concert where students direct each other in choir performances and play music on the instruments they started playing only a few weeks earlier.

Below, you can enjoy a now-legendary (among IUP music students) performance from one of those concerts: “Lorraine’s Lament,” an ode to Lorraine Wilson, professor emeritus and former chair of Music:

Nursing Simulation Lab Makes Music Video Debut

Posted on September 27, 2011 by Ms. Michelle S. Fryling

IUP’s Nursing and Allied Health Professions degrees are some of our most rigorous programs, and for good reason–the things that the students learn there ARE a matter of life and death.

The faculty work very hard to create real-life experiences for students, so they are well prepared for work in hospitals and other health care settings. In September 2010, faculty members Lisa Palmer and Julia Greenawalt were successful in receiving amost $300,000 to create a simulation lab, which mirrors the home of a rural patient with a common chronic illness. The lab is designed to help train nurses for home health care especially and includes telehealth monitors used by home health care agencies. Dr. Palmer explained that with the shortage of nurses, more and more patients are being treated in their homes, and this laboratory offers a significant advantage to IUP students who go on to work with home health care agencies.

This new home health care simulation lab adds to the department’s current simulation laboratory, established by the department in 2007 and renovated in 2009. This lab includes manikins of all “ages,” including an infant, two simulated hospital rooms, and IV and other training devices.

While this laboratory gets very heavy use by students and faculty and will undoubtedly help future nurses save lives, it was the site of a very unusual project this summer.

David Altrogge, a 2006 IUP art studio/graphic design graduate, is making a name for himself as a cofounder and creative director of Vinegar Hill, a full service production company and creative agency based in Indiana. IUP has used his company for projects, and he has used IUP and Indiana places and spaces for several of his productions.

David recently was contracted by Centricity Records to produce a music video for Aaron Shust’s My Hope Is in You. The story is about a couple waiting as their daughter is treated in a hospital following an accident. I won’t give away the ending, but you might want to have a few tissues handy while you watch it.

If you’ve ever visited Johnson Hall (home to the department), and the “hospital” in the video looks sort of familiar to you–well, that’s because it is. IUP’s Nursing and Allied Health Professions Department’s simulation lab is the hospital, and the hospital lobby is the lobby of the Nursing department in Johnson. The video features several IUP Nursing graduates, including Megan Wallwork (doing chest compressions), Janelle McCombie, and Kristi Altrogge. The Bennets, of Indiana, are the grieving parents.

While IUP is proud of David’s work, we are also proud to know that the simulation lab did exactly what it was supposed to do, albeit in a fairly unorthodox setting: It offered a very real hospital environment, with a realistic patient and believable injuries. A win-win for all involved.

Raindrops, Sure…But Probably Not Satellite Parts (Falling on My Head)

Posted on September 22, 2011 by Ms. Michelle S. Fryling

I am old enough to remember the celebration surrounding America’s first lunar mission and Neil Armstrong walking on the moon. (“One small step for mankind” is part of my heritage.) I also remember the ORIGINAL Apollo 13 mission (not just the movie with Tom Hanks), and I was one of the many people who were extremely impressed to have former astronaut Jim Lovell here at IUP for the First Commonwealth Lecture Series. To my generation, astronauts like the late Patricia Hilliard Robertson (a 1985 IUP Biology graduate) are heros, and space travel and NASA still have a major wow factor.

I also remember Skylab and how worried everyone was about the possibility of being hit by space junk falling from the sky. It did sort of tarnish the space program for me, mostly because it was such fodder for late-night comedians and the show Northern Exposure. (Who else remembers that was how Maggie O’Connell’s first boyfriend died?)

Fast forward thirty-two years, and here were are again. “Satellite the size of a school bus poised to fall to Earth at an undisclosed location,” television news reporters state with the appropriate look of concern. But I think Americans have a lot less panic and a lot more amusement over this satellite than Skylab.

