Ivanovo State Power University Scrapbook

I was able to travel with my husband and our SVCC faculty team of Brady Surles and Phillip Imel to Lipetsk in the fall of 2001, spending the first couple of days touring Moscow, meeting the director, faculty and students at LSTTU, and touring the city and businesses of Lipetsk. However, the sudden illness of my father, back home in New Jersey, caused Don and I to return to the U.S. at the end of the first week. Even though it was a brief experience, I will never forget the beauty of the Tretyakov Art Museum in Moscow, the warmth and enthusiasm of the students, and the wonder of communicating with educators who have survived such tumultuous change in the last two decades, coming out on the other side with hope and ambition for a better future.
We were able to arrange a student art exchange in collaboration with art teachers from the city of Lipetsk in the spring of 2002, and our faculty, art students, and community benefited greatly from seeing the finely crafted, imaginative art works from their peers across the land and sea.
In November, 2002, I returned to Russia, traveling to Ivanovo State Power University with other members of our team, Brady Surles and Ken Cross. This time I was able to stay the whole month, teaching, exchanging ideas and further expanding curriculum, and touring businesses, other schools, jewelry and fine craftsmanship production centers, and traditional, folk, and fine arts museums and schools. I was also given a special treat through meeting and working with the art students and teachers of ISPU. Our faculty hosts, under the leadership of ISPU Director Mikhail Shipko, were extremely gracious and welcoming, making our experience unforgettably rich in learning and sharing. Mikhail Shipko, Irina Volkova, Olga Makshina, Irina Astrakhentsava, Sergej Dunayev, Sergey Kupriyanov, Eugene Grobov, Natalia Klochkova, Natasha Kudareva and Alexander Karyakin have become our friends and colleagues, whom we admire and respect. The class group that our team worked with, and in particular, the group that I advised on a special project for the course, as well as our student interpreters, so impressed me with their intelligence, enthusiasm and openness to change and growth in their own lives and for the future of their country. I think that Russia is in good hands for the future!