Everything Nac

Stephen F. Austin State University’s SFA Gardens recently hosted the 26th annual Bugs, Bees, Butterflies and Blossoms event on April 5 and April 19 at the Mast Arboretum.

This collaborative event — organized by the Arthur Temple College of Forestry and Agriculture, SFA Gardens, SFA Department of Education Studies, Texas Forestry Association, and Texas A&M Forest Service — offers SFA education students valuable hands-on teaching experiences with kindergarten through third-grade children in an engaging outdoor environment.

Dr. Melissa Hulings, assistant professor of education studies, arranged for 42 SFA students taking the “Teaching Science in EC-6” course to participate as activity hosts for the event.

The SFA students were provided training through Project Learning Tree and resources to conduct four activities that “engage children in learning about the environment through the lens of forests” according to Dr. Alan Sowards, SFA professor emeritus of education studies and founder of the event.

The event was attended by 554 children across 32 classes from eight public, private and home schools. The children learned about the life cycles of butterflies, honeybees and trees, including the role of decomposers in the tree cycle and the adaptations of plants and animals that help them survive.

“What I love about this event is that some teachers who brought their classes to Bugs, Bees, Butterflies and Blossoms also attended the event as a child, later graduated from SFA in education studies, and are now bringing their students to the event,” said Kay Jenkins, SFA Gardens environmental educational programs coordinator.

The Four Seasons Garden Club supported the event through a donation used to purchase a classroom set of Project Learning Tree’s K-8 activity guides and event T-shirts for the SFA students to wear. Local beekeeper David Gallager provided observation honeybee hives for one of the activities, and SFA Gardens provided live decomposers, plants and butterflies in various life cycle stages and other resources for the activities.

“Bugs, Bees, Butterflies and Blossoms is the largest and longest-running environmental education program in East Texas,” said Ted Stevens, education director with the Texas Forestry Association. “This year was another success as it gave future teachers the confidence to incorporate environmental education into their classrooms and provided a service to the community around the university by hosting an interactive and fun environmental education field investigation for local school children in SFA’s beautiful gardens.”

Ted Stevens; Laura Stevens, wildland urban interface coordinator for the Texas A&M Forest Service; Jenkins; and Elyce Rodewald, SFA Gardens program associate, hosted the trainings for SFA students.

ABOUT STEPHEN F. AUSTIN STATE UNIVERSITY

Stephen F. Austin State University, the newest member of The University of Texas System, began a century ago as a teachers’ college in Texas’ oldest town, Nacogdoches. Today, it has grown into a regional institution comprising six colleges — business, education, fine arts, forestry and agriculture, liberal and applied arts, and sciences and mathematics. Accredited by the Southern Association of Colleges and Schools, SFA enrolls approximately 11,000 students while providing the academic breadth of a state university with the personalized attention of a private school. The main campus encompasses 421 acres that include 37 academic facilities, nine residence halls, and 68 acres of recreational trails that wind through its six gardens. The university offers more than 80 bachelor’s degrees, more than 40 master’s degrees and four doctoral degrees covering more than 120 areas of study. Learn more at sfasu.edu.

Stephen F. Austin State University’s Jordan Coleman, a Master of Arts in public history student from Effingham, Illinois, has been named a Jess Hay Graduate Fellow by The University of Texas System for the 2024-25 academic year.

The fellowship is a unique graduate opportunity established by the late Jess Hay, a former UT System regent who was an advocate and visionary leader for the UT System. Hay passed away in 2015. The fellowship was designed to tie graduate education to timely and high-quality research benefiting the state of Texas.

“I feel incredibly honored to have received the Jess Hay fellowship knowing the amount of great research being completed throughout the UT System,” Coleman said. “It is also wonderful to see research coming out of SFA’s College of Liberal and Applied Arts recognized by not only SFA but by the UT System.”

As part of the program, four annual graduate student research fellowships of $15,000 each rotate among UT System institutions, benefiting two academic institutions and two health institutions each year.