Ken Coles I know what I think, but I’m more interested in what our faculty experts have to say about current issues. Kenneth Coles, associate professor of Geoscience, did not disappoint on the subject of NASA’s UARS satellite and the “threat” of it hitting something–or someone–here on Earth.

“Thousands of old satellites, rocket boosters, and pieces of debris orbit the Earth. Many are in orbits that eventually decay due to friction with the very thin uppermost atmosphere,” he explained.

“When they lose enough energy to fall to Earth, smaller objects burn up in the
atmosphere, but very large ones can make it to the ground. NASA and NORAD (the North American Aerospace Defense Command) track a lot of ‘space junk’ and give as much warning as practical of such events.

“Compared to the other perils of everyday life (such as riding in a car) the hazard is very minor for us on the ground, but space junk is a much greater problem in orbit, where collisions can cause considerable damage to a satellite or spacecraft.”

Even NASA experts are pretty calm about the possibility that you could be hurt by a falling piece of satellite. They predict that twenty-six parts of the satellite will survive re-entry into the Earth’s atmosphere, and the odds of getting hit by one of those pieces is 1 in 3,200.

So, while I am not a statistics expert, considering that Pittsburgh has an average of 152 snowy or rainy days each year, maybe I should do my own television news story: “This just in: Residents of Western Pennsylvania have a 41 percent chance of getting wet from snow or rain on any given day!”

Wonder if that will make Good Morning America? I’m ready for my closeup. …

Good News “for a Change”

Posted on September 19, 2011 by Ms. Michelle S. Fryling

I truly do enjoy my job, and I am very appreciative of the folks who go out of their way to tell me that they are happy with the media coverage I’ve arranged. One of my favorite things is when folks e-mail me or stop me out walking around campus with story ideas. Alumni, especially, are very loyal to IUP, and they like to see their university represented fairly for the accomplishments of its students, faculty, and graduates. So, I try not to take it personally when I hear, “Let’s get some good news out there about IUP for a change.” I know they care deeply about IUP and its reputation and are just trying to help.

For the past several years, I’ve been maintaining a log of media hits on the What They Said web page. I think it’s a nice record of IUP in the news, and I hope that people (hint, hint: This means YOU, blog reader) visit it often.

But I’ve not really done an “official” count of media hits for several years, so, last year, I was asked to count and measure the number of “good news” stories about IUP out there with circulation information. Here’s what we found:

There were 435 positive stories about IUP from January 2010 to January 2011 in 46 different media outlets locally, regionally, nationally, and internationally.

This does NOT include the hundreds of stories featured on our local radio station OR any stories on athletics. … I imagine the number would probably triple if I counted sports reports and features.

Anyway, these media hits ranged from places like Religion Dispatch (with a circulation of 2.3 million), the New York Times (circulation 740,007), and the Minneapolis-St. Paul Star Tribune (circulation 534,750) to 29 hits in the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review (circulation 393,071), 22 hits in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette (circulation 319,987), and 310 stories in the Indiana Gazette (circulation 16,000). Using what researchers call the “industry multiplier” (how many people actually read or hear news reports), this means that good news at IUP “for a change” reached 76,474,622 people. Yes, 76.5 million people.

Of course, we don’t catch every media hit, so this is just what I’ve been able to document. I think it’s a pretty impressive number.

That’s the good news. But be assured, I’m working to get that 76.5 million up past 100 million for 2011-2012,…so story tips and ideas are always welcome!

Songbirds and Stuttering

Posted on September 16, 2011 by Ms. Michelle S. Fryling

I’m an early riser, and I love the sound of the birds in the morning.

Recently, I learned about a research project that has made me think about songbirds from a whole different point of view.

I came upon this story in a very roundabout way–I got a call from a reporter in the region, looking for information about an IUP professor working with a local company.

Right church, wrong pew. He had the right professor, Paul Nealen, Biology Department, but not the correct information about the type of research. But, it put me onto a great story.

Dr. Nealen believes that the little zebra finch, a songbird native to Australia, may hold the key to understanding speech and hearing issues in humans.

