{"id":37806,"date":"2011-06-03T08:09:37","date_gmt":"2011-06-03T12:09:37","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/?p=37806"},"modified":"2011-06-08T09:56:54","modified_gmt":"2011-06-08T13:56:54","slug":"a-scholarship-celebrates-imagination","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/2011\/06\/a-scholarship-celebrates-imagination\/","title":{"rendered":"A Scholarship Celebrates Imagination"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"Stephanie<\/a>
Stephanie Godbout, winner of the Clyde Jones Scholarship. Photo provided by the UConn Foundation<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Rising senior and human development and family studies major Stephanie Godbout had a moment in high school when she saw what creativity could do in the life of a child. She was job shadowing a speech pathologist one day, and watched him use a speech board with a young boy who has lost his verbal communication skills during brain surgery.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe child was communicating, and it was incredible to me that the pathologist had helped him do that,\u201d Godbout says.<\/p>\n

Godbout, the 2010-2011 winner of the Clyde A. Jones Scholarship from Human Development and Family Studies, follows in the footsteps of Professor Jones, an early childhood specialist who used creativity in his daily dealings with students and encouraged them to use it to stir the minds of the children with whom they were working. Although Jones died in 2009, his educational philosophies live on through his former students, and through his scholarship. (Read a moving<\/em> memorial<\/em><\/a> to Jones, who also left a bequest to his church in Cobleskill, N.Y.)<\/em><\/p>\n

Jones was an artist-turned-educator who, his former students say, used art as an avenue to reach students.<\/p>\n

\u201cHe came at curriculum with this idea that teachers should use what children are interested in and what they love when developing curriculum, that it should be about a unity with beauty and nature, and all sorts of complicated premises that really were not part of curriculum development back then,\u201d says Meg Galante-DeAngelis, a longtime lecturer at UConn and one of Jones\u2019 former students.<\/p>\n

\u201cIn his class, our work was very exacting; we did a lot of measurements using principles of visual design, he talked a lot about color and puppetry and all sort of things he was interested in,\u201d she adds. \u201cI repeat to my students something he always said to us: he thought that the youngest children should have the most-well-educated teachers because they couldn\u2019t communicate easily all of their desires. The more educated a teacher was, the more easily she would understand what a child needed.\u201d<\/p>\n

Another former student, Maureen Mulroy, now associate professor emeritus of human development and family studies, remembers Jones as quiet and yet, as she says, \u201ca marvelous teacher.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cHe was a great early childhood educator \u2013 he was never a friend, but I was allowed a certain degree of collegial equality after I got my Ph.D. and improved myself \u2013 he was difficult, demanding, fair, peculiar, a bit of a peacock, and really from the old school of early childhood education.<\/p>\n

Others became friends of Jones once he retired, when he could be seen outdoors drawing pencil sketches of scenes throughout Storrs, then sending them to friends.<\/p>\n

\u201cHe was an artist who got a Ph.D. in human development, so he got an academic wrapping around that,\u201d says emeritus professor Irene Brown, who befriended Jones when he was living at a healthcare facility in Mansfield. \u201cHe was interesting in that he thought about the child in what we would call a progressive way, that a child should be exposed to the arts. And he was devoted to UConn; the fact that he made this donation is a sign of his commitment to this institution. Every fall we would have a celebration of the scholarship students with the donors, and he would come.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>Now that Jones is deceased, the students who win his scholarship know little about their benefactor. But they are grateful to him nonetheless.<\/p>\n

Godbout, this year’s winner of the Clyde Jones Scholarship, is one of four children in a family that couldn\u2019t afford to pay for her to attend college, and she has used work-study and scholarships to get through UConn. She was the valedictorian of her graduating class at Bristol Central High School and a Presidential Scholarship recipient whose education has taken her out of UConn\u2019s classrooms and into the public schools, where she has observed classes. She also works part-time in UConn\u2019s Child Development Laboratories, and appreciates the on-site experience. \u201cHuman development and family studies really gets students involved,\u201d she says.<\/p>\n

The curriculum has changed over the years, but the philosophy remains the same. \u201cI credit Clyde Jones and others in the program with really preparing us well for advanced graduate education,\u201d says Mulroy, \u00a0\u201cand for helping us understand the opportunities that were just beginning to be open for the strong voiced and the stiff-spined women who were making a difference then.\u201d<\/p>\n

And now.<\/p>\n

Says Godbout, \u201cI find the things I am learning are really exciting. And the scholarship really helps.\u201d<\/p>\n

To give to the Human Development and Family Studies program, please contact the Foundation’s <\/em>development department<\/a><\/em>.<\/em> <\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Family studies students benefit from a scholarship named for the late Professor Clyde Jones.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":10,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_crdt_document":"","wds_primary_category":0,"wds_primary_series":0,"wds_primary_attribution":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"magazine-issues":[],"coauthors":[43],"class_list":["post-37806","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"pp_statuses_selecting_workflow":false,"pp_workflow_action":"current","pp_status_selection":"publish","acf":[],"publishpress_future_action":{"enabled":false,"date":"2026-04-18 23:17:15","action":"change-status","newStatus":"draft","terms":[],"taxonomy":"category","extraData":[]},"publishpress_future_workflow_manual_trigger":{"enabledWorkflows":[]},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/posts\/37806","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/users\/10"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=37806"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/posts\/37806\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":37821,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/posts\/37806\/revisions\/37821"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=37806"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=37806"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=37806"},{"taxonomy":"magazine-issue","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/magazine-issues?post=37806"},{"taxonomy":"author","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/coauthors?post=37806"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}