February 2020
THE COLLEGE INSIDER
NEWS ABOUT FACULTY, STAFF, AND STUDENTS OF
THE UNIVERSITY OF ARIZONA COLLEGE OF EDUCATION
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Karina Salazar named a Forbes 2019 College Admission Influencer
Congratulations to Higher Education Assistant Professor
Karina Salazar
on being named a
2019 College Admission Influencer
by
Forbes
. Salazar was nominated for her research work that analyzes whether the enrollment management practices of public universities undermine access for underserved student populations.
"Each [nominee], in their way, is turning a critical eye to the policies and practices in admission and encouraging educators to consider new approaches and to challenge long-standing structures."
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David Yaden elected vice president of the Literacy Research Association
Professor
David Yaden
is the newly elected vice president of the
Literacy Research Association
, a non-profit organization and community of scholars dedicated to promoting research that enriches the knowledge, understanding, and development of lifespan literacies in a multicultural and multilingual world. Yaden will subsequently serve as president-elect in 2021 and president of LRA in 2022.
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College of Education Educational Leadership alumni recognized as 2019 40 under 40 honorees
As principal of
Marana High School
, Mandel has diligently worked to develop and create an inclusive school culture represented by a clear and compelling vision for the school’s community:
Empower students to engage in our community and innovate in their world
.
Currently the host and producer of Arizona 360,
Arizona Public Media
's statewide public affairs program, Rivera has spent her career reporting on key issues in Southern Arizona, including border relations with Mexico, gun rights, education funding, the opioid crisis and immigration.
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Letty Molina-Gutierrez wins 2019-2020 NACADA UA Excellence in Academic Advising Award
Congratulations to Senior Academic Advisor
Letty Molina-Gutierrez
on winning the 2019-2020
NACADA
UA Excellence in Academic Advising Award in the Emerging Professional category. This award is given annually to only one advisor at The University of Arizona for those who have less than three years of direct advising experience.
Molina-Gutierrez also went on to be named the NACADA Winner of Region 10 Excellence in Advising - New Advisor.
We are so proud of you, Letty, and are so lucky to have you as an advocate for our students! Thank you for all of your hard work and dedication to the college.
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Michelle Aguilera awarded Maria Teresa Velez Marshall Foundation Dissertation Fellowship Award
Congratulations to TLS doctoral student Michelle Aguilera on winning the Dr. Maria Teresa Velez Marshall Foundation Dissertation Fellowship Award for the 2020-2021 academic year.
This award is given annually to graduate students who, through their teaching, research, or outreach and service, has demonstrated a commitment to furthering diversity in education, higher education, and the community at large. The working title of Aguilera's dissertation is
Language socialization, linguistic agency, and the verbal play of young children
.
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Learn how to share your news and research across the country through
The Conversation
The University of Arizona recently joined a number of the nation's most prestigious universities as a member of
The Conversation
, an independent, not-for-profit news source committed to communicating the work of scholars. The Conversation makes all of its articles available at no charge to news organizations and
The Associated Press
distributes the articles to newsrooms across the country.
To date, more than 40 faculty members and researchers affiliated with the University have published a total of 52 articles on The Conversation, garnering more than 1.76 million reads cumulatively. The following are a few recent examples:
You can see all of the articles and authors
here
.
To help our scholars better understand the process and learn how to get involved, The Conversation will visit the College of Education on Tuesday, February 4 at 10 a.m. in the Worlds of Words (room 453). Faculty, researchers and communicators are encouraged to attend a session at their college or any other.
Learn more about The Conversation
.
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Cultivate leadership with the American Association for University Women
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Tucson Electric Power to Invest $25,000 in Solar Energy at the Cooper Center
Last month,
TEP
announced they will invest $25,000 to develop a solar-powered learning resource at the
Cooper Center for Environmental Learning
, also known as “Camp Cooper.” The new system will help power the camp while serving as a centerpiece for lessons about renewable energy. This gift will help to educate and inspire the next generation on the importance of solar energy and the wise use of energy in all forms.
"Our vision for the future of facilities at Camp Cooper," explains director
Colin Waite
, "is to develop them as a sustainable model of how to live more lightly on the planet and in harmony with natural systems. What better place for us to begin this new phase of development than to address how we power our learning center?"
