Ohio University Eastern’s Early Childhood and Elementary Education program has long recognized the power of hands-on experience in preparing future educators.

Through a unique co-teaching partnership with local school districts, teacher candidates are placed in classrooms for an entire academic year, gaining an in-depth understanding of what it takes to guide students from the start of the school year to the final day of class. This program is a prime example of how strong partnerships between universities and school districts create lasting benefits for both students and the local community.

One such teacher candidate is Tiffany Hoffman, a senior in the Early Childhood and Elementary Education program, who is currently completing her co-teaching placement at Union Local Elementary School. As Hoffman navigates her final semester, she is gaining a comprehensive, real-world experience that will help her transition from student teacher to full-time educator.

Kim Ciroli, associate professor of instruction at OHIO Eastern, speaks highly of Hoffman’s dedication.

“Tiffany is the kind of student who shows up for every challenge with a positive attitude,” Ciroli said. “Balancing the rigorous demands of our program with the responsibilities of motherhood is no small feat, and yet she does so with incredible resilience. Tiffany’s commitment to her education and to her future students stands out, and she’s a great example of the kind of student we are proud to have in our program.”

Hoffman’s mentor, Rachel Dorff, who has been guiding student teachers for several years at Union Local, highlights the value of the co-teaching model.

“I have greatly enjoyed mentoring and learning from the student teachers placed in my classroom,” said Dorff. “The way that Ohio University Eastern allows teacher candidates to spend their last two semesters teaching in the same classroom and experiencing the year with our students is an invaluable experience.”

This immersion has allowed Hoffman to develop key teaching skills and gain confidence.

“Tiffany has refined her co-teaching techniques, and as she transitions to lead teacher in the spring semester, she is well-prepared to take on this responsibility,” Dorff said. “She’s become more confident in leading discussions and guiding students, and her familiarity with the staff and curriculum will serve her well in the future.”

The co-teaching program at OHIO Eastern began in 2016, when Ciroli attended a workshop at St. Cloud State University in Minnesota. Inspired by the research and co-teaching model used there, Ciroli and the team at OHIO Eastern decided to adapt it to meet the needs of local teacher candidates. They focused on a year-long placement, where students would spend two full days a week in the classroom during their junior year.

The partnership with Union Local School District began that same year, and the program has grown steadily since then.

“The knowledge of content, pedagogy, classroom management, and sense of belonging far exceeded their peers who were not in a co-teaching program,” said Ciroli. “The teachers all wanted to do it again, and soon, other teachers were asking to be part of the program. We’ve partnered with Union Local every year since.”

As the program has expanded, so too has its reach. The school district partnerships now include Union Local, Bellaire, Martins Ferry, Barnesville, Harrison Hills, Shadyside, and others. This broad network ensures that future educators are exposed to a range of teaching environments and challenges, which only enhances their preparation for a career in education.

Ohio University alumna Shayla Schuster, who participated in the co-teaching program last year, offers her perspective on how the experience shaped her career.

“I am currently teaching fifth grade at Union Local Elementary. The co-teaching program allowed me to work closely with Rachel Dorff where I built strong communication, collaboration, teamwork, and problem-solving skills. Having a mentor to guide me through my student teaching and the last year of college was very impactful. Dorff boosted my confidence, answered all my questions, and supported me through my journey to become a future educator,” Schuster said.

“Dorff modeled great classroom management, leadership, best teaching practices, how to effectively address behaviors, and plenty more,” Schuster added. “She provided me with feedback consistently that helped me grow and gave me the reins so I could learn hands-on. Not only did Dorff build a strong rapport with all her students, but she did with her coworkers as well. We created such a strong bond that I still reach out to her whenever I need anything.”

“After the co-teaching program came to an end, I truly felt ready to have my own classroom. I would not have been able to say that before my senior year. I have taken what I learned then and applied it to my teaching today. I am very happy where I am in my teaching career, and my amazing college education I received at OHIO Eastern sometimes makes me feel like I am not even a first-year teacher and I’ve been doing this longer,” Schuster said.

Looking ahead, Hoffman’s journey reflects the success of the co-teaching program at OHIO Eastern. Her growth, coupled with the continued collaboration between the University and local school districts, shows just how important these partnerships are in shaping the next generation of teachers.

