Huston named SGA Professor of the Year in Education and Health Sciences
MINOT, N.D. – Mary Huston, originally from Libby, Mont., lived in a number of states before eventually settling in Minot, where she is now an assistant professor of communication disorders at Minot State.
“I left Libby when I was an adult and moved literally coast to coast: Boston and New York, St. Louis, Kansas City, and Seattle,” Huston said. “Then I moved to eastern Montana where I was getting speech services for my daughter, and decided that I wanted to be a speech pathologist, so I came to Minot for the undergrad and master’s programs.”
After graduating with her Master’s degree in 2009, Huston worked in Ellendale, N.D., before returning to Minot as an instructor in 2016. Huston recently caught the attention of students at Minot State. The Student Government Association appointed her Professor of the Year for the College of Education and Health Sciences.
Huston focuses on making sure students have a perspective of the material beyond just raw information.
“I work hard in making what I teach meaningful and helping students connect the information,” Huston said. “Some of the classes I teach are complicated courses, anatomy and physiology, and speech and hearing science, but I try to make it real for them and put some of myself into what I’m teaching – make it engaging and applicable and doable.”
Part of making her courses feasible is understanding students’ situations.
“While there are requirements for my class, I recognize that the students are people and they have lots of things going on. My class is not the only class they have. I try very hard to keep it real – maybe it’s because I have that perspective of being a student myself,” she said.
Huston is currently working on her doctorate degree.
“I’m doing my Ph.D. through UND, so I actually go down to Bismarck two weekends every semester for every class and the rest of it is online, so it gets complicated,” Huston said.
Her studies compliment her approach as an instructor.
“My focus on research has been engaged teaching and learning – building that connection with students and helping students retain information,” Huston said. “That’s a lot of what I do – just connecting with people, helping them be the best them they can be. That’s the goal whether it’s my client or my students. I want them to be successful.”
Huston has gone beyond instructing and has contributed to the field of speech therapy by creating five IPad apps for speech therapists.
“One of them is an assessment-type app. One of them is designed for a specific therapeutic technique for phenology disorder, a sound system disorder. With that one the therapist is beside the client helping them manipulate it, but it’s engaging for the client,” Huston said. “It doesn’t replace the therapist but it definitely makes things a little bit easier.”
Students who graduate with a degree in communication disorders have a variety of career paths they can pursue.
“You can do just about anything. Work with literally any population – from premature babies in the NICU (infant intensive care unit) that need special care with feeding or cognitive development, all the way through great-grandpas at the nursing home who need some help with memory care,” she said. “We have specialists on campus that do concussion recovery and traumatic brain injury (treatment). We have feeding specialists. We have stuttering specialists. We have speech and language. In basically every aspect of it that involves a person, we can do something.”
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| Published: 09/21/18 |