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AWARDSS program welcomes new 2020 cohort
The Access, Wellness and Relational Determinants of Student Success program welcomed their 2020 cohort this January! The AWARDSS training program provides students with mentored experiences in conducting research relevant to U.S. education, designed to increase participation of underrepresented students in doctoral studies. The AWARDSS 2020 fellows spent time orienting themselves to the program by designing research questions that highlight the many strengths and considerable needs of surrounding communities. Fellows visited agencies and schools right here in Tucson and Nogales, Arizona. They also immersed themselves in the educational and cultural components of the Tohono O’odham Nation.
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Native graduate students deliver presentations about oral traditions
In December, students from Associate Professor
Sheilah Nicholas
’ spring 2019 course TLS 642:
Oral Traditions Across Societies
presented their final projects to Native American students at the university’s
Native American Student Affairs
. Graduate student presenters were Cynthia Ryman-Japanese Ikebana (presented
Connecting Heaven, Earth and Humanity
); Sarah Entrada—Mis Quince Años (presented
Finding Myself
); Lynn Tchida (presented
“Storying” Beadwork: An Indigenous Oral Tradition
); Cecilia Serrano (presented
Dichos Mexicanos/Mexican Proverbs
); Reena Joseph (presented
The Sacred and Ancient Tradition of Yoga
); Alaa Shakoori Mohammed (presented
Arabic Poetry as Oral Tradition
); and Kelly Strachen (presented
Chaco Culture
). A NASA Faculty Fellow, this event was one of Nicholas’ Faculty Fellow projects.
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with Associate Professor Sheilah Nicholas
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Pathways to Teaching program begins this semester
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KGUN visits Worlds of Words to talk about WOW Teen Reading Ambassadors
Veronika Vernachio
of
KGUN 9
visited
Worlds of Words
to talk about the
WOW Teen Reading Ambassadors
pilot program that offers high school students a college experience at The University of Arizona. Vernachio spoke with WOW Associate Director
Rebecca Ballenger
and local high school student Gregory Medina-Kenyon about the program. Medina-Kenyon, who helped start the program in 2018, was recently accepted into Stanford University and says he “owes a part of it to the WOW program.”
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Faculty and student presentations
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Desiree Vega and students present at AERO Annual Meeting
Associate Professor
Desiree Vega
and her students co-presented a poster titled
Examining the role of Arizona’s English-only legislation on English Language Learners’ (ELL) placement in special education
at the
Arizona Educational Research Organization
Annual Meeting in Tempe, Arizona on December 6, 2019. Student co-presenters included Alaina Puff, César Villalobos, Lauren Howard, and Dylan Barton.
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Desiree Vega, César Villalobos, and Alaina Puff
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Maintaining student enrollment through meaningful student-faculty relationships
Assistant Professor of Practice
Matt Ostermeyer
traveled to Queenstown, NZ to present at the
Australia and New Zealand Association for Leisure Studies
Conference in mid-December last year. His presentation, titled
Pairing a Recreation Programming Course with Student Retention Initiatives
, focused on research that indicates students who have meaningful relationships with faculty outside the classroom are more likely to maintain enrollment.
To develop meaningful student-faculty relationships outside of the classroom, the University of Arizona developed and supports a program called
Faculty Fellows
. It is a group of 55 dedicated faculty who are placed in dorms and cultural/resource centers across campus. The three overarching program goals include: 1) Foster students' connection to UArizona as a whole, 2) Help make a large school feel much smaller, and 3) Create avenues for student-faculty relationship building.
A partnership was recently forged between the Faculty Fellows program and an academic course called TLS 355: Planning Community Events and Recreation Programs. Each student group in the course is paired with a Faculty Fellow at the beginning of the semester and assists them in planning, executing, and evaluating an event in their assigned campus site.
The partnership has afforded the individual Fellows additional support to put on higher quality events for the students at their sites. Additionally, the Faculty Fellow program gains access to meaningful evaluation data, because it is a required piece of the enrolled students’ project. Likewise, the students in the class benefit from having access to an established budget, built-in target audience, and feeling like they are a part of an overarching campus initiative.
Ostermeyer’s presentation explored the successes and struggles of this specific partnership from an instructor and Faculty Fellow perspective, with hopes of spurring ideas for applications and potential, similar partnerships at the attendees’ own institutions.
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Ed Leadership students present at UCEA 2019 Annual Convention
Last November, Assistant Professor
DeMarcus Jenkins
invited a group of students to present at the
University Council for Educational Administration 2019 Annual Convention
. This was the largest group of students from the program who attended UCEA in several years. Some of the presenting students included Angela Cruze, Jessica Bernal-Mejia, Kent Thompson, Madiha Imran, and Tamela Thomas. They each presented on a variety of issues within the field of educational leadership.
