Music Instructor

Eldonna May took piano lessons at five, studied with the Detroit Symphony Orchestra, attended the Interlochen Arts Academy and toured Europe with the Ford Motor Youth Symphony.  But it would be on a different set of keys, and on a different continent, that she would engage in some of the most meaningful work of her career.

May holds a bachelor’s degree in music performance, a master’s degree in musicology and an MBA from Wayne State University, a Ph.D. in musicology from Michigan State University and a Ph.D. in online teaching from Florida State University.  Also on the music faculty at Wayne State, May teaches World Music and Introduction to the Arts at Macomb, online and on campus.

“What I appreciate so much about Macomb is the privilege of working in a department with outstanding administrators and faculty,” says May, who first taught online at the University of Michigan in the 1990s. “Stu (Scott) was one of the first in Michigan to develop an online, interdisciplinary humanities course and I very much wanted to be part of the process.”

But she may never have been if not for a lecture she heard as an undergrad on the history behind Richard Strauss’ musical adaptation of Oscar Wilde’s play Salome, which convinced her to change her musical direction from performance-driven to scholarly study.  That, in turn, led to her discovery of kwaito, a music genre with ties to hip-hop and jazz, popular in Botswana, Africa.  May has just completed a year of research there on a Fulbright Fellowship – as prestigious and competitive in academia as the Oscar is in Hollywood.

“Ever since I was an undergrad, I’ve had a fascination with African history,” says May – shown center here at the U.S. Embassy in Gaborone, Botswana, with Gao Lemmenyane, director of the Centre for the Arts in Gaborone and Marang Mutuna, associate dean for Internationalization & Educational Outreach at Botho University. “In doing research on kwaito, I developed a marvelous relationship with Botho’s faculty, which led to the Fulbright.”

The Fulbright covered all of the travel and living expenses for what was May’s fifth trip to Africa.  At Botho, she developed a curriculum for the university’s new music business program and embarked upon a book project about kwaito with one of its faculty.

“Everything in Botswana is based on an oral tradition, few can read music,” says May. “But the students there so desperately want to learn.”

Back at Macomb, May is incorporating all that she learned about kwaito into her World Music class. “At the end of the day,” she says, “it’s all about helping our students grow intellectually.”

Music Instructor/Director of Choral Activities

A 1905 upright piano held a prominent place in the living room of the home Todd Moses grew up in. It was his great uncle’s and he started playing it when he was eight, following the fingertips of older siblings.  But it wasn’t until he joined the Macombers that he discovered the harmony he had been looking for.

“It was fantastic, life altering,” says Moses. “As a Macomber, I found other students as passionate about music making as myself.”

Fast forward through 30 years and several teaching posts and Moses is now poised, with baton in hand, to help other Macomb students make the same discovery.

The Macombers are Macomb’s singing and dancing troupe that perform throughout the state as well as in twice annual “extravaganzas,” the proceeds of which fund scholarships for the troupe’s members. Moses was encouraged to tryout while in the Magic Company, the College’s high school choral group. Passing that audition in 1986 was nearly as exciting as learning in May that he had gotten the job as Macomb’s new music instructor and director of choral activities at Macomb, which includes directing the Macombers.

“I just love it.  Once I get into the rehearsal room with the students, it’s so comfortable, it just flows,” says Moses, who previously served as director of choral activities at Dakota High School. “But I never truly left Macomb.”

Moses earned a bachelor’s degree in music education/voice from Ball State University and a master’s degree in teaching from Saginaw Valley State University.  Throughout his career, he has continued to stay active with Macomb’s choral groups.  He has performed with InVoice, a group of Macombers alumni, and has codirected Garfield Singers, the College’s middle school/junior high choral group. But returning to Macomb as a faculty member is about as meaningful as when he moved that 1905 upright piano into his own living room and began teaching his daughter on it.

Macomb, after all, is where Moses met his wife, Liz, a fellow music educator and Macomber alum. Macomb is where he is teaching and directing many of his former Dakota music students, including daughter, Bethany, a second-year Macomber who will be continuing her music education at Brigham Young University next year. And Macomb is where he will be able to share with aspiring music educators and performers what he believes is the most important lesson they will ever learn.

“I tell my students, love what you do and always follow your passion,” says Moses. “That is the only way to truly be fulfilled in your career.”

Reading Strategies and College Success Skills

Her students may not know that Heather Mayernik provides a safe haven each summer to migrating monarchs, but they benefit as much from her experience and enthusiasm as the butterflies the reading professor nurtures on milkweed in her backyard.