For the past sixteen years, the last six at IUP, Dr. Nealen has been studying how hearing and vocal communication occurs in the zebra finch by examining how their neurons act during learning, memory, and communication.

Okay, just stay with me here.

It is his hope that, as researchers gain a greater understanding of how these neural circuits work in these songbirds, they will be able to determine how–and why–human speech and hearing problems like deafness and stuttering occur.

“We can learn things from birds that are really relevant for humans,” he said.

Paul Nealen, Biology Department Dr. Nealen says that songbirds learn to vocalize or sing in a way that matches how humans learn to speak–by hearing themselves practice. In humans, hearing our own speech helps us to produce normal speech. Just ask any parent about that–it’s what we do to help our babies learn to talk.

Who knew that the same is true for zebra finch–hearing their own song helps them to maintain and refine their ability to sing?

The goal of Dr. Nealen’s research is to discover how individual neurons contribute to this overall function of using auditory feedback to guide the production of sounds.

One of the most exciting parts for me in telling the story to reporters is that Dr. Nealen involves IUP Biology undergraduate students in the project. But that’s another blog entry.

Attaque Old Age!

Posted on September 12, 2011 by Ms. Michelle S. Fryling

Magazines and newspapers are full of stories about aging boomers who are aggressively taking charge of their health and the aging process, acting as if this is something new. Not surprising, as the boomers’ mantra is “It’s all about me.” (Boomers, don’t e-mail me complaining about this description. First of all, I am one, and, second, if Wikipedia says it, it must be true.)

But it’s NOT new, according to Lynn Botelho, professor of History and the 2011-2012 University Professor.

“People have this perception that this generation of seniors is the first to really ‘fight back’ against aging, and that seniors in the sixteenth, seventeenth, eighteenth, and early nineteenth centuries would ‘go gentle into that good night’ that was old age,” Botelho said.

“That is simply not the case. Geriatric medicine began in the 1700s, not in the nineteenth century, as many people believe. Seniors in the 1500s were well aware of the benefits of moderating their diet, exercising, and special medicinal treatments to address issues related to aging.”

Botelho is a historian of old age and the aging body in early modern England and Europe. Her current work, being completed as part of her role as IUP’s University Professor, is a five-part book, The Aging Body, the first wide-ranging study on old age in Europe in the 1700s.

It might be because I’m just a little south of thirty now (okay, maybe more than a little), but this work makes me feel just a little better about my own efforts to age gracefully.

I’m also totally intrigued by Botelho’s other passion: fencing. And not just working out with the IUP Fencing Club (she has been its advisor for many years). I’m talking WORLD CHAMPIONSHIPS.

Botelho is a competitive fencer, in both foil and épée. She won two national titles at the July 2011 United States Fencing championship: an individual Veteran Woman (40-9) national championship and a gold medal as part of the Women’s Veteran Team.

“Fencing is a very physical activity, but it’s also about how well you think under pressure, so it’s a good fit with the life of an academic,” Botelho said.

And she knows something about the academic life. Botelho has published seven books and thirteen articles or essays on the subject of the history of aging. She serves in several international executive positions in the field of British studies, including as president of the North American Conference on British Studies. She has degrees from the University of Oregon and Oxford and holds a Ph.D. from the University of Cambridge. She also is a life fellow of Clare Hall, Cambridge.

IUP’s University Professor award, a lifetime title, recognizes a faculty member who demonstrates an outstanding record of teaching, research, and scholarly activity and service.

I am very excited that Botelho will be the first IUP professor to be featured on a new television show on WTAJ-TV called “Central PA Live.” She will be a guest on the Wednesday, September 14, show, which airs from 4:00 to 5:00 p.m. on Comcast cable channel 193. And, there’s another IUP connection: The host for the show is a 1979 IUP Journalism graduate, Dawn Pellas.

This week, Botelho will be talking about aging, but she’s already been invited back to do another segment, teaching show host Pellas how to fence! I’ll definitely be tuning in to both shows!

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