Teaching and Learning
Highlights from 2017–2018
MSU preschool teacher known to generations to retire
Jean Hannula, a lead preschool teacher with Montana State University's Child Development Center, will retire in August after a 40-year career in early childhood education. MSU Photo by Adrian Sanchez-Gonzalez
JUNE 22, 2018
BOZEMAN -- Jean Hannula speaks so softly, you have to lean in a bit to hear her. Listen carefully. She holds decades of wisdom about the big lessons small children can teach us.
For the last 23 years, Hannula has been a mainstay as a lead teacher in the Montana State University Child Development Center, a laboratory preschool of the Early Childhood Education and Child Services program in the MSU College of Education, Health and Human Development.
Hannula will say goodbye to the “countless little faces and families” she came to know from working in early childhood education for 40 years when she retires from MSU in August. Throughout her time in classrooms over four decades, Hannula said she “hasn’t seen a single carbon copy of any one child” and that “not a day went by” that she didn’t learn something from children. Read more about Jean Hannula.
Dietetic interns, WWAMI medical students collaborate at MSU to learn about food as medicine
OCTOBER 12, 2017
BOZEMAN — Culinary medicine – or blending the art of food and cooking with the science of medicine – can complement traditional medicine, and focusing on eating delicious, healthy foods can bring long-term benefits, according to Coleen Kaiser, director of the Montana Dietetic Internship program at Montana State University.
That’s the motivation behind a new collaboration between the Montana Dietetic Internship program and the WWAMI Medical Education Program at MSU.
“This collaboration is about getting people excited to eat scrumptious food, that over the lifetime has positive impacts on lessening the instance of cardiovascular disease, weight gain, obesity, the onset of diabetes and other chronic diseases associated with our eating habits,” said Kaiser, who is also a registered dietitian and licensed nutritionist. “It’s really about blending lifestyle choices, nutrition, culinary arts and health care.”
To learn how to associate food and nutrition choices with health care, this fall Montana dietetic interns provided workshops for students in the WWAMI program. As part of the project, 24 interns led three workshops for up to 45 participants.
The workshops – which began with a tour of Towne’s Harvest Garden, MSU’s student-run vegetable farm – were designed to introduce the concept of food as medicine with a focus on farm-to-table and sustainable food systems, according to Anna Diffenderfer, assistant director of the Montana Dietetic Internship program. They also provided an overview of the biochemical interactions and benefits of particular foods, as well as how to use the information in clinical settings, particularly in rural health care. Finally, the workshops provided a cooking lesson focused on the Mediterranean style of eating. Diffenderfer said the Mediterranean style was chosen because of a large amount of research that supports it as a healthy eating choice. Read more about culinary medicine.