Portland Community College | Portland, Oregon

PEOPLE and PLACES: Reardon named Teacher of the Year by OBME

Photos and story by James Hill

Verna Reardon, instructor and department chair for Comp Applications and Office Systems at Cascade Campus has been named as the Post-Secondary Teacher of the Year by the Oregon Business and Management Educators (OBME) – a professional association of teachers from secondary and post-secondary schools who teach courses preparing students for careers in business. Reardon received her award at the awards luncheon at the annual OBME conference. Congratulations to Verna!

Art Schneider to head business at Sylvania

Art Schneider is the new interim dean of Business, Computer Technologies and Real Estate Division at the Sylvania Campus. Schneider has served at the college as a long-standing instructor and faculty chair for the Computer Application and Office Systems Department. Congratulations Art!

Music instructors perform at local festival

Music instructor Julianna Johnson, along with NW recording artist Michael Allen Harrison, hosted the Autumn Music Festival at the Dancing Oaks Nursery in Monmouth, in September. It was a benefit for the Luckamute Valley and Kings Valley Charter Schools. Music instructor John Mery also performed at the festival.

Tutoring center opens in HT Building

A tutoring center for physical and life sciences students opened in Sylvania’s Health Technology Building fall term. Tutoring will be provided for the first time at Sylvania in biology, chemistry and physics.

Smith presents at Yakima Valley CC

Barb Smith, radiography faculty, presented a six-hour continuing education seminar entitled "Radiographic Imaging in the Digital World" at Yakima Valley Community College. The Washington State Board of Community and Technical Colleges has established several centers of excellence among its 34 institutions. Since YVCC is the Center of Excellence for Allied Health, an invitation to present there is an acknowledgement of Smith’s national status as a pre-eminent radiography educator.

More News & Notes from around PCC:

* Josette Beach and Virginia Vanderford, dental hygiene instructors, have developed a distance learning CG course about health careers in collaboration with counselor Catherine Sills from Counseling and Advising. This course was developed with the goals of accessibility and potential to be offered as a dual credit offering in the high schools. The course will contain streaming video of health professionals in the course of their daily work. It is hoped that streaming video will prove to be an effective replacement of job shadowing, which has traditionally been an integral part of other health careers courses.

* The Dental Hygiene program is developing a new module in Restorative Care, which will expand the scope of practice for dental hygienists. If the trends in medicine and allied health are reflective of dentistry, there will be increased pressure to expand scopes of practice as more physicians, dentists, nurses, and other allied health care practitioners leave the workforce in the next ten years.

* Rowan Wolf, sociology instructor, presented a paper entitled, “Shifting Tides: Migration in the Era of Globalization, Global Conflict and Environmental Collapse,” at the prestigious Oxford Round Table, Oxford University, in England.

* Tim Barnes, literature and writing instructor, published a book review in the fall 2007 edition of the Oregon Historical Quarterly. He reviews, “Reading Portland: The City in Prose,” edited by John Trombold and Peter Donahue

* Brooke Gondara, Social Sciences, Business and Real Estate division dean, has been selected as the keynote speaker at the 2007 American Association of Women in Community College’s Oregon Conference.