Click play to hear excerpts from an interview with Margaret Finnegan

In Tasha Walden’s classroom, six fourth-graders sit around a table in silence. When Walden asks a question, three arms dart up to answer. When one girl is picked, she walks to the Smart Board, touches a set of numbers and slides it across the screen.

“Put the numbers in order from least to greatest,” Walden says. As she talks, her hands are a flurry of movement, stretching apart on the word “from” as if pulling taut a piece of string. When a student gazes at his notebook-sized white board, Walden taps the desk in front of him to get his attention. When the whole group works together to find an answer, she smiles and cheers, “Yaaaay! Good job,” her hands rising above her shoulders and fingers wagging.

Meanwhile, on the floor, a girl is sprawled in front of a laptop playing a loud math game. “Pedro has 46 cents,” the computer asks. “What can he buy?” She punches some keys and gets a loud, cartoon-y failure tune in response: “Wamp wamp waaaaah.”

But the sound means nothing to her, and her classmates don’t glance over. None of them can hear it – in fact, many of them can’t hear anything at all. Walden, a 2004 Flagler graduate, is the only one in the room who hears, speaks and signs clearly.

And she’s responsible for helping her students learn despite a disability that can make everyday communication difficult, if not impossible. As Helen Keller once described it, deafness can mean “the loss of the most vital stimulus — the sound of the voice that brings language, sets thoughts astir and keeps us in the intellectual company of man … to be cut off from hearing is to be isolated indeed.”

Relationships

Like many of her peers, Walden wanted to study deaf education and sign language because she sympathized with the challenges facing deaf people. Her interest started in high school, when one of her good friends had a deaf sister.

“I was like, ‘I can’t even tell her happy birthday,’ ” Walden said. “I’m not the kind of person who would just go, ‘I can’t sign, so I’m just not going to learn.’

“I didn’t want her to feel isolated or left out … So the first thing I learned to sign was ‘Happy Birthday.’ ”

Walden chose Flagler’s deaf education program because it offers an uncommon opportunity to spend time at the nearby Florida School for the Deaf and Blind (FSDB) — the same place where Walden teaches professionally now. Each year, Flagler’s close ties with FSDB help about 55 deaf ed majors gain American Sign Language skills, teaching experience and familiarity with deaf culture. The Flagler deaf ed curriculum requires students to complete observe-and-assist hours and internships at FSDB before they graduate.

“We have a relationship with FSDB that’s almost as old as the college,” said Margaret Finnegan, professor and director of Flagler’s Education of the Deaf and Hard of Hearing Program. Flagler Chancellor William L. Proctor served for numerous years on FSDB’s board and as its chair, and Flagler Assistant to the President Mary Jane Dillon is the board chair today. “FSDB is the largest school for the deaf in the country … You get a sense of what the breadth of the [deaf] population is. Some students have cochlear implants, some don’t. Some parents are involved, some aren’t.

“It gives our students an opportunity to work with all those different dimensions of deafness and to have a broader perspective of what their role is going to be and how they’re going to refine their skills … The more authentic experience our students have, the more likely they are to make good decisions as teachers.”

Deaf and elementary education major Jillian White agrees. She’s been spending three hours a week with an FSDB kindergarten class helping with various activities: math practice, reading, playing games, planting lima beans. White says the observe-and-assist has affirmed her interest in deaf education.

“I am amazed at how well I can communicate with the students,” she said. “Also, obviously, the experience helps. I want to work there, and the people that I meet are so amazing. I see my future in the students and faculty.”

Jessica Kaspar, a 2004 Flagler graduate who teaches second grade at FSDB, says her FSDB internship and volunteer experience helped her prepare as much as possible for a challenging first year in the classroom. For her, the biggest benefit was a chance to acclimate to the nuances of deaf communication.

“It’s like if you were going to go to a different country for a year,” Kaspar said of her preparations. “It was getting in there and doing it and learning from my mistakes.”

Walden experienced a similar period of initial awkwardness when she interned at FSDB.

“It’s a scary experience when you first come in and you get a chance to be on the other side – you’re the one who can’t communicate as well,” she said. “It was tough, and you have to think, ‘How can I say that conceptually accurately?’ But when you’re educating the future, you have to think about it.”

Contrary to popular belief, most sign languages – and there are vastly different versions used throughout the world – have developed independently of oral languages. That means signed messages have their own complex forms of grammar, and meanings can be altered by seemingly unimportant factors like body posture. In short, American signs are not necessarily word-for-word translations from English.

