In her office at the UM School of Education, Renee Hill-Cunningham shows off some of the weighted dolls she created to teach children math concepts. Photo by Bill Dabney/UM Foundation
University of Mississippi professor’s gift to underwrite field trips, study-away opportunities for students
When University of Mississippi education majors have opportunities to travel for field trips, Renee Hill-Cunningham wants to make sure there’s no student left behind.
That’s why the Ole Miss faculty member promised to give an estimated $250,000 of her estate back to the School of Education and designated the money to cover expenses for students who lack the means to participate in learning-focused excursions. The planned gift establishes the Michael and Renee Cunningham Experiential Learning Endowment.
The idea originated when a student explained to the associate professor of mathematics education that even if she could get a scholarship to cover the published cost of a trip, she wouldn’t be able to afford associated costs, such as transportation to the airport, extra clothes for an extended stay, passports, power converters and inoculations.
“If these students are working and trying to pay for school themselves, they’ve probably not traveled much in their lives,” Cunningham said. “They are exactly who needs to be going on these trips.”
The professor’s late husband, Michael Cunningham – whom the endowment tributes – also passionately believed in the transformative power that study-away trips have on students. One such adventure changed his own life.
“He grew up very poor and went to a parochial school on scholarship,” Cunningham said. “He would tell this story about how the priest found out Michael had never seen the ocean.
“The priest arranged to take Michael’s whole family to the Outer Banks, and it was life-changing for him.”
Cunningham has had a passion for making a difference in students’ lives for decades.
“I taught in high-poverty schools in Durham (North Carolina) and had students who had never seen the ocean and even more had never seen the mountains,” she said. “Almost all had never been to Washington, D.C.”
She developed a three-year plan for her students to see each of those places on annual field trips.
“That’s really where my understanding began of how travel changes people,” she said. “The transformation of being able to understand the world outside your own neighborhood was so powerful.”
David Rock, the school’s dean, expressed gratitude for his faculty member’s vision for the future.
“Her desire to create an endowment to enhance the educational experience for our students and honor her late husband, Michael, is inspirational,” Rock said. “Dr. Cunningham is passionately dedicated and committed to student learning.”
In planning her testamentary gift, Cunningham said she kept going back to what was important to her and her husband.
“We would pitch in and pay to cover expenses for kids who couldn’t pay and host fundraisers to make sure every child could go on my field trips,” she said. “Michael was such a big part of that. I wanted to honor him, his belief in children and how he bought into the benefits of travel and experiences for kids.”
Cunningham also partnered with microbiologist Erik Hom, UM associate professor of biology, to design a class that takes education and biology students into the field for two experiential trips to Hawaii and one to California.
“I wanted education students to see what real science looks like – that it’s not just sitting in a lab wearing a white coat,” she said. “So, we went to some really cool places and collected microbes.
“My part of the planning was to provide experiences where the kids would see different cultures.”
It’s important for education students to see such differences because classrooms are composed of kids with vastly disparate backgrounds, she explained.
At Ole Miss, Cunningham also created the Rebel Teacher Program, which gives student teachers an immersive experience with seasoned professionals to be better prepared for classrooms of their own.
However, her day-to-day responsibility involves preparing undergraduates to teach math. Shelves, tables and even the floor of her office in Guyton Hall are packed with blocks, eggs, pom-poms, colorful containers, dolls of different weights – anything that can capture children’s attention and imagination.
Cunningham, whose parents were Ole Miss alumni, grew up in Dover, Delaware. She earned three degrees from the University of North Carolina and has taught in many different elementary school classrooms. She also held curriculum and new-teacher mentoring positions and worked in the central office and at the state level in Raleigh, North Carolina.
Ultimately, she became a STEM coordinator at a high-poverty elementary school before accepting faculty positions at Ole Miss, first at the Tupelo regional campus and, three years later, in Oxford.
“With the STEM program, we focused on hands-on learning. With these children, who had never touched this stuff, it made them excited about science and math. They just ate it up,” she said. “I knew that was what would happen because I’d been working with kids for 20 years by that time.”
By “stuff,” she’s referring to kits from the Museum of Science in Boston full of educational tools – pullies, thermometers, flashlights and more – that children would use to solve engineering challenges while learning science and math concepts.
“These fourth and fifth graders would work together as a team to figure out problems. There were no behavior problems because they were all engaged, and they all came up with an answer,” the professor recalled. “How great was that for them to have success at something! It seems insignificant but it was a challenge for them and something they would never get from reading their textbooks.
“My philosophy of education was that I was not teaching them; I was providing them with an experience to allow them to learn.”
By Bill Dabney
