The most addictive part of performance is to be so well-prepared that musicians can allow the magic of the moment to speak through them, says Christine Vanderkooy.

Associate professor of music and education in the UWindsor Faculty of Education, she is the subject of a profile in the current issue of Canadian Music Teacher Magazine, the house organ of the Canadian Federation of Music Teachers’ Associations.

A pianist, Dr. Vanderkooy has performed as a soloist across Canada, the United States, and Europe. Her own experience with music performance anxiety led her to conduct research in the area.

“I knew I wasn’t alone in my experience even though it wasn’t a big part of the formal dialogue amongst musicians at the time,” she tells interviewer Lori Elder. “The body’s fight or flight response elicits the same response as being cornered by a bear and can be debilitating for musicians who require immaculate control of fine motor skills, acute attention to subtle nuances, and detailed intellectual control.”

She tells students that preparation is one of the best strategies for dealing with anxiety.

“Teaching highly conscious practicing that prepares students for performance, including opportunities for graded exposure to performance, are all valuable tools and help to build self-efficacy,” says Vanderkooy. “Showing students how to be highly engaged during practice, right from the first time they approach a new piece, helps begin a journey toward secure memorization and performance.”

The profile also offers discussion of Beethoven’s sonatas, adjudicating competitions, and Vanderkooy’s plans for future appearances in concert and recording.

Read the entire article starting on page 11 of the Spring 2020 Canadian Music Teacher Magazine.

WE-Spark Health Institute is hosting its first virtual brainstorming event, “Creating Meaningful Research Experiences for Students,” to provide health researchers an opportunity to share ideas on how to provide students with meaningful research experiences during a pandemic.

The WE-Spark Connections Brainstorming Event will run 1 to 2 p.m. Tuesday, June 30.

“COVID-19 has sent the researcher community into uncharted territory, with some struggling to find meaningful research experiences for students,” said executive director Lisa Porter. “This is an opportunity to support our researchers by generating creative ideas for helping students continue to have valuable research experiences, keep students engaged and excited about research, foster new networking opportunities, and serve as a new knowledge translation tool to grow and elevate the health research culture in Windsor-Essex.”

Organizers from WE-Spark will begin the discussion with a few ideas of their own and have invited four students to share how they have been staying involved in research over the past few months.

• Justin Senecal of the Schulich School of Medicine & Dentistry - Windsor Campus will share his experience leading a project looking at Barriers to Translational Research in Windsor.
• Ryan Palazzolo of the UWindsor Faculty of Science will showcase how to take an in-person community outreach activity and adapt it into an interactive virtual tool.
• Isabelle Hinch and Emily Mailloux of the University of Windsor Faculty of Science will demonstrate how students can work together virtually to develop lab skills training modules.

Participants will be invited to share their thoughts on how to engage students in meaningful research experiences. All ideas will be captured and posted on the WE-Spark website.

The event is open to everyone interested in creating meaningful research for students. Click here to register.

The federal government has been taking its time in deciding whether Chinese telecommunications company Huawei should be allowed to help build the country’s 5G network, but Canada has a history of indecision and delay on crucial matters of defence and national security, says political science professor Andrew Richter.

In an opinion piece published Monday in the National Post newspaper, Dr. Richter cites two precedents: the decisions on whether to accept American nuclear weapons in the early 1960s and on participating in the U.S. missile defence program in the early 2000s.

“Both hinged on the desire to maintain good relations with Washington, against an opposing desire to chart a more independent path,” he writes.

The current case pits the Canadian wish to remain on excellent terms with the U.S. against the conflicting desire not to do more damage to its relationship with China.

“In situations like this, the decision is ultimately based on a careful weighing of the pros and cons, and balancing core national interests against the potential consequences that might arise should Canada say no,” Richter concludes. “But the reality is that Canada’s decision is going to make someone very unhappy, and it is this realization more than anything else that explains the government’s delay.”

Read his entire column, entitled “Think the government is taking a long time making a decision on Huawei? It’s nothing new,” in the National Post.

Growing up in Windsor, Jane McArthur recognized the Ambassador Bridge as a defining feature of the landscape. A doctoral candidate in sociology at the University of Windsor, she hopes that increasing attention paid to health risks on the job amidst COVID-19 will help women working at the bridge see their concerns about breast cancer addressed.

“In interviews with women who worked at this border crossing, I listened to their personal stories as they talked about the complex risk factors for breast cancer,” McArthur writes in an article published Sunday in the Conversation, which shares news and views from the academic and research community. “Largely unheard, these women’s stories are a new landscape and a symbolic bridge to cross in efforts for environmental breast cancer prevention.”

McArthur says that messaging around breast cancer suggests that lifestyle factors are to blame for the disease.

“Environmental and occupational risk factors don’t get the same attention as individual risks,” she writes. “To prevent more breast cancers, research and risk strategies should include gender, racialization, social class, ethnicity, migration status, geographic location, environment, and occupation among other contributions to inequalities in risk.”

She concludes that ignoring workplace and environmental risks is a failed approach: “Deeply entrenched institutional risks for breast cancer must be challenged to build an effective public health strategy towards primary prevention of breast cancer.”

Read the entire piece, “Blaming women for breast cancer ignores environmental risk factors,” in the Conversation.

Trying to decide which multi-factor authentication methods to set up for your UWin Account?

Watch Information Technology Services team member Eric Masse demonstrate how each multi-factor authentication method works when you are asked to authenticate, in a 119-second Tech Talk video.

If you want more information about MFA at UWindsor, click on the link in the Comments section below the video.

Tech Talk is a presentation of IT Services. More Tech Talks are available at www.uwindsor.ca/its/tech-talk.

—Ericka Greenham