“Macomb students are smart and hardworking, and I look out for them. They are like family to me,” says Mayernik, whose been known to invite passing students she has never met before into her office on South Campus for a chat about their classes. “I know what it means to have a professor mentor you, and I try to do the same for any student who needs it.”

Mayernik’s most valued mentor was the Oakland University professor who helped her navigate academic protocols after exiting the university several years before with enough credits for a master’s in Reading and Language Arts, but without the actual degree.

“Professor Cramer helped me apply for the degree, invited me to serve as his teacher’s assistant and encouraged me to start my Ph.D. program,” relates Mayernik, who is now writing her dissertation and, also, teaching part time at Oakland. “There is no question he changed my life.”

And that, ultimately, led her to Macomb five years ago to teach Reading Strategies and College Success Skills, following a career that began, she notes, as president of her high school’s future teachers club.

“I always knew I wanted to teach,” she says.

A single mom with three children, one a junior at Purdue University, Mayernik has taught at private schools in Grosse Pointe Woods and Detroit, and at Wayne County Community College. She has also structured a professional development program for teachers in Chicago, provided online learning to students displaced by Hurricane Katrina and served as a consultant for the nation’s leading instructional services provider.  Mayernik has received two national awards for her teaching, most recently this year from the National Institute for Staff and Organizational Development, part of the Community College Leadership Program at the University of Texas at Austin.

But, the passionate teacher, gardener, kayaker and scuba diver believes that, unlike the migrating monarchs who summer in her backyard, she has landed for good.

“I love the College’s philosophy that anyone can come here and change their life,” says Mayernik.  “I’ll probably never leave Macomb.”

Social Work Professor

Rochelle Zaranek has earned bachelor and master degrees in social work and sociology, a Ph.D. in sociology, and two post-doctorates in research and teaching.  But it was a class assignment while a student at Macomb that would have the most profound of impacts.

Her sociology professor “challenged” Zaranek and her classmates to spend a Friday night at Detroit Receiving Hospital, where the majority of patients are admitted through the emergency room. “I left the trauma unit in the wee hours of a Saturday morning,” says Zaranek, “knowing I wanted to go into medical social work.”

At the time, teaching was not on Zaranek’s radar.  While earning her degrees at Wayne State University, she concentrated solely on social work, serving clients in Detroit’s inner city.

“The people there are remarkable,” says Zaranek.  “I learned some of life’s greatest lessons from older people in Detroit.”

It was as a teaching assistant in graduate school that she was first introduced to the front of the classroom and a good first impression turned into a lifelong commitment. She taught full time at Wayne State for 10 years and, in the evenings, at Henry Ford Community College because, she explains. “I love to teach.”

And that is why she decided to join Macomb’s faculty nearly 10 years ago, where she knew, at a community college, the emphasis would be on teaching not research.  But Zaranek’s efforts to reach students are anything but confined to the classroom.

Developing a new pre-social work curriculum, Zaranek purposefully included a service learning component in the same spirit as that life-changing classroom assignment at Detroit Receiving. That evolved into her role as Macomb’s service learning coordinator, assisting other faculty with service learning projects. She also organizes all of the volunteer opportunities offered to students and staff on the Martin Luther King Jr. Day of Service each January and is advisor to the Social Work Student Organization.

Spring break is no different and in addition to arranging for students to volunteer at soup kitchens, homeless shelters and food banks during their week off, Zaranek has also taken several groups to Louisiana to assist in post-Katrina rebuilding. Last summer, she capped off a two-year distance service learning project with a visit to three orphanages in Kenya, an African country where more than half of the population live in poverty, for which her students had been collecting notebooks and backpacks.  That visit paved the way for a formalized study abroad opportunity, with Zaranek leading the first group of Macomb students to Kenya this past June.

For all of these efforts and more, Zaranek has received a 2017 Award for Teaching Excellence from the National Institute for Staff and Organizational Development, an offshoot of the Community College Leadership Program at the University of Texas.  But for her, nothing eclipses working side-by-side with her students to make the world a better place.

“When you can take your textbook and bring it to life, it makes it real for the students,” says Zaranek.  “I can lecture to them about homelessness or poverty, but when we work together at the Capuchin Soup Kitchen or at an orphanage in Africa they begin to really understand.”

Philosophy Instructor

Like a lot of first-year college students, Bradley Wakefield wasn’t sure what he wanted to major in. He started out in business, but disliked how it constrained the curious nature his mother assured him he had been born with.

“I took a philosophy class and the instructor had one of the greatest minds that I had ever encountered,” says Wakefield. “Then I took another philosophy class and another. I just wanted more.  And it’s the same hunger I see in some of my students.”

