CSUDH News

The primary source of news and information about California State University, Dominguez Hills, its students, faculty, and staff.

Child Development

CSUDH to Bolster Racially Diverse Educators with $22 Million Gift from Ballmer Group

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Teacher doing building activity with young children.

The historic gift marks the largest donation ever given to CSUDH.

More than 1,000 new teachers of preschool and early elementary school grades will start work in the Golden State over the next six years thanks to two new programs being launched at CSUDH, following a transformative gift announced today.

Ballmer Group is committing a historic $22 million to CSUDH over six years, marking the largest donation ever given to the university. The majority of the gift will fund scholarships for students through the university’s Toros Teach L.A. program, which will help address California’s severe shortage of early childhood educators by preparing, graduating, and placing culturally competent, racially diverse teachers and leaders in schools across the Los Angeles region.

“This program, supported by a generous gift from Ballmer Group, will have an outstanding impact on communities with a high need for credentialed preschool and early childhood educators,” said CSUDH President Thomas A. Parham.

“It will support communities of color by creating a pipeline of teachers working and staying in the area, and improve those educators’ ability to create positive outcomes for their students through the use of culturally competent pedagogies.”

California’s early education workforce faces a serious shortfall of teachers, with some estimates putting the need at nearly 10,000 educators as the state expands access to transitional kindergarten to all 4-year-olds by the 2025-26 school year. CSUDH’s Toros Teach L.A. program will include two initiatives to address this need: Early Childhood Excellence and Black Educator Excellence. Through these, the university will build equity-embedded credentials, help districts recruit and support their Black educators and all educators of Black children, and enable educators to forge successful teaching careers with less debt and improved career retention.

“We are excited to work with Ballmer Group toward educating and mentoring culturally responsive teachers for the preschool-3rd grade classrooms of the Los Angeles region,” said Jessica Zacher Pandya, dean of the College of Education at CSUDH. “With this generous gift, we can offer this training to more future teachers, who can then serve the communities they come from while helping to alleviate this critical need for the state.”

The grant supports scholarships for up to 1,200 students, allowing them to earn bachelor’s degrees and PK-3 or K-8 teaching credentials. The program also includes training and upskilling for current teachers, including new units needed for the PK-3 credential once it becomes available and certificate coursework for current teachers who want to improve their ability to teach ethnically diverse learners.

“This significant, impactful gift accelerates our rollout of the new PK-3 credential, while also fostering a diverse pool of future educators,” said Mi-Sook Kim, dean of CSUDH’s College of Health, Human Services and Nursing, which houses the Department of Child Development. “Our Child Development program will also support current teachers looking to upgrade their learning and earn a new credential to progress in their career.”

Ballmer Group’s grant to CSUDH was paired with a gift of $11 million to California State University, Long Beach, to support similar programs on that campus.

“Early education is a game-changer for giving kids a fair shot in school and life,” said Kim Pattillo Brownson, Director of Strategy and Policy for Ballmer Group. “Teachers are vital to this work, and CSUDH and CSULB will now be able to support LA’s future early educators through scholarships, degree programs, and partnerships to support our children’s learning.”

Connie and Steve Ballmer co-founded Ballmer Group in 2015 to focus on improving economic mobility and opportunity for children and families in the United States who are disproportionately likely to remain in poverty. Ballmer Group directs its philanthropy to help ensure that a person thrives through a healthy birth and stable family, a safe childhood and adolescence, a good education, and a career that can support a family.

Education Students Create Books for Local Children

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Five children holding hands, a bumble bee on a sunflower, and a sheep and her lamb.
Illustrations from CSUDH students’ books. Clockwise, from top My Friends are My Teachers, written by Danica Sundholm, illustrated by Megan Cooper; First Day Butterflies, written by Estefany Santos, illustrated by Santos and Oscar Sandoval; Why Can’t I, written by Ashley Lopez, illustrated by Rosario Lopez.

Students in the College of Education’s (COE) Early Language and Literacy LBS 310 course do more than study how children’s books contribute to early childhood literacy. By the time the course is over, students have written and illustrated their own books. It’s all part of CSUDH’s Project CYCLE: Crafting Young Children’s Literary Experiences, which brings the university and local community closer together.

The goal of Project CYCLE is to provide the young children and families of CSUDH’s  Infant/Toddler Center, Child Development Center, and the surrounding community with books to read at home. It also gives the teachers-in-training hands-on experience in creating useful early literacy materials.

The project was conceived by Conrad Oh-Young, assistant professor of special education, and stems from his days as a classroom teacher. “We were always looking for different ways to help parents work with their children outside of school,” recalls Oh-Young.

“One way was to provide books for families, but money was limited, as you can imagine. We couldn’t purchase books for families, nor could we legally make copies of the books we had. So, the alternative was to somehow create our own books.”

In fall 2019, his first semester at CSUDH, Oh-Young presented the idea to his COE faculty colleagues. They shaped the idea into a practical proposal, then applied for initial funding through the university’s Instructionally Related Activities (IRA) Grants and Faculty Association Legacy Fund. They continue to be funded through the university’s IRA grants.

Jen Stacy, associate professor of liberal studies, has been one of the driving forces behind the project since its inception. She sees the course as a way for students to recognize how social realities and circumstances are reflected in early literacy materials.