And deaf culture is like any other, according to Finnegan, who previously taught at FSDB and has a deaf daughter: it’s interesting and different, but a difficult adjustment. She used homecoming at FSDB as an example.

“Homecoming at a deaf school is unlike anything you’ve ever seen,” Finnegan said. “It’s just a big sign fest … It’s very expressive, very touchy.”

And it’s surprisingly loud.

“Deaf people don’t know how noisy they are,” she said. “When I’m at home with her [my daughter,] doors are slamming, water is left running … she scoots her chair across the floor.”

Adjustments

The deaf and hard-of-hearing classes at FSDB are small compared to public schools. There are typically five or fewer students in a class, and they come from all over the state. Many of them live in the FSDB dormitories and go home for weekends and holidays. Some of their families sign, others don’t.

Kaspar says deaf and hard-of-hearing students often face a variety of unique emotional and educational challenges – but technology has helped teachers overcome some of them. She and Walden have Smart Boards that allow them to project a computer screen or document on the wall; students can even touch and move items on the board. And when a lesson is over, Walden says, she prints out notes – which, when students have to keep their heads up and eyes alert to receive a lesson, can be difficult to jot down on their own.

Still, there are rough days. “It’s sometimes such a struggle,” Kaspar said. “They [deaf children] develop language in the same way hearing kids do, but it’s a little delayed.

“I think all good teachers, though, they have to change and modify … I think when people think of teaching, they think of big manuals. They think of ‘Open your book to this page and answer that,’ ” Kaspar continued, her hands running down an imaginary list on the table. “People don’t think of crying kids or ‘I don’t understand, I’ve never been to a zoo.’ … How do you explain when they don’t understand that the past is two weeks ago and yesterday?”

Walden says she has the most difficulty adjusting to the broad range of individual academic levels in her classroom. Deaf children learn at different speeds, just like public school children. Whenever she gets frustrated, Walden looks for inspiration in her students.

“I had all the kids write a paper about what it’s like to be deaf,” she said. “There was one kid, I was almost in tears reading his paper. He loved the signs and the people and the culture … other kids say, ‘I don’t know why I’m deaf. It’s not fair.’

“It’s important at the beginning of the year to find something special about each child … and I keep journals of those little ‘a-ha!’ moments when they got something.”

Communication

Kaspar, who never wanted to be a teacher growing up, says a family-like sense of connection drives the deaf community. There’s a closeness that makes the task of teaching – and mastering a new language with both head and hands – worthwhile for her.

Both Kaspar and Walden find it difficult to stop signing now. Their hands move in rhythm with their speech long after their students have gone to lunch. If you don’t sign, it’s easy to feel a little flat in their presence – as if your own hands somehow have less life in them, and are leaving important things unsaid.

“With sign language, if you say ‘I’m proud of you’ and your face is like this,” Kaspar said, her face falling into a blank expression and snapping back into motion, “it doesn’t mean anything. Sometimes I’m a better communicator with sign language than verbal, now.

“I remember when I was a little girl, I was so shy. I didn’t talk at all or show body movements…I got to college and became more expressive. Especially being here – it helps.”

Before Walden’s class can leave for lunch, the students have one more assignment to complete – a written one. A boy bends over his directions and mutters to himself, mulling over the problem. The girl next to him, who has a small, tan device curved above her ear, glances at the hearing people sitting in the back of the room. She glares at the boy and shakes her head.

He doesn’t see her, so she taps his shoulder and makes an exasperated face, all raised eyebrows and dropped mouth. Her hands clasp over her ears. She doesn’t say a word, but we know what she means.

As the latest addition to Flagler College’s Board of Trustees, Delores Lastinger is bringing a passion for education and a unique background in philanthropy to her new role.

Lastinger chairs development for Flagler now, but she spent her first years out of college teaching high school in Jacksonville. With the arrival of her children, she moved on to high-profile volunteer work, serving on a variety of boards throughout Northeast Florida and leading philanthropic projects with her husband, Allen.

The Lastinger Center for Learning at the University of Florida is among their biggest contributions. The couple created an endowment to found the facility for their alma mater, and the center has been developing skilled teachers and improving student progress throughout Florida ever since.

Now the couple has relocated from Jacksonville to St. Augustine – and Delores is helping Flagler gather the donations it needs to keep improving in the future. In addition, she and her husband have personally given the college $500,000 to help preserve Flagler’s historic buildings.

