faculty – Page 2 – Houghton STAR

In hopes of expanding Houghton’s education opportunities, Scott McClelland has been hired as Dean of Extension Studies. McClelland will have an office in Buffalo and will be primarily located there when the adult education program is launched. In addition, he will be traveling back and forth to Houghton in order to work with faculty in exploring the college’s options for a potential online program for students who want a Houghton education but are not able to attend on campus.

Mark Hijleh, Associate Academic Dean said that “as Houghton considers how we will translate our mission of providing access to high-quality Christian Liberal Arts to students from diverse backgrounds, we need to expand the entry points to what we have to offer.”

Recently Houghton has had to make cuts in the areas of faculty, staff, and athletics. This leaves many wondering why a full time position is needed for this job. Academic Dean Linda Mills-Woolsey explained, “One of our current initiatives aimed at strengthening Houghton’s ability to serve a diverse range of students while creating a sustainable economy for all areas of the college is expanding our arena of vision and service.” Mills-Woolsey also stated, “to be a viable college for the current age we need to explore more ways to use online options to provide flexible access to Houghton College programs. In order to move forward we need someone to manage all our extension study endeavors.”

McClelland will be moving from southern Florida to Buffalo on October 7th in order to work with the Houghton City Semester program which is already underway.“Houghton is exploring how to best make its top tier education available to a wider group of students than it has traditionally,” said Dr. McClelland “So my work will be to explore several options to do this within the Adult Education, online and by offering some new teaching opportunities in Buffalo.”

McClelland has experience in extension studies from his time as the Director of the San Francisco Urban Program based out of Westmont College. He then gained more experience at Trinity College. “My experience with Westmont and Trinity allows me to know how special it is when a campus wishes to reach out to meet the needs of ‘non-traditional’ students by working through many delivery systems now available to higher education institutions like ours,” said McClelland.

Students currently attending Houghton could also benefit from the online program. Junior Glenn Hampson said “I’m thrilled that Houghton is looking into expanding their online education programs. I’m graduating this year, and although I want to continue my education, I got to start paying off my loans here pretty soon. If I could take classes offered by Houghton online, I would be able to fulfill my academic goals while sticking with the school I love.”

The extension program is seen by many as a crucial next step for Houghton. Mills-Woolsey said, “In the long run we hope that investing in this position will provide benefits not only for our extension programs, but for students on the main campus, as our extension programs provide more visibility and accessibility while contributing revenues to the overall college.”

Houghton Artists Travel to Sierra Leone

news_jillian&renee4 — Courtesy of Renee Roberts

Earlier this year, Renee Roberts, Direct of Exhibitions at Ortlip Gallery, and Jillian Sokso, Assistant Professor of Art, traveled to Sierra Leone for a skills training trip that brought together their gifts in art with acts of ministry.

The two were asked to come to Sierra Leone by a Houghton alum on the board of Women of Hope International, an NGO that ministers to disabled women in Sierra Leone with the mission statement to “equip and disciple women with disabilities to become life-long followers of Christ who facilitate holistic transformation in their families and communities.”

Women with disabilities in Sierra Leone often face immense challenges. Many have difficulty performing basic tasks, such as drawing water, and sometimes earning a means of providing for their families is difficult. “Some of the ladies we worked with were amputees, a lot of them became disabled through preventable disease like measles or polio and lost the use of some of their limbs or [had] some sort of mobility issue, ” said Sokso. These women sometimes even become outcasts and their families may disown them because of their disabilities.

“The point of this skills training project or skills training trip,” said Roberts during a GCF meeting on

March 12, “was to facilitate classes for these disabled women who don’t have any other way to provide for their families or for themselves because they are seen as outcasts.” Papermaking and crafts help provide these women with skills to integrate themselves back into society while also making a profit, and it was to this end that Roberts and Sokso brought their talents as professional artists.

The women at the organization had already been making stationary, said Sokso, “But they were using this cheap Chinese cardstock that wasn’t really beautiful, so they were looking for papermakers.” Roberts and Sokso, after being requested to come to Sierra Leone last year, raised money through Printed Matter Press, the Dean’s Office and a faculty fund to help with the finances of the trip.

“The whole entire trip was so amazing to see God taking these things and opening these doors,” said Roberts.

While there, Sokso and Roberts gave classes on how to make paper and also gave a crafting class. Though they had to adjust certain papermaking techniques while in Sierra Leone, as the means and tools for producing paper were a little different than at home, overall the program provided their students with skills that they can use by selling their paper on the fair trade market.

“We talk about integration of faith and learning. But for me, this was the first thing that I did that I could authentically live out not only God’s giftedness to me and my life, but also to actually help somebody learn a skill that could be profitable to them,” said Sokso, “It was a very visual example of how you can use your gifts to help somebody else.”

Sokso also found the comparison between the fibers that they used in papermaking and the women they worked with very appropriate. “A lot of these women are told throughout their lives that they are worthless or that a demon has cursed them. A lot of their families have literally thrown them away,” she said, “But in the end we held up this grass we used to make paper and said ‘Did you ever think that anything like this could be made into something beautiful?’”