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Ron Marx shares college career experiences as part of Education Review
Acquired Wisdom
series
“This collection began with an invitation to one of the editors,
Sigmund Tobias
, from Norman Shapiro, a former colleague at the
City College of New York
. Shapiro invited retired CCNY faculty members to prepare manuscripts describing what they learned during their college careers that could be of value to new appointees and former colleagues. It seemed to us that a project describing the experience of internationally known and distinguished researchers in educational psychology and educational research would be of benefit to many colleagues, especially younger ones entering those disciplines. We included senior scholars in the fields of adult learning and training because, although often neglected by educational researchers, their work is quite relevant to our fields and graduate students could find productive and gainful positions in that area.”
Marx, R. W. (2019). Feel free to fail once in a while: We all do! That's how we learn from life's lessons. Education Review, 26.
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A call to update policy, programming, and instruction for
emergent bilingual
learners
Saracho, O. (Ed.). (2020). Handbook of Research on the Education of Young Children. New York: Routledge, https://doi.org/10.4324/9780429442827
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The importance of learner-centered teaching in astronomy education
In an
AAS Nova article
about the book, Editor Susanna Kohler writes, “The authors of Astronomy Education, Volume 1 provide insight into many different aspects of learner-centered teaching, like how to create student buy-in, how to develop appropriate course materials, and how to measure the impact your teaching strategies are having.”
Impey, C. and Buxner, S. (2019). Astronomy Education, Volume 1: Evidence based instruction for introductory courses. doi:10.1088/2514-3433/ab2b42
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Research finds that restrictions on U.S.-China collaborations could undermine research without enhancing security
Early last month, Professor
Jenny J. Lee
and Higher Education doctoral student John Haupt published the results of their research,
The China Threat and the Future of Global Science
, in
Scientific American
. Their findings, “indicate that the “China threat” narrative oversimplifies a complex reality. U.S. policies that restrict research collaboration with China will mostly undermine U.S. productivity and growth. Curbing scientific production to the interests of the U.S. might yield some immediate “benefits” (i.e., national security, global competition, etc.), but maintaining or increasing research collaboration would yield other, and perhaps greater, benefits for the U.S.’s role as a leading global knowledge producer as well as advancing global science.”
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Addressing the teacher evaluation process
In the policy brief, Lavigne and Good argue that the most commonly used practices to evaluate teachers have not improved teaching and learning in U.S. schools. They have not done so because these approaches are problematic, including the failure to adequately account for context, complexity, and variation of teacher effectiveness and practice. With these limitations in mind, the authors provide recommendations for policy and practice, including the elimination of high-stakes teacher evaluation and a greater emphasis on formative feedback, allowing more voice to teachers and underscoring that improving instruction should be at least as important as evaluating instruction.
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Send in your news for the next
College Insider
!
We'd love to promote your news related to events, publications,
presentations, awards, and more. Click the link below to submit.
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Student Spotlight
Name
: Makenna Clark
Major
: Literacy, Learning, and Leadership
Minor
: Educational Psychology
Graduation
: May 2020
Hometown
: Peoria, AZ (but my family now lives in Madison, WI)
Spirit Animal
: Giraffe
What led you to the University of Arizona College of Education?
I was interested in the University of Arizona College of Education because it seemed like a smaller tight knit community within a large university. I liked that I would see many of the same peers and professors within my classes, but also be exposed to a larger group once I stepped out of the college.
What have you learned in the College of Education that's made a difference to you?
Something that I learned in the college that has made a difference for me is the importance of mental health in schools. Many of my professors who taught classes for my educational psychology minor here have put an emphasis on making sure we take care of ourselves and they stress the importance of doing the same for our future students when we become educators.
Tell us about something you're involved with in the College of Education (or at the university) and how it's impacted your life.
On the college level, I am a peer mentor and a
student ambassador
and on the university level, I am a
resident assistant
in one of the dorms on campus. Being a peer mentor has made an impact in my life because I enjoy helping freshmen navigate the struggles of college and love celebrating their accomplishments with them.
What are your post-graduation plans as of now?
As of now, my plans are to go to graduate school to pursue a master’s in school counseling. I want to be a school counselor, so this is the right next step for me.
What advice do you have for students just getting started in the college?
My advice is to enjoy every moment of college and to make the most of it. Getting involved on campus helped me a lot and it made me feel like I had others to rely on when I needed support.
What is your favorite spot on campus and why?
My favorite spot on campus is the mall because you can always find a place to sit and relax. You can always find people enjoying life there and I love seeing the joy it brings to them.
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