“Allen and I always thought the Ponce de Leon Hotel was such a treasure and so beautiful,” Lastinger said. “And now the years have gone by, and here we are helping to raise money for it … It’s such an important facility for St. Augustine, isn’t it? You drive by and see those spires rising up.”

Lastinger said she got involved with Flagler because of her friend and former Chairman of the Board Fred M. Cone Jr., who recently passed away.

“I miss him so much,” she said. “That is a big void. Because of him, it makes me want to work even harder – to carry out the faith he had in me.”

In addition to preserving the historic campus buildings, Lastinger’s development goals include improvements to the college’s student living and teaching facilities, capital projects and scholarships.

“It’s very important, especially for Flagler College, where so many of the students receive some sort of financial aid,” Lastinger said.

College President William T. Abare Jr. called Lastinger a “wonderful addition” to the board.

“She has a passion for education and a keen interest in higher education, especially in programs dealing with the preparation of teachers,” he said. “She is a thoughtful, forward-thinking person.”

John Stewart, Flagler’s vice president of institutional advancement, said Lastinger brings “vigor and vision” to her role. “The advancement office has already been energized by her ideas and leadership,” he added.

Lastinger said she’s excited about her work for Flagler. She sees evidence of the college’s progress everywhere.

“It is extremely gratifying to see,” she said. “I go in the [new Ringhaver] Student Center and I wonder, ‘How in the world did we ever operate here without that?”

Woolfolk was associate provost and professor of sociology at Oglethorpe University in Atlanta prior to joining Flagler. He replaces Paula Miller, who resigned in July after 12 years of service that she called “very rewarding, full of wonderful opportunities, unique challenges and positive results.”

Woolfolk brings a rich academic background to his new position. In addition to a 35-year teaching career, he has led a variety of programs to improve faculty development, curriculum and campus culture.

“Flagler has been exceptionally well-managed financially, developed many strong programs, been very successful in recruiting students and generally exhibited what I would call an entrepreneurial spirit,” Woolfolk said. “When I visited the campus, I detected a sense of commitment and enthusiasm among the faculty, staff and students. I intend to work very closely with all three groups to see if we can find ways to make a strong academic program even stronger.”

Woolfolk holds doctorate and master’s degrees in sociology from University of Pennsylvania and another master’s degree in political science from the University of Oregon. He also has a bachelor’s degree in economics from University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School of Finance and Commerce.

Kelly, who was appointed assistant dean this summer, also served as interim dean of Academic Affairs during the Fall semester. The former chair of the Business Administration department has worked at Flagler for 18 years and been named “Professor of the Year” twice.

The English major spent years dreaming about traveling to China after seeing a television special on Chinese adoptions when she was in elementary school. By middle school, she was telling anyone who would listen that she hoped to live in China one day.

Finally, with the last summer of her undergraduate studies looming, Griner decided it was time to “test the waters” and see if living in the communist country was really for her.

“The whole country intrigues me,” she said. “I had to go there for myself and walk the dirt roads and shake hands with farmers to really understand what China is all about.”

Griner spent seven weeks there training in Beijing, taking classes at a teachers’ college in north central China and living with a rural Chinese family, which turned out to be her favorite part of the trip.

She took a four-hour bus ride to a remote village that had a reputation for being hostile toward outsiders. But Griner said the people in that small town were some of the most warm and caring she met during her trip.

“They loved me not for my flowery words or grand ideas, because they couldn’t understand me,” she said. “They loved me just for existing, just for being me.”

Despite having to help kill a chicken for dinner, sticking out like a sore thumb with her bright red hair and white skin, sharing a concrete slab bed with an entire family and using a “town bathroom” – which meant a concrete block wall surround and two bricks to stand on to keep the user’s feet clean – Griner says the rural experience was rewarding.

“I now know there is really nothing I cannot do,” she said. “There are only boundaries that I set for myself. If I have to eat scorpion, or chicken feet, or shower with 40 other people, I can.”

Most Chinese live on farms and are very poor, Griner said, in stark contrast to the images of Beijing, Shanghai and Hong Kong portrayed by magazines. But she believes the country has a lot to offer.

“China is a place of extraordinary contradictions, and this generation of Chinese college students has an incredible future,” Griner said. “My impression of China is one of incredible natural beauty, a rich and spiritual history and a people whose kindness has invigorated my soul.”

Griner finds the “hustle and sensory overload” of America exhausting after spending her days cultivating sunflowers and getting to know people with more basic needs. She still appreciates the United States and the freedoms it offers, but she plans to make the move to China this summer after she receives her degree.

