The University of Toledo’s graduate programs are recognized among the best in the nation, according to the 2020 U.S. News & World Report Best Graduate Schools rankings.

The College of Nursing and College of Law, in particular, jumped dramatically in the most recent rankings released Tuesday.

The master’s degree in nursing jumped up to 135 from the previous year’s ranking of 183. The doctor of nursing is ranked 135 compared to 152 the previous year.

The full-time law program is now ranked 126. It had been 137 in the 2019 rankings.

“The significant increases in the U.S. News rankings in just one year reflect the University’s increasingly positive reputation and the progress we are making advancing our academic and research excellence,” President Sharon L. Gaber said. “We are proud of these rankings, but more importantly the outcomes they represent in student success, program quality and accomplished faculty.”

In addition to the nursing and law programs, UToledo’s graduate programs in education and social work moved up in the rankings. Education is now ranked 172 up from 176 and social work is listed as 196 up from 201 the previous year. In addition, the engineering graduate program is now ranked and listed as 148.

The College of Nursing attributes its dramatic 48-point jump in the master’s program and increase of 17 spots in the doctoral program to attracting a more qualified student applicant pool, increasing program accessibility for students, strong graduation rates, and a growing research profile for faculty.

“We are proud of the recognition for our outstanding programs, excellent students and talented faculty, who are leaders in clinical practice, teaching and research,” said Dr. Linda Lewandowski, dean of the College of Nursing.

The 11-point increase in the College of Law rankings reflects improved bar passage results and a higher employment rate 10 months after graduation.

“The reputation of Toledo Law continues to grow in recognition of our strong faculty and commitment to student success, which includes advanced bar exam preparation and career development initiatives,” said D. Benjamin Barros, dean of the College of Law.

More than 150 fourth-year medical students at The University of Toledo will learn on Friday, March 15, where they will carry out their residencies on the way to becoming attending physicians.

The annual Match Day event is a highly anticipated ceremony for graduating medical students across the country. At precisely noon, UToledo College of Medicine and Life Sciences students will join thousands of students from other medical schools across the country in tearing open envelopes that contain their match.

“Match Day is very exciting for our students and the faculty and staff who support them,” said Dr. Christopher Cooper, dean of the College of Medicine and Life Sciences. “It is the culmination of four years of intense training and now the graduating seniors find out where their next phase of residency training will occur.”

The 2019 Residency Match Reception will begin at 11 a.m. at the Stranahan Theater’s Great Hall. The event is by invitation-only.

Medical students spend months interviewing with hospitals and universities across the country to determine where they want to spend the next three to seven years of their medical training.

Students rank their top institutions, and academic and community-based health systems rank their top student choices. A computer algorithm administered by the National Resident Matching Program then matches students and residency programs together.

Residents are licensed physicians who care for patients under the supervision of attending physicians while they continue to train in their chosen specialty.

Last year, 157 UToledo fourth-year medical students matched into positions in 23 medical specialties.

A noted historian will visit The University of Toledo to deliver the keynote address for Women’s History Month.

Dr. Lorri Glover will give a talk titled “Why Not a Woman? The Improbable Life of Eliza Lucas Pinckney in Revolutionary America” 6 p.m. Wednesday, March 13 in Thompson Student Union Room 2592.

The John Francis Bannon Endowed Chair and Professor of History at Saint Louis University is writing a biography on Pinckney, who, at age 17, took over running three plantations in South Carolina in the late 1730s. Pinckney experimented with indigo production, which, cultivated by slave labor and marketed globally, became a cornerstone of the state’s economy.

“Eliza Lucas Pinckney’s remarkable writings — the largest collection from any women in the colonial South — afford fascinating insight into agriculture and commerce in the Atlantic World, Southern plantations and racial slavery, 18th-century family values, and especially gender history,” Glover said.

In addition to Glover’s talk, the University has several other events slated to mark Women’s History Month.

“I am really excited for this year’s lineup of Women’s History Month events. We have tried to highlight some of the spaces where women have fought and are still fighting for justice,” said Danielle Stamper, interim program coordinator in the Office of Multicultural Student Success and interim program manager at the Catharine S. Eberly Center for Women.

