The University of Maryland Baltimore County (UMBC) Department of Music invites applications for a tenure-track Assistant Professor of Choral Conducting and Music Education to begin August 2024. We seek a dynamic artist-educator who will develop a forward-looking, 21st-century vision for UMBC’s Camerata Choir and who will pursue a research agenda in performance and/or music education.

Examples of research may include live performances, recording projects, published scholarship, and community engaged work. Diverse areas of research or creative activity are welcome. In addition to being responsible for the direction of UMBC’s Camerata choir, this individual will coordinate UMBC’s choral music education program, which includes overseeing a music education internship for 1st and 2nd year students. To complete the teaching duties, the individual will teach music education, vocal pedagogy, and/or conducting coursework based on the candidate’s experience, areas of interest, and departmental needs. Recruiting, advising, and service responsibilities will also be assigned based on candidate interests and departmental needs. We welcome applicants with an interest in addressing inequities in and through music education—including through collaboration with historically marginalized communities. The candidate will have the opportunity to build relationships and collaborations through a social justice lens that will meaningfully contribute to UMBC and surrounding communities. Applicants who demonstrate a commitment to diversity, equity, and inclusion by way of teaching, performing, publishing, or volunteer experiences as well as those with experience employing culturally responsive approaches and/or integrating musical, social-emotional, and social justice learning goals are strongly encouraged to apply. Salary is competitive. Candidates who are members of groups historically underrepresented in the professoriate are especially encouraged to apply.

A master’s degree is required, and the areas of choral conducting or music education is desired. Successful K-12 teaching experience is desired; teaching or mentoring of undergraduate level students and/or professional-level choral conducting experience is also desired. The complete application package must include: a letter of interest that describes the candidate’s qualifications and potential research and/or creative activity agenda in detail, including how their experience has prepared them to teach successfully the university music courses listed above; a current CV; dated links for up to 3 video excerpts totaling no more than 30 minutes of material demonstrating choral conducting skills (if available, we encourage candidates to include video of a rehearsal as one of these videos); a separate statement addressing their capacity to respond in pedagogically productive ways to the learning needs of students from diverse backgrounds and their use of culturally responsive approaches, musical, social-emotional, and/or social justice learning goals with specific examples from their teaching experience; and three reference contacts. Additional materials may be requested later.

Don't meet every single qualification? At UMBC, we are dedicated to building a diverse, inclusive, and authentic workplace, so if you're excited about this role but your past experience doesn't align perfectly with every qualification in the job description, we encourage you to apply. You may be just the right candidate for this or other roles. We would also be happy to address any questions you might have about the application process. For questions, please contact Professor Brian Kaufman, Department of Music: brian.kaufman@umbc.edu.

For best consideration, please submit all application materials through Interfolio (http://apply.interfolio.com/131281) by October 30, 2023. Applications will be accepted until the position is filled.

Located in the heart of the culturally rich Baltimore-Washington corridor, the Department of Music is a growing, diverse, and supportive community enrolling 160 undergraduate majors. Housed in the University’s striking new Performing Arts and Humanities Building, the music wing includes a 350-seat performance space with superior acoustics, 9-foot Steinway grand pianos, and fully equipped recording and keyboard labs. All tenure-track faculty maintain robust careers in performance, conducting, or composing on the regional and national level, with many having a research focus in contemporary art-music and some with creative activities that include music as a vehicle for civic engagement and social justice. In addition to its undergraduate degrees, the Department offers a post-baccalaureate Certificate in American Contemporary Music. See https://music.umbc.edu/ for more details.

For any questions reach out to Tess via email at tessc1@umbc.edu or feel free to visit Public Policy 252!

UMBC is proud to announce the projects selected to receive grants in the 2022 - 2023 rounds of the Hrabowski Fund for Innovation competition. The Fund supports initiatives to enhance teaching and learning at UMBC, with specific emphasis on innovative approaches to increase student success.

Autism Peer Mentorship Program (AUTISM PEERS): A team led by Michael Canale (Student Disability Services) will create a sustainable peer mentoring program for students with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) by recruiting neurotypical mentors to work with ASD students on social learning. Many ASD students lack the social and interpersonal communication skills to participate in campus events and activities fully. Peer-mediated intervention strategies are most commonly based on social learning theory and focus on the direct experience of observation, modeling, and imitation to foster new learning. Students in the program will be interviewed to establish goals and will meet with their mentors weekly to address the established social learning objective. Upon completion of the semester, participants and peer mentors will evaluate the program.

Boning Up on Forensic Anthropology--Enhancing Student Learning and DEI Competencies in ANTH 322: A team led by Sarah Chard (sociology, anthropology, and public health) will draw on existing scholarship of teaching and learning literature to redesign ANTH 322: Forensic Anthropology as an active learning course involving hands-on exercises with skeleton models to support UMBC's social justice vision. By handling and drawing bones of the human body, and labeling their features, students will gain deeper insights to and greater retention of human osteology, principles of human variation, and pathology--the cornerstones of forensic anthropology. In addition, this redesign will allow students to explore questions of justice and bias that accompany work with human remains. The team will assess the impact of this project by comparing assessment scores to those of prior classes, pre- and post-tests within the course, and obtaining students' qualitative assessment of the learning process.