Bill Plympton cavorts with one of his creations at the Animation: Script to Screen event. (photo: Marc Mohan)

It’s no secret that Portland and its environs have become a nexus for the art and business of animation. In fact, the city has been at the forefront of the industry at least since Will Vinton first put fingers to clay in the early 1970s. The achievements of Laika Studios (Coraline, ParaNorman, and many others) and ShadowMachine (Guillermo Del Toro’s Pinnochio) have been celebrated with showcases at the Portland Art Museum and elsewhere, but a recent exhibition and lecture series at the Lakewood Center for the Arts in Lake Oswego brought together a fascinating constellation of animators, demonstrating the vast diversity of styles and methods within the field and Oregon’s preeminence in so many of them, especially the meticulous, crafted universe of stop motion.

Co-curated by Tiffany Schuster and the recently launched Museum of Stop Motion Animation, the event, Animation: Script to Screen, was the centerpiece of this year’s Lake Oswego Festival of the Arts, held from June 20-22. In addition to an exhibit exploring the techniques of stop motion and displaying dozens of objects used in the making of Pinocchio, Wendell & Wild, and other films, the weekend also offered a dizzying array of presentations from some of the most acclaimed animators working today. And, of course, it would be close to heresy to stage something like this in the Portland area without including local legend and Oregon City native Bill Plympton, who made the trip from his New York home to attend, conduct a master class in 2D animation, and screen his latest hand-drawn feature, Slide. Plympton describes Slide as “what if Mel Brooks became a cartoonist. It’s a wacky musical Western comedy with probably more bad guys than any other film ever made. I love drawing bad guys, and I wanted to draw as many bad guys as I could.” (This is of course extra impressive considering Plympton’s virtually unique status as an animator who draws every frame of his films himself and by hand.) Plotwise, he continues, the film follows “a wandering vigilante who comes into this small lumbering town that’s very corrupt. These two fat guys are ruling the village, tearing down the trees and rivers and lakes and just destroying everything. The good guy doesn’t have a gun, but he uses his slide guitar to defeat them and clean up the city.”

In his class, Plympton emphasized the practical side of his calling as well as the artistic. “I show people how it is possible to make a living being an independent animator,” he says. “I talk about the secrets of my success, and I’ll do a presentation on how I draw my famous characters. And I’ll look at people’s portfolios, too. I’m happy to do that.” The demands of the medium, especially as Plympton practices it, aren’t for everyone. “If you don’t like to draw, you’re probably in the wrong business. I get up at five in the morning and start drawing, and go to bed at eight at night after drawing all day.” Asked if he regrets having to take meal breaks, he simply replies, “I do.”

On the other end of the spectrum from Plympton’s work is the technically complex, studio-based work that Lead Animator Anthony Scott has excelled at for over 30 years. Scott, whose lecture on Saturday covered his remarkable career, got his start, remarkably enough, working for Art Clokey, the Claymation pioneer who created the character Gumby (and his equine sidekick Pokey). Like Plympton, Scott seems born to animate: “When I was seven years old, I was coming up with my own characters and stories and wanting to make them move. By the time I was eleven, I had found one or two books in the library on how to make animated films, and I got ahold of a Super 8 movie camera. I just started experimenting with cut-out animation, clay animation, shooting live-action stuff with friends, that sort of thing.” The opportunities for a budding animator weren’t extensive in Scott’s home state of Michigan, he recalls, so “when I was 21, I moved to California. Eventually I found out about a new Gumby TV series that was being shot in Sausalito, about twenty minutes from where I was. I sent in my demo reel on a VHS, and about two months later I got a call inviting me in for an interview with Art Clokey.” He got the job, despite having no formal training in film or animation.

Characters from the Oscar-winning Gullermo Del Toro’s Pinocchio were on display. (Photo: Marc Mohan)

From there, Clokey recommended Scott to Henry Selick, who was working on a series of 10-second bumpers for MTV (you remember, the ones where the channel’s logo would morph into all sorts of bizarre shapes and colors). That was in 1988, and since then Scott has worked with Selick on every one of his stop-motion features, from 1993’s The Nightmare Before Christmas to 2022’s Wendell & Wild. He was the senior stop-motion animator on the Oscar-winning Pinocchio, and personally took home an Emmy for his work on the opening credits of the 2009-2011 Showtime series The United States of Tara, which was done in a cut-out, two-dimensional style that’s worlds away from the Selick aesthetic.

