Carol Yvonne Adams Swinyar
1951
-
Carol Swinyar,
a singer and pianist with an avid interest in elementary music education, has
been a music teacher and administrator for over 35 years. She has taught from
pre-school through the college and university levels and from coast to coast in
the U.S. mainland, as well as in Alaska and Hawaii. She is now semi-retired and
resides in Chino Valley, Arizona.
Carol was born in Walla
Walla, Washington, one of four daughters born to Marie Jenkins and Earl Adams.
Her parents were teachers in the Adventist school system and she lived no more
than three years in any one place while growing up, residing in the West,
Midwest, Southeast, and the East as well as Iran.
Her mother, who had graduated
in 1951 from Walla Walla College, now University, with a B.A. in voice, played
piano and saxophone and her father also sang and played piano and trombone.
Carol grew up surrounded and immersed in music activity and, at age five, while
her parents were teaching in Iran, started taking piano lessons from Dorothy
Oster, a fellow missionary.
While piano lessons continued
with a number of teachers as her parents moved frequently, she particularly
enjoyed her study in Baltimore, Maryland, with Hattie Thompson, an older
teacher who took an interest in her and encouraged her in her music study. By
the time she was in fifth grade, she was accompanying her mother's choirs and
other musicians.
Carol also began singing and
in her freshman year at Jefferson Academy in Texas, she started and sang in a
girls' trio. From then on, she sang in several groups throughout her academy
years. She also learned to play the clarinet so that she could be a member of
the band.
Carol attended another
academy before graduating from Highland View Academy in 1969. In addition to
her mother, Cecil Lemon at Greater Baltimore Academy and Gerald Ferguson, her
first voice teacher at HVA, were important inspirational teachers during her
academy years.
She began serious study in
voice with Dorothy Ackerman in her first year at Southern Missionary College,
now Southern Adventist University. Ackerman would not only be her primary voice
teacher in her college years, but would also become her mentor and close
personal friend. Carol completed a B.Mus.Ed. in 1973, with voice and piano as her performance areas.
By the time she graduated
from SMC, she had married trumpeter Gary Swinyar,
also a music education graduate. In the following years, as they moved to
accommodate his career as a band director and eventually an administrator, she
filled her role as a mother to two children and taught as a freelance music
teacher. For fourteen years, she gave private lessons in piano and voice,
taught pre-school and kindergarten music classes, and conducted church
children's choirs.
During those years she held
part-time music positions at Adventist church schools in Oregon, Florida,
Alaska, Hawaii, and Washington state. From 1994 to
1997, she taught as an itinerant music teacher in four Adventist schools in the
Seattle-Tacoma area and, in the last year, while still traveling between three
SDA schools, taught kindergarten music at four schools in the Sumner,
Washington, public school system.
Her work in Sumner led to a
full-time appointment in 1997 as an elementary K-6 music specialist teaching at
Liberty Ridge Elementary School in that community. For the next five years, she
filled a number of roles at LRES, including chairing the committee overseeing
assemblies, supervising a student teacher, and mentoring another.
In 2002 she joined her
husband, who, a year earlier had accepted a position as principal of the Ruth
Murdoch Elementary School in Berrien Springs, Michigan, and started work on a
master's degree in education at Andrews University. While doing graduate study,
she team-taught an upper division class at AU to general education majors on
integrating the arts and movement into the elementary school curriculum.
Additionally, she taught K-6 music in the Boynton Montessori Magnet School and
in the Martin Luther King Elementary school in Benton Harbor. She completed an M.Ed. in curriculum and instruction in 2004.
The Swinyars
moved to South Lancaster, Massachusetts, in 2004, where he became
superintendent of education for the Southern New England Conference and she
began working in the Thayer Performing Arts Center, a community music school
associated with Atlantic Union College. She initially taught general music to
children ages three and four, class piano to children ages five to eight and
adults, and served as TPAC assistant director for two years before becoming its
director, a position she held from 2006 to 2011.
She was also an adjunct
faculty member at AUC, where she taught music education classes to music
majors. In 2007 she started an ongoing apprentice teacher program at Browning
Memorial Elementary School in which college music education students taught
music under her mentorship and supervision. In 2011 the Swinyars
relocated to the Gulf States Conference, where he served as superintendent of
education until his retirement in December 2013, and she as a volunteer in elementary
schools as they traveled in the conference.
Swinyar is a certified Kodaly Educator and has
completed Orff Schuwerk at levels I and II. Because
of her extensive training and experience in elementary music teaching, she is
passionate about the importance of mentoring pre-service and in-service music
teachers and developing and maintaining an effective music curriculum for the
elementary level. She wrote "Music - You Can Teach It!" for
the Journal of Adventist Education, an article published in the
October/November 2008 issue.
She served as coordinator of
the Atlantic Union Conference Music Development Curriculum Committee in 2005
and, since 1993, has made numerous presentations in conventions, seminars,
forums, and workshops in Alaska, Hawaii, Washington state,
Michigan, Tennessee, and New England on teaching, leadership, congregational
singing, and other topics.
While living in So.
Lancaster, Swinyar proposed that a music ministries
director be established by the Southern New England Conference and then was
chosen to fill the volunteer position once it had been created. As part of her
work in that area, she published The Singing Church, available at: http://www.sneconline.org/article.php?id=88
ds/2013
Sources:
Emails, 11 November 2008; 6 June 2010, 1 May 2012; Biographical Information Sheet
and Resume provided by the subject, 25 November 2008.