Coleman, who served one deployment in Iraq while serving in the United States Army as an infantryman, was selected based on his research and thesis capstone project on former Congressman Charles Wilson’s congressional papers housed in SFA’s East Texas Research Center.

According to Coleman, Wilson was an internationally recognized politician whose career has continued to be historically significant since his death. The intended outcome of Coleman’s capstone thesis is to catalog and add hundreds of new historical items to the Charlie Wilson Collection and make it available for streamlined public research almost 30 years after its creation.

To enable and expand access to the collection, Coleman is creating an updated finding aid that includes these previously uncatalogued objects, folders, photographs, and audio and visual items. Adding these pieces to the Charles Wilson Congressional Papers finding aid will allow researchers global access to the ETRC’s audio and visual recordings of Charles Wilson during his time in office.

As part of the cataloguing process, Coleman will put the collection into archival-quality boxes and folders, introduce safe storage methods for objects and oversized items, and make recommendations for which media items need to be digitized as soon as possible, including 300 video and audio cassettes, reel-to-reel films, video home system tapes and broadcast films. These tactics will ensure the collection’s long-term survival and usability by the public.

Coleman said the $15,000 award will be used to purchase all the supplies needed to correctly preserve the audio and visual materials within the Charles Wilson Congressional Papers collection at the ETRC, and research Wilson further in both Austin and Washington, D.C.

Initially unfamiliar with the fellowship, Coleman was encouraged by his history professors to apply and credits the remarkable mentorship of faculty members — particularly Drs. Perky Beisel and Lydia Towns, SFA professor and lecturer of history, respectively — as the reason for his academic achievements.

“Jordan Coleman is a top-notch graduate student in every area: research, analysis and writing,” Beisel said. “He’s been a consistent leader in his seminar courses and has gone above and beyond to gain additional hands-on experiences within the field of public history. As president of Phi Alpha Theta, the history honors society, Jordan has led an ambitious fundraising campaign and organized a regional conference, thus revitalizing the organization and making SFA a destination for history-minded students.”

Along with the Jess Hay Graduate Fellowship, Coleman has presented at seven conferences while in graduate school and has been awarded multiple state and international awards for his research. Additionally, Coleman wrote a National Register of Historic Places Nomination for the Concord Rosenwald School in Mount Enterprise while interning for Preservation Texas.

He also has been involved in six projects over the past two years spanning all aspects of becoming a public historian. He has worked on a Native American Graves and Repatriation Act project, assisted in the creation of a preservation and management plan for a historic cemetery, conducted and transcribed oral histories and has processed hundreds of boxes of documents and digitized thousands of photographs at the ETRC.

Coleman currently works at the ETRC as a graduate research assistant and credits his wife, Holly, and son, Axel, as his biggest supporters and motivators.

ABOUT STEPHEN F. AUSTIN STATE UNIVERSITY

Stephen F. Austin State University, the newest member of The University of Texas System, began a century ago as a teachers’ college in Texas’ oldest town, Nacogdoches. Today, it has grown into a regional institution comprising six colleges — business, education, fine arts, forestry and agriculture, liberal and applied arts, and sciences and mathematics. Accredited by the Southern Association of Colleges and Schools, SFA enrolls approximately 11,000 students while providing the academic breadth of a state university with the personalized attention of a private school. The main campus encompasses 421 acres that include 37 academic facilities, nine residence halls, and 68 acres of recreational trails that wind through its six gardens. The university offers more than 80 bachelor’s degrees, more than 40 master’s degrees and four doctoral degrees covering more than 120 areas of study. Learn more at sfasu.edu.

ABOUT THE UNIVERSITY OF TEXAS SYSTEM

The University of Texas System has enhanced the lives of Texans and individuals worldwide through its commitment to education, research and health care for 140 years. With 14 institutions collectively enrolling over 254,000 students, the UT System stands as one of the largest public university systems in the United States. UT institutions annually produce over 66,000 graduates and award more than one-third of the undergraduate degrees in Texas, as well as over 60% of the state’s medical degrees. The combined efforts of UT-owned and affiliated hospitals and clinics resulted in over 10.7 million outpatient visits and more than 2 million hospital days last year. The UT System’s $3.8 billion research enterprise is one of the nation’s most innovative and ranks No. 1 in Texas and No. 2 in the nation for federal research expenditures. The UT System has an operating budget of $29.1 billion for fiscal year 2024 and employs more than 116,000 faculty, health care professionals, support staff and student workers.