“I strive to become more Chinese each day – which means lessening my need for identity, control and independence,” she said.

Even so, Griner is unsure of her ultimate plans.

“I don’t know who I will be in 20 years,” she said. “But I know that my experience in China has changed my life forever.”

The poster came out of a class for Art Professor Don Martin, who for the past two years has assigned his illustration students to design a poster for a non-profit organization that interests them. Luce’s poster is one of three projects being published.

The Blood:Water Mission is a non-profit based in Tennessee whose mission is to reduce the impact of the HIV/AIDS pandemic by building clean water wells and supporting medical facilities in Africa. A donation of just $1 provides a year’s supply of water for one person there.

After submitting his work to the organization, Luce received an e-mail saying it would be published on pamphlets for board members and promotional posters to be shown at events such as Bonnaroo.

Luce’s use of rich, earthy colors and rustic designs in his poster complement Blood:Water Mission’s visual theme.

“I was inspired by the organization itself, the work they do and the look they have in a lot of their advertising, also just artists like Marc Rothco,” Luce said. “I hope that visually it represents them and that it will inspire people to want to donate to their cause.”

For more information on Blood:Water Mission and getting involved, visit their Web site at:
http://www.bloodwatermission.com, or http://www.myspace.com/bloodwatermission

Novak is the author of The New York Times bestselling book, “The Prince of Darkness: 50 years Reporting in Washington,” a memoir of his years in journalism. He’s just as well- known for his newspaper column, his appearances on Fox News and CNN and his involvement in the Valerie Plame-CIA leak scandal.

Novak spoke at the Flagler College Forum on Government and Public Policy this past November, and he took questions from several classes during his visit.

At the Forum, Novak read from his book, talked about the upcoming presidential election and spoke about the difficulties of being in the spotlight after his newspaper column about Plame created a media stir and spawned a special investigation.

The Flagler College men’s basketball team took on the University of Florida Gators Nov. 1 at the O’Connell Center in Gainesville in front of 10,444 people — the largest crowd the Saints has ever played before. The game was set-up between Flagler Coach Bo Clark and UF Coach Billy Donovan.

Clark said he hoped the game would be an opportunity his players would never forget.

Glorimar Maldonado Nosal’s writing career hasn’t gone exactly as intended – but her change in plans has helped improve educational opportunities for millions of Hispanic American students.

The 1996 Flagler alumna and English major hoped to write the great American novel after college. When she entered the job market, however, Nosal found herself involved in non-profit work. Now, about a decade into her career, she works as the marketing-communications manager of the White House Initiative on Educational Excellence for Hispanic Americans in Washington, D.C.

The White House Initiative’s goal is to help reduce the achievement gap between Hispanic American students and American students from other backgrounds. To accomplish that, Nosal crafts messages that help Hispanic American parents better understand No Child Left Behind rights and find resources their children need to succeed in school.

“I think being a novelist, for me, would have been a personal thing,” Nosal said. “But you don’t know if anyone else will benefit from it. [With this initiative,] you change one life, you can change generations … I don’t think I ever dreamed I would be in this situation, helping people with low incomes who didn’t have the opportunities that I had.”

Nosal’s parents are both Puerto Rican, and she was born in Homestead, Fla. She said her cultural background and Spanish language skills have helped her work with the White House Initiative. She also personally understands some of the challenges facing Hispanic American students and their parents: When Nosal was in kindergarten, administrators at her school removed her from regular class and sent her to an English as a Second Language class – without permission from her mother or teacher.

“My first language was English!” she said, adding that her mother made sure Nosal got back into the correct class. “My mother was a very informed and involved parent; she knew she had rights and choices, and she exercised her right to make decisions that would positively impact my academic career. Unfortunately, the same cannot be said of the 6 million Hispanic households in the U.S. with school-age children.”

In addition to writing and editing for the White House Initiative, Nosal develops strategies for fostering communication between learning-related groups throughout the country. And her work has paid off: The initiative currently has a national network of almost 500 partners, from nonprofit organizations to businesses. Those partners share their outreach activities, resources, best practices, news and contacts with the White House Initiative and each other.

“Regarding the achievement gap between Hispanic students and their non-Hispanic peers, I can tell you that slowly but surely that gap is decreasing,” Nosal said. “There have been steady gains in the math and reading levels of fourth and eighth graders since No Child Left Behind was enacted in 2001. In fact, according to the latest National Assessment of Educational Progress report, African-American and Hispanic students posted all-time highs in a number of categories.”