Assessing Sense of Belonging and Dialogue Skills in a FYS Course: A team now led by Ciara Christian (Initiatives for Identity, Inclusion, and Belonging) will utilize data collected from a first-year seminar course that employs dialogue pedagogy to learn which practices contribute to first-year and transfer students' sense of belonging in the classroom. As a Minority Serving Institution, UMBC's students bring rich experiences from all corners of the globe. While the benefits of diversity are evident, students are not always well-equipped to engage meaningfully across differences. Additionally, stakeholders across campus have anecdotally noted several casualties of COVID in relationships--the ability to practice empathy and the inclination to dialogue across differences of identity, worldview, and lived experience. These casualties contribute to a lack of connection, making it imperative for UMBC to explore the ways in which students find, create, and experience a sense of belonging on campus.

Development of an Inquiry-Based Bonus Module with Short Video to Enhance Conceptual Learning in Undergraduate Heat Transfer Course: A multidisciplinary team led by Liang Zhu (mechanical engineering) will develop and implement bonus modules to approximately 120 students per year in a heat transfer course in hopes of improving students' retention and graduation rates and creating a strategy that can be adopted by other engineering courses. Unfortunately, most students do not spend enough time on course content to master the conceptual information. Based on the team's experience of assigning bonus problems, they hypothesize that integrating a three-minute focused video in an inquiry-based bonus module would effectively engage students in the delivery of these engineering concepts. The team will evaluate effectiveness of the modules based on a survey of conceptual questions of heat transfer given at the beginning and end of the semester.

LOTUS Mentoring Program--Leading Others to Thriving and Universal Success: Angelina Jenkins (Initiatives for Identity, Inclusion, and Belonging) will develop, pilot, and assess an identity-based mentoring program targeted at supporting undergraduate Asian, Pacific Islander, and Desi American (APIDA) students at UMBC. UMBC's current student population boasts broad diversity, but as a Minority Serving Institution, students of color make up about 52 percent of the student population. More specifically, 19 percent of UMBC's student population is made up of APIDA communities. In 2021, Michelle Obama celebrated UMBC as an Asian Serving Institution, yet UMBC has no initiatives or interventions that center these populations. With a primary goal of building cultural confidence through peer-to-peer connections, APIDA students will increase their sense of belonging, build community connections, and have a deeper understanding of their racial and ethnic identity.

Team-Taught Course Development--Experimental Archaeology of the Global Medieval and Renaissance Eras: A multidisciplinary team led by Molly Jones-Lewis (ancient studies) and Lindsay Johnson (music) will build a materials library to support a new course in experimental archaeology, the study of the past using systematic reproduction and use of objects, activities, and arts to answer questions about the past. The course will focus on basic skills of doing (e.g., fiber craft, foraging, dance, music, farming, cooking, writing) used by pre-modern societies in daily life alongside readings of scholarly works using experimental methodology. Students will learn from invited speakers, develop foundational craft skills learning from the instructors and local artisans, reproduce existing experimental projects, and design an experiment of their own to execute. A successful student will be able to articulate a research question about pre-modern history, locate it in existing scholarly discussions, create a physical project that will produce valid data, and present their results clearly and accessibly to others.

Multidisciplinary Internship Experiences at the Imaging Research Center: A multidisciplinary team led by Anita Komlodi (information systems) will extend the longstanding internship experiences for visual arts students with the UMBC Imaging Research Center (IRC) to students from other departments and programs. Initially, the team will recruit students from computer science and electrical engineering and information systems to contribute to interdisciplinary projects. Interns may receive academic credit for the internship as well as a research practicum course offered by the UMBC Career Center. The team ultimately plans to extend the internship beyond the proposed departments, disseminate findings, and seek sustained funding and external support.

Course Planning with Machine Learning: Ergun Simsek (computer science and electrical engineering) will develop machine learning and statistical models to accurately estimate the number of new students entering in the professional programs, and then determine the demand for the necessary sections of the required classes and electives. Course scheduling with an objective function of high classroom (section) fill rates is a challenging task for large and/or rapidly growing programs. Due to their unique structure, professional programs typically learn of the number of new students only a few days before the semester begins, which makes course planning more challenging. The models will be developed and tested using the MPS data science program data, which grew from seven to 550 students in five years, and validated with the MPS health IT program data, which had a similar growth pattern. The PI will share these models with the local community and provide training on how to use them for any master's program at UMBC.

