When University of Mississippi education majors have the opportunity to travel for field trips, Renee Hill-Cunningham wants to make sure there’s no student left behind.
That’s why the Ole Miss School of Education faculty member promised to give an estimated $250,000 of her estate back to the school and designated the money to cover expenses for students who lack the means to participate in learning-focused excursions.
With her planned gift, which the school will realize after her lifetime, the associate professor of mathematics education established the Michael and Renee Cunningham Experiential Learning Endowment.
The idea originated when a student explained to the professor 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, inoculations and more.
“If these students are working and trying to pay for school themselves, they’ve probably not traveled much in their lives. They are exactly who needs to be going on these trips,” said Cunningham who began to consider: “How are we going to help them? What capacity do we need to provide so they can take advantage of this opportunity for experiential education?”
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. He would tell this story about how the priest found out Michael had never seen the ocean,” Cunningham recalled. “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. 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. The transformation of being able to understand the world outside your own neighborhood was so powerful,” she said.
School of Education Dean David Rock expressed gratitude for his faculty member’s vision for the future.
“I am truly honored by the special gift created by Dr. Renee Cunningham to provide support for impactful and meaningful experiential trips for School of Education students,” the dean said. “Her desire to create an endowment to enhance the educational experience for our students and honor her late husband Michael is inspirational. Dr. Cunningham is passionately dedicated and committed to student learning!”
In planning her testamentary gift, “I kept going back to what was important to Michael and me. 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. Michael was such a big part of that,” she said. “I wanted to honor him, his belief in children and how he bought into the benefits of travel and experiences for kids.”
During her time on the UM faculty, Cunningham partnered with microbiologist Erik Hom, UM associate professor of biology, to design a science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) class that took education and biology students into the field — 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. So, we went to some really cool places and collected microbes,” Cunningham said.
“My part of the planning was to provide experiences where the kids would see different cultures,” she continued, adding that education students especially need to see such differences because classrooms are composed of kids with vastly disparate backgrounds.
At Ole Miss, the professor 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 UM undergrads to teach math to children. 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 childrens’ attention and imagination.
“How do you teach children what math is? You have to show them. It has to be visible. They have to be able to touch it and move it,” she said, exuding enthusiasm for her chosen profession.
Cunningham grew up in Dover, Delaware, the daughter of Ole Miss alumni. She earned a master’s degree in curriculum and instruction in 2003 from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. She previously earned a BA in psychology and later an EdD from the same university.
In addition to teaching 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 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,” Cunningham 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.”
For more information about supporting the School of Education, contact Kelly Smith Marion, director of development, at ksmith13@olemiss.edu or 662-915-2007.
To learn more about methods for including the university in estate plans, contact Marc Littlecott, advancement director for estate and planned giving, at marcplan@olemiss.edu or 662-915-6625.
By Bill Dabney/UM Foundation