Listed by date, other events at the University include:

Monday, March 11

• Women’s History Month Kickoff Exhibit, 9 to 11:30 a.m., Carlson Library Room 1005. Authors featured will be NK Jemisin, Octavia Butler, Ursula Kroeber Le Guin, rupi kaur, Alison Bechdel, Suheir Hammad, Monique Truong, Zadie Smith, Melody Moezzi and Audre Lorde. Attendees will be able to read about these authors and eat bagels. Everyone who attends will be entered into a drawing for some of the pieces by the authors. In addition, Carlson Library will have books by the authors on display.
• Stand Up to Stalking and Sexual Violence, 6 p.m., Health and Human Services Building Room 1711. Anna Nassett will share her personal account of being stalked by a stranger for more than seven years, and how advocacy for stalking victims is important for recovery. The event is sponsored by The University of Toledo Center for Student Advocacy and Wellness.

Friday, March 15

• Film Screening, “#SayHerName: The Life and Death of Sandra Bland,” 6 p.m., Thompson Student Union Room 2592. The event is sponsored by the Eberly Center for Women, Office of Diversity and Inclusion, and the Toledo alumnae chapter of Sigma Gamma Rho Sorority Inc.

Monday, March 18

• Womxn of Color Symposium: Finding and Using Our Voice, 1 to 7 p.m., Thompson Student Union Ingman Room. Denice Frohman, poet, educator and performer, will lead the symposium. Her work focuses on identity, lineage, subverting traditional notions of power, and celebrating aspects women deem unworthy. The professional development event will feature dialogue and cultivating resilience and empowerment. Register by Thursday, March 14, to utoledo.edu/diversity. Limit 100 participants.

Tuesday, March 19

• Lunch With a Purpose, noon, Eberly Center for Women, Tucker Hall Room 0152. Dr. Barbara Mann, UToledo professor of humanities, will give a talk titled “Spirits of Blood, Spirits of Breath: The Twinned Cosmos of Indigenous America.”

Monday, March 25

• Preparing for Success, 4 p.m., Collier Building Room 1035. Amy O’Donnell, Distinguished University Lecturer of Career Development, will lead a program on salary and contract negotiations.

Tuesday, March 26

• Preparing for Success, 4 p.m., Carlson Library 1005. Amy O’Donnell, Distinguished University Lecturer of Career Development, will lead a program on salary and contract negotiations.

Thursday, March 28

• Discussion, noon, Eberly Center for Women, Tucker Hall Room 0152. Dr. Nyasha Junior, a faculty member in the Department of Religion at Temple University, will discuss “What Is Womanist Interpretation?”
• Women’s History Month Jeopardy, 6 p.m., Eberly Center for Women, Tucker Hall Room 0152. Stop by for trivia and a chance to win prizes.

Sunday, March 31

• Phenomenal Woman, 6:30 p.m., Thompson Student Union Auditorium. Jasmine Dees, founder of Anointed Angels, will speak at the Association for the Advancement of African-American Women’s Sixth Annual Women’s Gala. University students also will perform.
• A Slash of Color and Culture, 6:30 p.m., Thompson Student Union Auditorium. Be there for the Natural HAIRitage’s Third Annual Hair Show.

Babies babble or drift asleep as mothers and fathers sing “Row, Row, Row Your Boat,” “Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star,” “Itsy-Bitsy Spider” and other lullabies that have been passed down through generations.

Toddlers sing along.

Pam, 8 months old, listening to her mother sing “You Are My Sunshine”

When Hilma Stover recognized the music bug bit her 3-year-old daughter Pam in a special way, her creative use of a beauty product took those classic folk songs to the next level and would fuel Pam’s lifelong dedication to early childhood music education.

“My mom used red nail polish to paint the letter names of each key on a large toy piano,” said Dr. Pamela Stover, organist and associate professor of music education at The University of Toledo. “I had a book that had big notes with the letter names inside. That’s how Mom taught me how to play simple tunes.”

When she grew up, Stover chose a career first teaching children and then preparing music teachers using Orff-Schulwerk techniques and what is known as the Kodály approach, a method based on the idea that children learn to read and write music better and quicker through musical games that involve singing, clapping and movement.

Dr. Pamela Stover

Folk songs and the internationalization of the Kodály approach are the focus of Stover’s recently awarded Fulbright grant to the Kodály Institute of the Liszt Ferenc Academy of Music in Kecskemét, Hungary, for four months next year. She will delve through the institute’s undigitized archives to do research for her upcoming book, “The History of Kodály-Inspired Teaching: From Hungarian Folksongs to Globalization.”

“This Fulbright is one of the best things that has ever happened in my career and is the culmination of about 15 years of background research and 35 years of teaching,” Stover said. “The opportunity to do archival research at the incredible Kodály Institute is an honor. The institute provides international teacher training and houses an invaluable and rare collection of folk songs not only from Hungary, but from around the world. This treasure trove, which cannot be loaned out, contains international teaching materials and handwritten primary source documents that hold the answers to many questions about the Kodály approach to teaching music.”

Recipients of Fulbright awards are selected on the basis of academic and professional achievement, as well as record of service and leadership potential in their respective fields. The Fulbright Scholar Program offers grants to American faculty, administrators and professionals to teach and conduct research abroad. The program is sponsored by the United States Department of State’s Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs. It is the flagship international education exchange program sponsored by the U.S. government.

Stover, who has been on faculty at The University of Toledo since 2011, plans to use her Fulbright to trace the development of the music curriculum that started in a small Hungarian city and spread throughout the world.

Folk songs are much more than simple children’s songs. Handed down from generation to generation, they preserve a portion of history. In the U.S., we commonly think of square dances or cowboys singing around a campfire or sailors working in unison on a ship.

“Every country and every ethnicity preserve its culture through folk songs,” Stover said.

Stover’s book will start from the beginning of the Kodály approach to teaching music, which arose out of a nationalistic philosophy in early 1900s Europe.

“Hungary kept getting invaded, and Hungarian composer Zoltán Kodály believed his country was overly influenced by music from Germany and Austria,” Stover said. “He and a colleague Béla Bartók went on a quest around the country recording and transcribing people singing children’s songs, work songs, people in fields, people in schools. They went everywhere.”

Kodály and Bartók created a Hungarian folk song collection to preserve Hungarian culture by writing down the culture’s oral tradition. There was one problem: No one could read it except for trained musicians.

As a result, Kodály gathered some of Hungary’s finest music teachers and designed a way to teach everyone how to read and write music first by singing and later with instruments.

“A country’s language influences the rhythm, so I first want to analyze the pitch and rhythm sets used in international folk songs, and find out why Kodály teachers use the ‘sol mi’ descending minor third as found in natural language, instead of the first two notes of the scale – ‘do re’ – as made famous in ‘The Sound of Music,’” Stover said.

In addition to writing a history book about the Kodály method, Stover hopes to strengthen the next generation of music educators by creating a folk-song collection and a multicultural teaching guide that can be used in classrooms around the world.

Stover, 35, with her 2-year-old cousin Nora at the piano in 1996.

“In times of budget cuts, music is typically on the list of things that can be cut,” Stover said. “We are at such a crisis point in the United States with the fragile status of funding for music education that it is easy to sympathize with the desperation Kodály would have felt when he was gathering Hungarian folk songs, not knowing which enemy would invade next. We are both thinking of preservation of our musical culture. This Fulbright will enable me – in a very small way – to preserve music education history.”

Stover’s mom Hilma is proud of her daughter’s Fulbright, but she still sees her little girl who sang in the church choir and desperately wanted to learn how to play the organ.

“Pam never ceases to amaze her dad and me,” Hilma Stover said. “We both enjoy music but were never musically talented. She can sing every verse of a hymn while getting both hands and feet going on the organ to make beautiful music. We are very proud of her hard work and accomplishments, as well as the pleasure she takes in seeing her students at The University of Toledo excel as teachers, performers and composers.”