“It’s important that the books children read reflect their identities. It’s important that folks from different backgrounds and languages are visible,” says Stacy says Stacy, who credits fellow Project CYCLE collaborator, Assistant Professor of Liberal Studies Amina Humphrey for helping students develop a critical framework for assessing and interacting with children’s books.

“We connect these issues to the course content, then we charge the soon-to-be teachers with that,” explains Stacy. “One day, they’re going to have to create curriculum, and children’s books are a great way to start thinking about being culturally inclusive. What can you create that reflects either your life or someone that you’re close to, or something that’s important and matters to you? It’s a great way to get students to really incorporate these ideas into their studies.”

In the four semesters that Project CYCLE has been integrated in Early Language and Literacy LBS 310, approximately 240 students (60 each semester) have written and self-published one book. Students have been enthusiastic about the results.

Kimmiesha Perryman, a child development major who graduated in 2021, wrote a book called The Chocolate Princess, dedicated to children with darker skin tones. “My point was to identify the differences but to also develop an appreciation of it on all sides,” she says. “I wanted to show children that we may all look different, but we’re all still human–and beauty comes in all shades.”

“When I first received my copy of the book, I was super excited!” she continues. “Being able to hold a copy of a published book that I wrote was great. This project was exciting because I’ve always thought about writing children’s books. It has definitely helped show me that I want to be an author.”

For Francisco Gonzales, writing his book was a chance to draw on his own experiences in the punk rock community and share them with kids. His book, Punk Rock Jav, is about a young punk rocker who is constantly criticized. “My book shows that he’s not what people say about him,” says Gonzales, who graduated in 2021 with his bachelor’s degree in liberal studies and his multiple subject credential. “For example, he’s told that he’s lazy, but my book tells how he works hard on the things he’s interested in, like skateboarding.”

The program has expanded over the years, and now provides materials for CSUDH JumpStart–a service program which pairs college students with preschools in under-served communities.

“We’re really excited about our collaboration,” says CSUDH JumpStart Director Jessica Ramirez. “They donated 250 books, which we were able to then give to our JumpStart students and partners. Now they can start their own library at home! We also gifted the preschool teachers some books to help replenish their classroom libraries.”

During the Fall 2021 semester alone, Project CYCLE distributed 200 books to the CSUDH Children’s Center and 250 to JumpStart. In August 2022, approximately 160 books were given to the community-based Preschool Without Walls program that meets on campus, with another 50 waiting to be distributed.

The program will be undergoing some changes for the 2022-2023 academic year. Rather than a class, Project CYCLE will be held as a series of workshops each semester. Stacy hopes that this new format will help open the program to graduate and post-baccalaureate students as well. Stacy and her colleagues would also like to integrate bilingual teachers and students into the program and bring in more external funding. Doing so would enable them to host literacy festivals, author or artist meet-and-greets, and even create a mini library of student-authored books.

“We have big dreams,” says Stacy. “Hopefully, we can continue to find the funding sources to be able to accomplish them. We would love to have Project CYCLE woven throughout our programs, and to have students at all levels involved. We’re going to use this year to try to figure that out, and we’re excited at what the future has in store for us!”

Irene Tung Earns Visionary Grant for Pregnancy Research

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Irene Tung
Photo credit: Julie Graeper, University of Pittsburgh

Assistant Professor of Psychology Irene Tung has been awarded a Visionary Grant from the American Psychological Foundation in the amount of $19,979. The grant, which seeks to support research that uses psychology to solve social problems, will fund Tung’s pilot study of emotional health and stress physiology during pregnancy for one year.

Tung, who joined the CSUDH faculty in January 2022, began researching the impacts of early life stress on children’s development while earning her doctorate in clinical psychology at the University of California, Los Angeles. As she advanced throughout graduate school, she became interested in earlier developmental stages and how adverse experiences affect young children’s behaviors and perceptions.

“When you follow these kids earlier and earlier in development, you see that even from early childhood they may differ a lot from other kids in how they react to stress,” Tung said. “They may be more reactive to situations than other kids, and stressful events may contribute to vulnerability to risky behaviors later on in development.”

As Tung pursued her research, her findings suggested that some of those differences may originate even before birth. She began to see associations between prenatal exposures to stress and children’s early emotional outcomes – connections she wants to explore more through her Visionary Grant-funded research.

Her project, titled “Leveraging Mobile Health Technology to Monitor Daily Emotional Health and Stress Physiology During Pregnancy,” will assess pregnant women’s daily physiological responses to stress by tracking their heart rate variability and electrodermal activity with a wrist-worn device. The study will also examine daily positive emotional supports the women receive, and how these emotions can help regulate stress.

“Research in the general population has shown that emotions like joy, gratitude, and social connectedness can help with buffering stress and are linked to positive health outcomes,” Tung said. “But current interventions to support pregnant women tend to focus more on the physical or biological aspects of pregnancy. I’m hoping this study will emphasize the importance of psychological health and the way it interacts with physiology.”

A strong proponent of early prevention, Tung ultimately wants to pinpoint what factors help pregnant women build resilience, as she believes this will lead to better outcomes for both the women themselves and their children’s future development.

But for now, Tung is focused on rolling up her sleeves, setting up her new CSUDH research lab, and getting started on the project.

“I’m very excited to use this study as a training lab for undergraduate and graduate students,” she said. “I’m hoping it will provide opportunities for students interested in the prenatal and early childhood periods to start some of their own projects, as well.”