Archives: Initiatives

Trinity is proud to be named the #1 BSN program in the State of Illinois by RegisteredNursing.org. Nursing programs were assessed on several factors which represent how well a program supports students towards licensure and beyond!

Dr. Peters will be joining SAAT’s faculty for the semester as visiting professor in the undergraduate church music program and teach two music history survey courses, one on Medieval and Renaissance music and another on music in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. He will also direct two choirs: the seminary choir, an 80-voice choir of students in the theology and music programs; and the Vocatus ensemble, a chamber ensemble of about 20 singers from the music program. In this blog, his goal is to communicate some of what he will learn during this semester of cross-cultural learning and teaching.

“Getting to Know Us: The Stories Our Foods Tell” developed out of a freshman composition class’s study of Nina Thursteneau, an Indian-American writing about her access to Indian foods, family, and culture somewhere along the Missouri-Kansas border. In the class were three Korean young women, with Shin from Cambodia and Jessie from Peru. Naomi was only one generation removed from Eretria & Ethiopia, Paulette two generations from Mexico, Andrea two generations from the Philippines. Other students had cultural connections to Ireland, Lithuania, The Netherlands. They had parents, grandparents, uncles and aunts, and their stories, to write about. Their foods ranged from beer brats and OJ banana bread muffins to kugelis and himbasha, to lumpia and Young Yang Bab, to Ddok-Bok-Gi and mole poblano, to Janchi Guksu and Keating (Irish) potatoes! The foods, family histories, and cultural insights seemed too good to keep in the classroom, especially as they also picture the way we image God together better than we do separately. Read the stories here! 

Trinity’s product management class, taught by Omar Sweiss, assistant professor business, and Dr. Jeff Nyhoff, professor of computer science, was challenged to engage in what seemed like an impossible task given the time constraints of a single semester: Gather market research and interviews, design and engineer, develop a marketing launch plan, and potentially build a prototype of a new kind of pump, “the Smart Pump.” The new product needed to be integrated with technology to provide key data on pump condition and inner workings.

Students in the class came from multiple disciplines, including biology, business, computer science and graphic design. The class self-organized into four business units and worked with mentors from Tuthill Pump Group in Alsip, Ill., to create a final product. In a culminating event, each team pitched its concept to a panel of Tuthill corporate executives on Monday, Dec. 6.

Teams were judged on the clarity of content, organization, and delivery, and all four teams delivered a quality, viable, and innovative solution. In the end, the panel awarded Team Pump It Up, which developed the “Pump Sense Add-on Component,” the winner.

Class participants agreed that the course taught valuable information in innovation, marketing, management, and team dynamics, as well as highlighting the value of multi-discipline input towards the goal. “Working with Tuthill Pump allowed for an innovative approach to student learning,” said Tom Iwema ’18, a student from the winning business unit.

“This is another example of how Trinity Christian College seeks to immerse students in real-world experiences solving business problems to equip them to innovate, compete, and succeed in God’s world,” said Sweiss.

Trinity recently welcomed about 150 middle school students from Calvin Christian, Chicago West Side Christian, Deer Creek Christian, and Timothy Christian schools who took part in the Middle School Diversity Conference.

Activities during the day ranged from a praise time at the beginning of the day, activities and games that addressed diversity issues and helped the students both frame those issues and discuss how they could be leaders for change, and activities that were just fun and brought different students from different Christian schools together.

The day was organized by a team of students from each of the participating schools and led by Jeralyn Harris of Chicago West Side Christian. Students from Trinity’s Education 335 class, “Teaching in the Middle Grades,” also assisted throughout the event.

“I was deeply impressed with the depth of the middle school students’ commitment to diversity leadership and it was an amazing experience for my students, most of whom hope to teach middle school in another year or two, to interact with the middle school kids and get a sense of what they are capable of,” said Dr. Bill Boerman-Cornell, professor of education.  “It was a great day.”

The Foundations of Human Communication course recently offered four different socially entrepreneurial organizations analysis of their digital messaging.  The students wrote magazine-style white papers and produced a 2-minute video, followed by in-class visits with the social entrepreneurs feedback, sometimes via Zoom.  The four organizations are Blue Sky Bakery (a social enterprise that offers job training to at-risk youth), International Teams (a socially entrepreneurial incubator in Elgin), New Moms (a nonprofit organization serving homeless and at-risk adolescent parents and their children in Chicago), and Native Tongue (a magazine company addressing food scarcities in Woodlawn).

Comm Art’s Persuasive Speaking class recently offered Charlie Branda of Art on Sedgwick consultancy regarding oral presentations about her organization’s work with the public.  She hosted the class in her neighborhood on a Saturday morning, gave them materials from the company to draw from, and then came to campus to evaluate their final presentations. They offered her different variations on potential presentations: a 30-second elevator pitch, a 5-minute boardroom bid, an 8-minute TED-style talk.

Groups of Trinity freshmen and visiting students from Holland Christian High school explored five Chicago neighborhoods on Tuesday, November 7. Students visited a museum, ate locally, and took a neighborhood walk in Pilsen, Chinatown, Ukrainian Village, the former Polish district of West Town, or Washington Park. Students characterized the day as humbling, fun, exciting, unique, eye-opening, and inspirational.  “I think the food gave the most insight to current Polish culture, but the museum gave great context for it all,” said one student. Check out the English Department Facebook page for more pictures.

Students in Speech and Hearing Sciences 212 recently completed an assignment of drawing and labeling the muscles of respiration on t-shirts as part of learning about respiration and the biomechanics of breathing. The major structures such as the ribs and sternum were labeled and the muscles were drawn in relation to that.