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Dr. Brian Sturm, associate professor at the University of North Carolina
at Chapel Hill School of Information and Library Science (SILS), was one of 16 inducted into the Frank Porter Graham Honor Society on April, 18, 2013 during a special ceremony held in the Pleasants Family Assembly Room of the Wilson Library.
The Society was founded in 1990 and named after Frank Porter Graham, "the renowned former president of the University of North Carolina system and North Carolina Senator.
The Frank Porter Graham Honor Society recognizes outstanding service provided to the University and community by graduate and professional students enrolled at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Further, it recognizes faculty, staff and friends
of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill who have made significant contributions to the development of graduate and professional student education at the University."
According to the
Honor Society Web page, “Graduate and professional students enrolled at UNC who have provided outstanding service provided to the University
and community and faculty, staff, and friends of UNC who have made significant contributions to the development of graduate and professional education at the University are eligible for selection into The Frank Porter Graham Honor Society.”
The faculty or staff member must have been employed at the University for at least five years and have an outstanding record for contributing to graduate and/or professional
education.
Sturm, who has been a member of the SILS faculty since 1998, was selected because of his many outstanding contributions to graduate and professional education at SILS and
to the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, as well as his generous gifts of time, effort and talents to the community.
He specializes in storytelling and children’s literature and received the
SILS award for Teaching Excellence in 2002. He has been repeatedly nominated for his outstanding teaching for the School's award and nominated for
the international professional organization's Association for Library and Information Science Education (ALISE) Teaching Award.
In 2012, Sturm was appointed research fellow by the Graduate School of Library and Information Science at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. His research interests
include immersion in information environments; storytelling; children's literature; public library services to youth.
Dr. Sturm is the creator of
StorySquad,
an initiative that is designed as a community intervention to help young children gain pre-literacy skills, to help older children develop a concept of story structure and build visual literacy skills and imagination and to help older adults retain
their mental agility and imagination and reflect on their lives from new perspectives.
"Story Squad, an initiative Brian launched in fall 2011 to bring storytelling into the larger Triangle community, has a twofold effect," said his student nominator. "Not
only does it enhance the lives of community members who might not otherwise have access to storytelling, but it gives graduate students an opportunity to practice storytelling skills for public audiences - a skill applicable in such varied settings as business
management, heritage preservation, and of course, Brian's specialty, children's librarianship. Story Squad has gone to such varied locations as Charles House (a senior center in Chapel Hill), Community Church of Chapel Hill, and numerous area libraries."
In addition to local venues, Sturm has taken his master storytelling to states around the nation.
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Wanda Monroe
Director of Communications
School of Information and Library Science
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
108 Manning Hall, CB#3360
Chapel Hill, NC 27599-3360
919.843.8337
sils.unc.edu
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