Full STEAM Ahead--Breaking Down Silos to Prepare Students for a Global Society: A team led by Jonathan Singer (education) will develop a course in the master of arts in education program which incorporates experienced teachers working in primary and secondary schools in Maryland in collaboration with pre-service teachers in a STEM-Hub program at the University of Kassel in Germany to develop integrative projects in STEAM to implement in the K-12 classroom. Today, students must be prepared to enter a global workplace that is increasingly interconnected both internationally and across disciplines. Working with colleagues in another country will help in-service teachers gain valuable skills and knowledge that they can pass on to their students. The project breaks down silos that exist in education today and embraces that learning is interconnected and that students can excel in all disciplines.

Quantum Immersion for Information Systems Undergraduates--An Experiential Learning Approach: A team led by Lei Zhang (information systems) will incorporate introductory quantum computing modules into existing curricula to bring the knowledge of this growing field to a broader audience and prepare students with cutting-edge technologies for the job market. Quantum computing has attracted billions in investments as of 2022, and companies are eager to hire individuals with interdisciplinary expertise. The pilot project will incorporate a one-week quantum module into IS 300 and another one-week quantum module into IS 471, with future extensions to other courses. The team will employ experiential learning best practices, and will assess effectiveness using in-class games, pre- and post-tests, and end-of-class surveys. The team will disseminate their findings and anticipate this project will contribute to the exploration of quantum education across the campus and outside UMBC.

Proposals for the next round of Hrabowski Fund for Innovation grants are due by October 27, 2023. For more information and to apply, visit UMBC's Faculty Development Center website.

The Hrabowski Fund for Innovation exemplifies UMBC's commitment to investing in faculty initiatives that fuel creativity and enterprise and also create opportunities for student engagement.

This Friday, October 6th from 11:30am-12:30pm we will be having our second GBM of the semester in in Public Policy 208. Come ready to enjoy some delicious pizza and a short discussion!

This Friday, October 6th from 11:30am-12:30pm we will be having our second GBM of the semester in in Public Policy 208. Come ready to enjoy some delicious pizza and a short discussion!

NDAM's roots go back to 1945, when Congress enacted a law declaring the first week in October each year "National Employ the Physically Handicapped Week." In 1962, the word "physically" was removed to acknowledge the employment needs and contributions of individuals with various types of disabilities. In 1988, Congress expanded the week to a month and changed the name to "National Disability Awareness Month" to address inclusion more broadly.

Americans with disabilities make up almost one-fifth of our population, which brings more celebration to this month, underneath the umbrella of the  Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA)  celebrating its 32st anniversary, and Section 504 celebrating its 50th Anniversary. This month includes:

and given the beauty and complexity of being human, we respectfully nod to disability-related health conditions that are highlighted at other times.  We see you.  You matter.

Accessibility and Disability Services, remains committed to building on past progress and creating inclusive change as we work in partnership with the entire UMBC community, including Facilities Management, Human Resources and Instructional Technology. Student Disability Services provides support for students with disabilities, as education is a path toward progress.   While huge strides have been made with accessibility and inclusion (which can happen via accommodation), people with disabilities still face discrimination and lack of understanding. and has many events planned - the fight for full inclusion remains (Judy Heumann Ted Talk link). 

Accessibility and Disability Services

Student Disability Services

Retriever Integrated Health includes The Counseling Center as counseling (of course) as well as workshops and group meetings - they are recruiting for their Neurodiversity group now.

Retriever Integrated Health also has a range of health services that support campus members of all abilities in the new, very-accessible Center for Wellbeing  across from Erickson Field (D7 on the map).

Student Organizations:

Faculty Group:  Disability Studies Working Group

October 18: Campus Accessibility Walk

Oct 19-22: Superfest Virtual Film Festival

October 24: Hands On Assistive Technology Demonstration

October 25: Assistive Tech at Work MDoD Webinar

October 26: Silent Tears: Toward a Theory of Bad Crip/Queer Feelings J. Logan Smilges (Dresher Center)

October 27: Boost Accessibility with Ally Instructional Tech Event

A photo of UMBC's Campus Visitor Guide Accessible Route Map  next to a disability pride pin and an illustration of diverse group of fourteen people, each with differing disabilities accompanies this post.

The Critical Language Scholarship (CLS) Program is a fully-funded language-intensive summer study abroad program geared to promote rapid language gains and essential intercultural fluency in regions that are critical to U.S. national security and economic prosperity. Each summer, American undergraduate and graduate students enrolled at U.S. colleges and universities across the country, spend eight to ten weeks learning one of fourteen languages at an intensive study abroad institute. 

The CLS Program is offering multiple webinars to help applicants learn more about languages both taught at UMBC (Arabic, Chinese, Hindi, Japanese, Korean, and Russian), as well as strategic languages not taught here (Azerbaijani, Indonesian, Persian, Portuguese and Turkish). UMBC has a long history of its students receiving these competitive awards. 

The CLS Program is hosting a series of webinars in October. To register for one, please click on the hyperlink below: