North Texas Daily (Denton, Tex.), Vol. 99, No. 40, Ed. 1 Friday, March 30, 2012 Page: 1 of 12
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Stormy
82° / 64°
Blowing Up
The World Balloon Convention soars to Dallas with art
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Friday, March 30, 2012
Volume 99 I Issue 40
O ntdaily.com
North Texa s 3Daily
News 1,2
Sports 3
Classifieds 4
Games 4
SCENE Insert
The Student Newspaper of the University of North Texas
Artist Nick Cave hosts Heard per brmance
Jeanette Silva
Contributing Writer
More than 200 viewers
crowded around to view
"Heard," a production by UNT
artist-in-residence Nick Cave,
which featured UNT dancers
dressed in colorful horse-
themed costumes.
The free-admission perfor-
mance, which was nearly a
year in the making, took place
on the lawn between the Art
Building and Curry Hall. The
crowd consisted of elementary
school students, UNT students
and staff, Denton residents
and even a few local police
officers.
The dancers were dressed
in Soundsuits made of raffia, a
type ofpalmleaf, and collabo-
rated with percussion players
from the music department
and designers from the art
department.
"It was fantastic," Cave said.
"It was just what I had imag-
ined in my head."
Cave, who grew up in
Missouri, attended graduate
school at UNT in the '80s to
study art. Being this year's
artist in residence gave Cave
the green light to go through
with the performance he had
been dreaming of.
At first, Cave couldn't decide
whether to name the piece
"Herd" or "Heard," but he
decided on the latter. He felt
"heard" signified the perfor-
mance more because of the
Soundsuits as opposed to
focusing the performance on
just a herd of horses on a lawn
on campus.
Cave wanted viewers to go
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Dance freshman Tyler Weems performs as a part of Nick Cave's art piece "Heard" outside of the Art Building on Thurs-
day. The show included UNT students such as dancers, percussion players and designers.
Photo by Chris Lewis/Contributing Photographer
To see more about this story, see Page 6 of the SCENE
to a dream-like state while its day-to-day regimen," Cave Layne Farmer thought highly said. weighed about 150 pounds,
watching the performance. said. "A moment where you're of the performance. Dance senior Kodi Dancers were also attached
"It's really about a very here in this alternative expe- "The music had a pulse to Giovannini was a team leader to each other.
simple idea that gets the mind rience." it and gave the performance for the dancers who performed
to sort of remove itself from Painting and drawing junior a dream-like feel," Farmer in the Soundsuits, which See HEARD on Page 2
Ecological species digitized
in UNT's Digital Library
Caydee Ensey
Staff Writer
The Environmental
Education, Science, and
Technology Building currently
hosts a large collection of
freshwater mussel shells that
are being photographed and
digitized to become a part of
the loseph Britton Freshwater
Mussel Collection in UNT's
Digital Library.
Mussels, a marker species,
act as a tell-tale to scientists
who seek to gauge the health
of a stream or river.
"They are used by stream
ecologists to evaluate how
clean water is," said lames
Kennedy, the biology
professor in charge of the
digitization project. "If we go
out and find lots of different
types of freshwater mussels,
then we know the water is
pretty clean. If we don't find
any, or only a few different
species, then that tells an
aquatic ecologist that there
is something wrong in that
stream."
Mussels are valuable in
determining ecological
conditions becau se they filter
particles that are in the water
out for food.
"That could be microor-
ganisms or decaying bits of
plant material, and they feed
on all that," Kennedy said.
"So when they are pumping
the water through their gills
they are very susceptible to
any changes in their envi-
Photo by Ashley Crystal Firstley/Staff Photographer
Biology master's student Sarah Hammontree pulls a box of mussels from a shelf
in the museum. Hammontree works with professor James Kennedy to document
samples in 3-D for the UNT Digital Library.
ronment."
The site for the collection
was dedicated to loseph
Britton, a biology professor
from TCU who gathered
and Cataloged most of the
shells that are in the collec-
tion today before his death
in 2006. The Institute of
Museum and Library Services
gave a grant of about $150,000
for the project. New speci-
mens are constantly being
added.
See MUSSELS on Page 2
Professors add character to class
Nicole Balderas
Senior Staff Writer
It's not in many classes
students study the philos-
ophy of Friedrich Nietzsche
using Batman comics as a
supplemental textbook,
but in professor Shaun
Treat's " Mythic Rhetoric of
Superheroes" class, that is
exactly what they do.
While the use of popular
literature in the classroom
has received scorn from some
academics, many teachers
find simply engaging students
in learning is a win.
"You have to look at what
your students are interested
in," said Treat, who works in
the communication studies
department, "We're using
themes people are inter-
ested in but still using clas-
sical theories to understand
them."
Through his class blog,
Treat underscores material
learned in class in a medium
more conducive to the
learning style of students.
"Sometimes students can
get bored with Nietzsche,"
Treat said. "But when I dress
those theories up in tights
and capes they're on it."
Although the trend of
referencing pop culture to
explain classic concepts isn't
a new one, a 2012 report titled
"What Kids Are Reading"
indicates students' interest
in pop culture may be driving
more and more teachers to
incorporate the material into
classroom lectures.
The report gathered infor-
Photo by Ashley King/Staff Photographer
Communication studies professor Shaun Treat skims over one of his textbooks. Treat
is one of the professors at UNT who uses popular literature to teach his classes.
*Sometimes
students can
get bored with
Nietzsche. But
when I dress those
theories up in
tights and capes
they re on it"
- Shaun Treat
Professor
mation from more than 7.6
million students from 24,265
schools
nationwide who read more
than 241 million books during
the 2010-2011 school year.
Out of the 388,963 ninth
through 12th graders in the
report, the top reading choice
among both men and women
was "The Hunger Games." The
top choice of the previous year
was "Twilight."
" I realized these kids are kind
of checked out, and they don't
want to read "Macbeth" and
"Canterbury Tales" so the only
way to bring them in is through
pop culture references," said
Aaron Case, an English senior
teaching 12th grade English
at Denton High School. "I was
using TV, but then I found a
lot of them have read "LIunger
Games" and we've been able
to talk about character devel-
opment so it kind of draws the
gap between really archaic liter-
ature.;'
One UNT professor taught
a less traditional undergrad-
uate secondary English class
using the book "True Blood and
Philosophy" in addition to the
class' required rhetoric text.
See COMIC on Page 2
Inside
UNT's on-campus periodic table
News i Page 2
Versatile sophomore makes immediate impact
Sports | Page 3
Day in the life of a music producer
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Gorman, Sean. North Texas Daily (Denton, Tex.), Vol. 99, No. 40, Ed. 1 Friday, March 30, 2012, newspaper, March 30, 2012; Denton, Texas. (https://texashistory.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metapth255901/m1/1/: accessed April 26, 2024), University of North Texas Libraries, The Portal to Texas History, https://texashistory.unt.edu; crediting UNT Libraries Special Collections.