“I’ve been really fortunate to work on so many different kinds of projects, not just big-budget feature films, but smaller, experimental things,” he says. “That freshens things up for me. A movie is a longer job and that’s great. But smaller projects give you time and opportunity to experiment, and that keeps it exciting.” Scott is especially fond of his work on the 2015 film The Little Prince, which involved a lot of elaborate paper animation. Having risen up the ranks over the years, he’s also developed a preference for more hands-on roles. “Tim Burton’s Corpse Bride was my first big supervising role. I had to work with all the department heads—puppets, sets, props—and then very closely with the director to make sure everything’s going to work for us. That’s great, and I can do that, but it takes you away from the creative part. After Coraline I decided to go back to just animating and performance, which is what I like to focus on the most.”

There’s a reason this cinematic form is called “animation.” Taking unliving objects and imbuing them with movement, personality, and, yes, a sort of life is, as Scott puts it, “really magical.” And the handmade, artisanal nature of stop-motion never lets you forget that there’s an actual human behind it all. Two relatively recent developments complicate that relationship: computer-generated imagery and artificial intelligence. While recognizing those concerns, Scott isn’t a purist or a Luddite. “I’m okay with some CGI,” he says. “We definitely try to keep it stop-motion as much as we can, but if you have a huge crowd shot—you know, a hundred zombies chasing your character—you need to use CG figures made up to look like stop-motion figures.”

Sponsor

Scott’s also been around long enough to be wary of doom-and-gloom talk. “You know,” he says, “when Toy Story and Jurassic Park came out, a lot of people thought ‘That’s it, stop-motion is truly dead.’ It had been kind of dead already since the 1970s. The Nightmare Before Christmas came out the same year as Jurassic Park, and it was nominated for the Best Visual Effects Oscar. Jurassic Park won, of course, but then more stop-motion features were made. Nightmare was kind of the first in a series, and then Laika got going, and Aardman Animations started cranking out features. And here we are.”

The more optimistic take on the encroachment of technology is that the ubiquity of cameras and apps on smartphones allow almost anyone to experiment with making stop-motion films. That spirt of exploration and nearly unfettered creativity will surely lead to developments in animation, and cinema in general, that can barely be dreamt of today. The companies mentioned so far in this piece, from Aardman to Laika to ShadowMachine, were all represented at Animation: Script to Screen, but so was the late, lamented Will Vinton Studios.

The original camera ramp used by Will Vinton and Bob Gardiner in 1975, a holy relic of animation history. (photo: Marc Mohan)

Webster Colcord, who worked with Vinton on some of his early efforts (including Meet the Raisins) and went on to be a mainstay at Oscar-winner Phil Tippett’s animation studio, also gave a presentation titled “Monsters, Mayhem, and Mistakes: A Career in Hollywood Animation” that included rarely, if ever, seen clips of his work from the 1980s to the present day. Colcord also re-created the set of a Rainier Beer commercial that Vinton and then-partner Bob Gardiner shot in 1975 so that it could be paired in the exhibit with the actual camera track used in the production. This fifty-year-old piece of wooden equipment may as well be a piece of the True Cross for its significance as a relic of the origins of the Portland area’s ability to produce and attract world-class animation talent. It was a thoroughly appropriate centerpiece for this celebration of an art form, and a place, unlike any other.

Demonstrators rally in support of unions, federal workers and workers rights in Northeast Philadelphia on Saturday, April 26, 2025. Read more

Some days when Sally Schuster goes to work at her office in Northeast Philadelphia, she and her coworkers light boots on fire.

Other days, they test camouflage visibility at different wavelengths. And sometimes, they simply make sure uniform colors match.

Advertisement

“Basically we ensure troop safety,” said Schuster, a chemist at a Defense Logistics Agency product test center.

Schuster and about two dozen other members of the American Federation of Government Employees Local 62 stood in the rain on Cottman Avenue near Bustleton Avenue on Saturday afternoon to protest President Donald Trump’s efforts to fire federal workers and strip them of their collective bargaining rights. Chanting “What’s disgusting? Union busting!” and holding signs, they sought the attention of passing drivers, many of whom honked their approval.

“Government workers serve the people,” said Schuster, 49, a Wyncote resident who has worked for the federal government for 20 years. “There’s lots and lots of departments that nobody knows we exist but if we disappear it’s going to hurt the whole country.”