By University Marketing Communications

Two theatre students from Stephen F. Austin State University brought the highest honors in collegiate acting to the university when they won the Irene Ryan Acting Competition at the National Kennedy Center American College Theatre Festival recently in Washington, D.C.

The acting duo of Kiya Green, senior theatre major from Waxahachie, and Mariano Aguirre, senior theatre major from Little Elm, were rated No. 1 in the nation for their competition performances in which the students had five minutes to present two monologues and one duo scene to be judged by a variety of professionals and theatre makers, according to Cleo House-Keller, director of the SFA School of Theatre and Dance. The Irene Ryan Acting Scholarship is a prestigious award in the field of theater arts, named after the acclaimed actress Irene Ryan.

“For those who aren’t familiar with KCACTF and the Irene Ryan competition, it might be hard to convey or understand the significance of Kiya and Mariano’s win,” House-Keller explained. “It is easily equal to winning an NCAA championship. These students came out on top of all of the actors in this competition from across the entire U.S. For SFA to be recognized like this – not that long ago for our production of “Bootycandy” in 2021 and again more recently with SFA theatre student Danielle Wooden winning the national title last year for stage management – only serves to highlight that theatre training at SFA is among the best in the country.”

Each April, the Kennedy Center welcomes outstanding theater students to the KCACTF National Festival. Student awardees in design, performance, directing, playwriting, stage management, dramaturgy, arts leadership and theatre criticism are invited from all eight regions. Through master classes, presentations, conversations and staged readings, students learn from and connect with established theatre artists, as well as their peers from across the country. At this national event, students are eligible for professional training opportunities, fellowships and awards based on their projects and work presented during the festival.

In earning Irene Ryan Acting Scholarships, Green will receive a $5,000 award, and Mariano will receive a $1,000 award. She also earned a Jane Alexander Award for Acting and a $2,500 award from the College of Fellows of the American Theatre, and she won a Mark Twain Scholarship for Comic Performance and a $1,000 award.

Aguirre won a five-day actor intensive session with Encompass Collective in which he will join other ensemble awardees in participating in graduate school-level actor training, including movement, voice, scene study and self-tape. Encompass Collective is a community of Global Majority actors trained at the top graduate school programs in the U.S. and who are committed to training the next generation of artists to sustain a professional career in acting.

Both Green and Aguirre graduated in May after earning Bachelor of Fine Arts degrees. Green is exploring two “exciting options” in her career path, including working with The Ensemble Theatre in Houston or moving to Atlanta, Ga., to “kickstart my acting career.”

“Both paths offer their own challenges and rewards, and I’m eager to see how each choice shapes my artistic trajectory,” she said. “I am incredibly excited about my future in acting. While I tend to be self-critical, I know that I’ve been blessed with a gift from God, and I’m determined not to let it go to waste. Winning this award is a testament to countless hours of hard work and dedication. It’s a reminder that my efforts have paid off, and that I’m on the right path. I can’t wait to see how I can continue to grow as an actor.”

“The Kennedy Center offers such an incredible opportunity,” Aguirre said, “and I was so honored to serve as Kiya’s scene partner for the festival. Meeting so many theatre students from around the nation, and working with one another throughout the week alongside some of the nation’s top theatre professionals was truly a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity.

“Receiving such honors for your work is an incredible experience,” Aguirre added, “and as we graduate, the recognition also reassures us that our theatre faculty at SFA have well-prepared us to forge our own artistic pathways in the professional world.”

For more information about the School of Theatre and Dance, call (936) 468-4003 or visit sfasu.edu/theatre-dance.