Nosal said she’s enjoyed her non-profit and government career – and all the opportunities to help and meet people she never would have known in the literary field.

“When I graduated from Flagler, everyone said, ‘Oh, English major. Are you going to become a teacher?’ ” Nosal said. “I did teach for a year at the junior-high level; it just wasn’t for me. After some time in the non-profit sector, I finally realized that being a civil servant and working for the federal government was exactly where I needed to be.

“What I love about it is you never know whose life you’re touching just by sending a link or an e-mail. One lady called from Honduras to thank us … it’s amazing, the contacts you make from all over the world.”

But that’s exactly what Amy Waers (‘06) has been doing while working as an assistant buyer in Wal-Mart Stores’ stationery department, a position that has her traveling overseas to China on buying trips.

“I actually got it [the position] through SIFE,” Waers said about Students in Free Enterprise, the entrepreneurial organization that has a chapter at Flagler. “We were at the national competition my junior year presenting, and I was recruited after one of our presentations by the senior vice president.”

Waers accepted the position and, upon graduation, moved to Bentonville, Ark., where the corporate office is located.

A highlight of her job has been the three trips she’s taken to China to buy stationery products. Waers said the location of her travels is based on which products she is responsible for purchasing and where they are made. Products like copy paper, envelopes and photo paper are predominantly manufactured in Asia.

Waers said she has embraced the many cultural differences she’s found between China and the United States.
“[The differences] became very real to me the first time I went over there,” she said. “It was like, ‘Whoa, yeah.’ … I absolutely love it.”

Waers said the business world is becoming a much smaller place. “Especially the way the economy is today,” she said. “It’s just becoming more and more global.”

China has topped headlines lately with products like food and toys being recalled for poor quality standards, and that fact isn’t lost on Waers, who says quality is critical.

“It’s one of the hardest things about importing products — the quality control issue — because in China they have different standards than we have in the U.S.,” she said. “So, it’s just really making sure that we communicate our standards and that the factories and the companies that we’re working with overseas understand how important it is to us.”

Mary Dye launched her career hoping to help malnourished people in Third World countries, and she wound up teaching American students to eat without starving or stuffing themselves.

The 2001 Flagler alumna and registered dietician works as a campus nutritionist for New York University’s Health Center. In tandem with a small team of doctors and counselors, Dye tries to help students – many of them with eating disorders – understand why a healthy, but not overly restrictive diet is important.
“They have a very fearful relationship with food,” she said. “It can get frustrating at times, but then you really think about the complications of the illness and how troubled these patients are. A lot of control issues come out through food.”

Dye said it’s easy for Americans to think of nutrition as an almost indulgent, unimportant area of study because they learn about food to lose weight rather than get healthy. In a culture rife with fad weight loss regimens, celebrity diet tips and wildly popular cooking shows, it becomes easier to see food as an obsession more than a necessity.

“It’s interesting because we live in this culture of excess,” she said. “As a reaction to being in this culture – where you’re almost set up to gain weight, honestly – these people [with eating disorders] are just approaching it differently. They’re going the opposite way and resisting food.”

But in poor countries, Dye added, many people still struggle to get enough to eat. That situation was Dye’s interest when she studied anthropology at Flagler and entered the public health nutrition master’s program at the University of North Carolina.

“I really wanted to work in something using my anthropology background,” Dye said. “I was very interested in cultures, how nutrition relates to other nations and the different problems people are facing around the world.”

Later, she interned with UNICEF and studied their transition to infant growth charts based on breast-fed, rather than formula-fed, infants. The charts help UNICEF dieticians determine whether babies around the world are getting proper nutrition.

As Dye’s nutrition career continued, she entered policy work in New York City that gave her firsthand experience with malnutrition issues here in the States, including local agriculture initiatives that bring fresh produce to low-income communities and menu advice for daycare programs.

“We were trying to get them to allow people to use food stamps at farmer’s markets,” Dye said. “A lot of these people live in what we refer to as ‘food deserts.’ The neighborhoods have nothing but fast food.”

She hasn’t traveled to Third World countries yet, but Dye said she loves being an advocate for healthy food – and she loves watching people get better, whether they need to lose or gain weight.

“When I see girls come from being at war with their bodies to appreciating them and all they can do, that’s amazing,” she said. “Food has become a side note, when really it nourishes us and makes possible everything we want to do.”