people

Think Center Advisory Team

 

The Think Center Advisory Team is a multi-disciplinary working group comprised of students, faculty, and staff who will provide feedback for Think Center processes and activities. The purpose of the team is to exchange ideas that help students become better learners; initiate a learning community that is actively engaged in innovative, collaborative and solution-oriented approaches; and supply “in the trenches” insight from teaching and learning experience.

 

Read on to learn a little about our team members and don't miss our Group Resume.

 

 

MEET OUR ADVISORY TEAM:
(We asked them to give us a quote, manifesto, story, or brief that revealed something about themselves as learners.)

• Tammy D. Barry, Ph.D.
  Associate Professor / Chair, Clinical Admissions / Department of Psychology
  
  
• Lesley Brumfield
  Honors College, Southern Style representative, junior sociology major
  "Don't let anything or anyone tell you that you can't be anything for anyone you want to."-Michael Warren
   
  Why I agreed to join this group: 
  I was allowed an awesome opportunity by being invited to be a part of the group. I know that being on the advisory team will enhance my college experience and give me the opportunity be a part of a project that will revolutionize education.  The service of helping my classmates want to learn again and to enjoy learning is what intrigues me. I have a passion for school and the TCAT is allowing me to share my excitement with other students.
    
• Wynde J. Fitts, M.Ed.
  Director, First Year Experience
  "Nearly all great civilizations that perished did so because they had crystallized, because they were incapable of adapting themselves to new conditions, new methods, new points of view. It is as though people would literally rather die than change.” - Eleanor Roosevelt
  
  
• Leisa Flynn, MBA, Ph.D.
  Chair and Professor of Marketing and Fashion Merchandising
  For me learning is about believing in yourself, preparation and practice.  When I want to do something well I am always prepared to do it poorly at first.  If I get it right the first time that is beginners luck and I go back and do it again.  Learning a song, understanding a tough concept, baking a great cake, writing a great essay, you have to be prepared to throw out the rough drafts on all of them.
  
  
• Stradford Goins
  Luckyday Scholar, senior math major
  
  
• Julie Howdeshell
  Director, Quality Enhancement Program
  
  
• Susan Hrostowski, Ph.D., LMSW
  Assistant Professor, School of Social Work
  My manifesto would be “All that is required for evil to prosper is for good [people] to do nothing.” Dr. Michael Forster, now dean of the College of Health, was my professor for several classes in the MSW program, and he had a phrase, “agitate for change.”  He taught me much and inspired me to keep on agitating!
  
  
• Jeffrey Kaufmann, Ph.D.
  Associate Professor, Department of Anthropology and Sociology
  When I was a sophomore undergraduate student at Montana State University, fresh off the ranch and from a country school with 16 graduating in my senior class, I took my first anthropology and philosophy classes. I had never even heard about the subjects before, but, being eager to fill my mind with ideas beyond horses and cows, I jumped in with both feet. I credit my first philosophy teacher for inspiring me to become a university professor.
  
  I had never seen the likes of such a professor before; not because he was strange or unconventional or couldn't button his suit jacket, but because he was the first "academic" of whom I became aware. He was incredibly smart: he was a Kant scholar, but he also chaired the department, organized symposia on the likes of Thomas Jefferson, and took me along with his faculty to meet a scholar of Ludwig Wittgenstein--a philosopher of language whom I was studying at the time. I was shown kindness and respect by a professor whom I had thought, incorrectly, had more important things to do than put up with the likes of me.
  
  His name was Gordon Brittan, and I wanted to "be like--not Mike--but Gordon." He came from California (PhD from UC-Irvine) and commuted each day to the Bozeman campus from his ranch on the other side of the Continental Divide, just outside Livingston, Montana (where the film "A River Runs through It" was filmed). In other words, he came to Bozeman to teach and to ranch; while I came to Bozeman to learn and to get away from the ranch.
  
  I have found that after entering academia my life's track has certain similarities with Gordon's. And I do not think it is just a coincidence. Professors can have deep and lasting effects on their students. I am one of those students. I study how people in mainly African societies make a living and a way of life by herding cattle. I am also starting a new research project in Mississippi that looks at how ranching systems in the Piney Woods has contributed to environmental changes in, so to speak, USM's backyard.
  
  
• Kasey Mitchell, SGA President, senior management major
  Some of the main tenets I strive to live by are motivation and empowerment. I strongly believe in doing my part to empower others to achieve their dreams.  I believe that the Think Center is something that can be an enabler in those areas as well.  By helping others to learn about themselves and their learning style, the center will be enabling them to accomplish anything they could wish for and more.  That is why I support this place.  That is why I am a part of this team.
  
  
• Aimée K. Thomas, Ph.D.
  Department of Biological Sciences
  
  
• Think Center staff (Bonnie Cooper, Dr. Erin Price, Shanna Luke)

 

Group Resume: Think Center Advisory Team

 

• 109 years, combined, attending institutes of higher education

 

• 132 combined years teaching experience

 

Disciplines represented:

 

 

Places we have been:

 

 

Pastimes / Hobbies / Personal Pursuits:

 

 

How we describe or characterize our own "learning personalities":

 

 

What motivates or inspires us to learn:

 

 

Books that changed us or had a major impact on us (...a small sampling):

• To Kill a Mockingbird
• Mission Possible by Marilyn Laszlo
• Princeton Review LSAT Study Book
• The Bible
• A Wrinkle in Time
  Harriet the Spy
• Greater Than Yourself
• The Servant as Leader
• Blink
• When Hope and Fear Collide
• Sex, Drugs and Coco Puffs
• The book that impacted me most is Will D. Campbell’s Brother to a Dragonfly about which Frederic and Mary Ann Brussat wrote, “…an emotionally charged account of the deep bonds between two brothers and the demons both had to struggle to exorcise. It also presents an idiosyncratic and very needed approach to the spiritual practices of compassion and justice.”  
• A Sand County Almanac by Aldo Leopold
• Silent Spring by Rachel Carson
• Animals in Translation by Temple Grandin
   

 

 

Last Modified: October 8, 2010
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