Many of the awards and scholarship funds at the University of Minnesota are established to honor a truly inspiring person. But, a handful of these awards honor not just one person, but multiple people, and in some cases, the relationships between them. One such award, the “Best Friends” award is a perfect example.
Members of the Class of 1949, Margaret “Muggs” Virum and Irene Scatliff were both “A” students. Instead of competing against each other for the top score, however, their love for learning fueled an enduring friendship united by a mutual love of books, teaching, politics, and child education. After graduation, Virum taught for forty-nine years in the Minneapolis Public School System, and Scatliff moved to New Haven, Connecticut to work for the Gesell Child Development Institute. Their lives took different paths but the two friends stayed connected. Over the years, Irene and her family visited Margaret’s classrooms frequently.
An insatiable passion for literacy was at the core of Irene and Margaret’s friendship. Even though Irene never returned to live in Minneapolis, Margaret made Irene a lifelong subscriber to the Minneapolis Star Tribune. They read the same columnists, loved and hated the same politicians, and enjoyed the same comics. They collaborated by reading and talking about the news together and then reflecting upon how current affairs might affect the lives of children. Irene and Margaret loved discussing educational policies and the latest news from Margaret’s elementary school and the Minneapolis school system. Their relationship never diminished, despite their geographic distance; their long distance phone calls would often creep into the wee hours of morning.
Irene’s hope in establishing a way to honor her best friend Margaret (formerly called the Virum Award), and now the Scatliff Family in creating the “Best Friends” Fund, is to support collegiality among future educators in the same manner Irene and Margaret practiced with one another throughout their lives as educators. The Scatliff family believes that by encouraging collaboration, future teachers can be inspired to seek greatness in the classroom. Through small grants to future educators, the hope is that the “Best Friends” Fund will inspire other future educators to further childhood literacy through collaborative efforts and their own singular endeavors.
This year’s awards offer future early childhood education and elementary preservice teachers, enrolled in CI 5413 Foundations of Reading the opportunity to review the Margaret Virum collection, write about what they learn, and collaborate with a colleague who also reviews the collection. Each winner receives $250 designated for the purchase of books and electronic texts created for early childhood education and elementary age-level students, allowing future teachers the ability to create the beginning of a strong classroom library. Ms. Virum left a lasting legacy of her passion for teaching in the form of student work and materials from lessons, scrapbooks that document life in her classroom each year she taught, and her own reflections in the form of personal journals. The materials have been cataloged and are housed in a special collection in the Curriculum and Instruction Library. This year’s recipients enjoyed a ceremony at the Red Balloon Bookshop in St. Paul.
2014 Recipients:
Kirsten Ptak
Zach Steigauf
Annie Fischer
Angela Madison
Alexandra Richardson
Jill Houghton
Bertha Ortiz
Jennifer Rose Martin
Christine Sack
Courtney Zellmer
The course, CI 5413: Foundations of Reading is a requirement of the Elementary Education Foundations program. To learn more about Elementary Education Foundations, please visit the program’s webpage. To learn more about scholarships and awards available, please visit CEHD’s Scholarships and Awards page.