The Trump administration on March 27 announced it was attempting to remove union rights for hundreds of thousands of federal workers, contending that U.S. labor law authorizes the president to forgo collective bargaining with employees whose work is critical to national security.

Lawsuits challenging the move are pending in U.S. District Court. A federal judge on Friday blocked the administration’s efforts to strip bargaining rights from members of the National Treasury Employees Union. But the federal government has already stopped withholding union dues from the paychecks of members of Local 62 and other unions.

Local 62 represents about 4,000 civilian employees at the DLA location at 7200 Robbins Ave., union president Candis Ralph said. Employees there include contract and logistics specialists that manage supply chains for the military, working with companies to secure uniforms, foods, medical supplies, and other items. About two-thirds are veterans, Ralph estimated.

“We contract only American sources for every single uniform,” Ralph said Friday. “Every single uniform component that a military member wears comes out of [Defense Logistics Agency] Troop Support. We provide those contracts to get those items.”

The Department of Defense, which includes the DLA, has one of the largest shares of federal workers in Pennsylvania. About 7,900 federal employees in the state worked for the Department of Defense as of September, according to data from the Office of Personnel Management.

“Our workers are essential, and we do work very hard,” Ralph said. “I want people to understand that these are your neighbors, these are family, these are your friends. Just as hard as a person who works a civilian job outside in a grocery store or in the private sector, we work just as hard.”

Tiffany Nguyen, a vendor logistics specialist, said she has already had coworkers fired in what appeared to be “just random terminations” justified as “budget cutbacks.”

“We’re out here to form solidarity,” said Nguyen, 27, who lives in North Philadelphia. “We’re out here to spread awareness about the union-busting.”

Nguyen, the Local 62 treasurer, said she was not afraid of being targeted for publicly protesting the Trump administration. Schuster, on the other hand, said she was very much afraid — but also felt she could not remain silent.

“I can’t sit back,” Schuster said. “If I’m going to lose my job, I’m going to put up a fight.”

Tiffany Haddish’s book, The Last Black Unicorn, earned the entertainer a career highlight while also opening up the door to litigation. Her ex-husband, William Stuart, filed a defamation lawsuit against the comedian, along with her co-author, Tucker Max, and publisher, for printing and disseminating lies about him.

Last month, Stuart won the first part of their court battle. The defendants tried to block his legal proceedings, stating that the lawsuit should be thrown out for his failure to properly inform them of the issue before filing his plaint. The judge ruled in Stuart’s favor, allowing him to pursue punitive damages against the defendants. He is seeking $1 million in compensation.

Tucker Max (Toby Canham/Getty Images)

His legal team has clarified their point of focus, placing the blame on the publisher and co-author/ghostwriter, the infamous Tucker Max.

“I know that everyone is focused on defendant Haddish, but she didn’t do this alone. The publisher, Simon & Schuster has a questionable history – they, among other things, enabled Milos Yiannopoulos after he was banned from twitter for racist hate speech against comedian Leslie Jones. Simon & Schuster’s parent company is CBS who continues to settle lawsuits for a pattern of bad behavior by executives.

This June, featured artists from collaborating stop-motion animation studios such as LAIKA, HouseSpecial, ShadowMachine and Tippett Studio will share their craft, career stories and timeless art form June 20-22 at the Lake Oswego Festival of the Arts. The featured exhibit is co-curated by MOSMA (Museum of Stop Motion Animation) and Tiffany Schuster.

Animation: From Script to Screen – While often associated with iconic films like ParaNorman, Kubo and the Two Strings, The Nightmare Before Christmas, Wendell and Wild and Guillermo del Toro’s Pinocchio, stop-motion has drawn in a new generation of fans and filmmakers. During this exhibit, you can meet animators, see scripts, storyboards and immerse yourself in maquettes and puppet fabrication, while learning about the four parts of the film process and technological advances.

Lake Oswego Festival of the Arts is presented by Lakewood Center for the Arts, a 501(c)(3) non-profit arts institution dedicated to providing arts education, performance and exhibition opportunities to the region. Its mission is to inspire and nurture a love of theatre and the arts.

Established in 1963, Lake Oswego Festival of the Arts attracts up to 30,000 visitors over the three day weekend. This event is free with a suggested donation, making it accessible to all. Shuttles will be available.

For more information about the overall mission and history of the festival, along with the other five exhibits being showcased this June, visit lakewood-center.org.