The hungriest are members of The Argument Clinic, the philosophy club that Wakefield organized after joining Macomb’s faculty in 2013.  Last semester, he introduced a successful speakers’ series, which explores such thoughtful issues as conspiracy theories and gender inequality in philosophy, the latter of which has been a focus of Wakefield’s own studies

“Everybody knows John Stuart Mill,” offers Wakefield, who holds a master’s degree in philosophy from Wayne State University and has begun work on his Ph.D. “But the world didn’t know that (Harriet Taylor, his wife) improved upon everything he did.”

A longtime ambassador for the Michigan Opera Theatre, Wakefield offers his students discount tickets and extra credit to attend performances. He was also instrumental in bringing MOT artists to Macomb for a preview of Little Women and an opera primer, part of his effort to establish an opera club at Macomb.

“Students here want the academic life,” says Wakefield, who is often followed to his office after class by students who want to continue a discussion.

“I surprise my students when I tell them ‘I’m professional at being wrong,’” relates Wakefield, who likens philosophy to the search for a thorn-less path to truth.  “My job is to tell students when they are in thorny territory.”

Both the thorns and their enthusiasm remind Wakefield of his younger self.

“Some of my students will be better philosophers than I ever will,” says Wakefield. “When they come back and tell me years from now that they have published, that they are the chair of their philosophy department, I will love that.”

Certified Nurse Assistant Program

Deborah Brown cannot count the number of roses she has received from grateful graduates.  A registered nurse (RN) with a bachelor’s degree, the Macomb instructor believes her students appreciate that she offers them both candid kindness and mutual respect.

“I was a nursing assistant for seven years before becoming an RN,” says Brown, faculty/ coordinator of Macomb’s Certified Nurse Assistant (CNA) Program. “I am able to show my students how they can advance from a CNA to a registered nurse.”

During her nursing career, Brown worked at Harper, St. John, Oakland General and Providence hospitals. She was also director of nursing at an adult care facility and an educational coordinator for the American Red Cross.  Her experience includes cardiac care, emergency room, labor and delivery, psychiatrics and medical/surgical.  She came on board at Macomb in 2008 to develop its CNA curriculum.

“I love the health care field,” says Brown. “Its foundation is family, and that is what I bring into the classroom. I make every student feel like someone cares about them.”

That pay-it-forward approach takes center stage in the section Brown teaches on caring for elderly patients, one of the fastest growing segments in health care.  Adding geriatrics to the curriculum also had the intentional impact of extending Macomb’s CNA program a few weeks longer than most.

“Because of the extra clinical practice, hospitals hire Macomb’s grads without any experience,” says Brown, “With a 95 percent first-time pass rate on the certification exam, Macomb’s program is considered one of the best.”

Brown was recently recognized by the Macomb Career and Technical Education Administrators Association for the dual enrollment CNA program she coordinates at Armada High School.  But neither receiving awards nor roses compare to discovering she had been the attending nurse at a student’s birth.

“Her mom came up to me at graduation and told me I had been so great to her when she was in labor, such a positive affirmation of everything I teach,” relates Brown.  “Moments like that make me love teaching so much.”

Political Science

Growing up in West Virginia, three hours from Washington D.C., Brooke Allen’s parents took her to more marches on the National Mall than she can count.  No wonder she is a self-described “political junkie” and a recent recipient of an American Political Science Association (APSA) award.

“The project was inspired by The Daily Show, when a comedian noted that gerrymandered (organized to benefit one political party) districts resemble pieces of abstract art,” explains Allen of the work that earned her an APSA CQ Press Award for Teaching Innovation.  “I hosted a Gerrymandering Art Exhibit in the fall, based on my students’ group research projects.”

CQ Press publishes scholarly texts on American government and public policy and its annual award recognizes one political science professor who has developed a new way of engaging students in the political process. Past recipients have been professors from Northwestern and Indiana universities and the University of Michigan.

“I was not expecting it at all” says Allen, who holds a Ph.D. in political science from U of M, and has been teaching full time at Macomb for five years. “I presented a paper on my students’ Gerrymandering art exhibit at the association’s annual meeting in Philadelphia.  Someone in the audience nominated me for the award.”

That someone was Dr. Sherry Wallace, a political science professor at the University of Louisiana, who is developing a similar classroom project based on Allen’s success, which the Macomb professor attributes to her students.

“We have great students,” says Allen.  “They are aware of what’s going on in the world.”

Allen continues to look for innovative ways to “show how what we talk about in class relates to their own lives.” There was an interactive video discussion with students from the University of California, Berkeley on the outcome of the last presidential election, which inspired Allen to add a unit to her classes on the impact of social media on election campaigns.

“We will be looking at a lot of different news sources,” says Allen. “They need to know they have more choices than Facebook.”