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CSUDH News

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

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Faculty Highlights: July-August 2020

August 13, 2020 By Paul Browning

Our faculty members participate in conferences around the world, conduct groundbreaking research, and publish books and journal papers that contribute to their field and highlight their expertise. We feature those accomplishments and more in this section. To share faculty news, email ucpa@csudh.edu.

College of Natural and Behavioral Sciences

Mathew JonesSharon Lanaghan, mathematics lecturer

Professor Matthew Jones, chair of the Mathematics Department, and mathematics lecturer Sharon Lanaghan have co-written the article “Building and Sustaining Success in Precalculus: A Multi-Pronged Approach” for the journal Primus. Their paper describes the rationale, implementation, and impact of the redesign of precalculus at CSUDH.

 

 

University Library

Carolyn Caffrey GardnerTess WithornCarolyn Caffrey Gardner, information literacy coordinator/liaison librarian, has co-edited the book “Hidden Architectures of Information Literacy Programs: Structures, Practices, and Contexts,” which features a chapter written by Gardner and Tess Withorn, librarian for the College of Health, Human Sciences and Nursing. Their piece focuses on CSUDH’s information literacy program titled, “California State University, Dominguez Hills: Revitalizing a Program from the Ground Up.”

 

Recent quotes and/or interviews in the media from faculty

Mara Lee Grayson, assistant professor of English

Mara Lee Grayson, assistant professor of English, was a featured educator in the EdWeek article “Five Ways to Use Music in Lessons.” Grayson’s topic focused on “using story songs to teach textual analysis.”

 

 

 

 

Michael Manahan, featured in WalletHub article "Best Business Cards."

“Credits cards are extremely important to small business owners, for two reasons. First, many B2B companies no longer offer traditional trade accounts to their customers. Now, it is common for all but the largest customers to have to pay by credit card for B2B services. Second, for many small businesses, credit cards are one of the few ways a business can obtain debt financing. Most banks no longer make small business loans but instead will give the business a high credit limit ($50,000 to $100,000) credit card. — Michael Manahan, professor of finance, was featured in the “Ask the Experts” section of the Wallethub article “Best Business Cards.”

 

 

 

CSUDH Professor’s New Book Set to Trigger Conversations on Race, Trauma

July 6, 2020 By Paul Browning

drawing of man with various trigger warning signs around him.
Illustration by Hillary Griffin.

The use of trigger warnings–brief statements informing students of potentially distressing or re-traumatizing content–in education have grown in popularity over the last decade, as educators attempt to engage students in controversial or sensitive topics without causing undue stress or anxiety. But do they really work? That’s the question that Mara Lee Grayson, CSUDH assistant professor of English, asks in her new book, “Race Talk in the Age of the Trigger Warning: Recognizing and Challenging Classroom Cultures of Silence.”

The conclusions she reaches may be surprising to some. “Most of the empirical psychological research demonstrates that it doesn’t help students deal with trauma or anxiety. Some studies have actually shown that trigger warnings have an ill effect,” says Grayson.

Mara Lee Grayson
Mara Lee Grayson, assistant professor of English, and author of ‘Race Talk in the Age of the Trigger Warning: Recognizing and Challenging Classroom Cultures of Silence.’

One of the main problems with trigger warnings, says Grayson, is “they’re just not effective. They’re not grounded in trauma psychology. They should be, and most people think that they are, but there’s a big difference between their conceptualization and their implementation. The ways that they’re used don’t generally fit with what we know about psychology and trauma.”

Grayson’s book is among the first to subject the idea of trigger warnings to rigorous research and study. “There’s not been a great deal of empirical research,” she says. “Trigger warnings rose up from Internet culture and became a thing in classrooms without really being studied.” She hopes that her book will serve as a starting point for more research and informed discussion.

As Grayson explains, the idea of trigger warnings arose from concepts about Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD). But “triggers are not necessarily predictable or consistent. It’s not as simple as someone who was sexually assaulted by a man is triggered by men or by discussions of sexual assault. It’s not as direct as that.”

“Triggers are actually very idiosyncratic. It might be a smell, it might be a particular sound,” says Grayson. “Because of that, they are incredibly difficult to predict.”

Also, not everyone deals with triggers in the same way, according to trauma psychologists. “There’s something called avoidance coping,” says Grayson. “That tends to be how many people deal with triggers – just by essentially avoiding anything that reminds them of the trauma. So in some ways you could argue that trigger warnings actually perpetuate that behavior.”

From Grayson’s perspective as a “racial literacy educator,” she finds another aspect of trigger warnings to be problematic. “The concept of the trigger warning is framed within a white, Western way of understanding trauma that doesn’t account for the ongoing nature of racial trauma. Based on my research, they tend to be used much more often in white spaces by white instructors. At the same time, among the most common topics that are prefaced with a trigger warning are racism and racial violence.”

“Essentially, they’re being used to preface racism or discussions and depictions of racism, but for whose benefit?” asks Grayson. “I would argue that they really cater not to the students who experience racism, because those students deal with racism every day, including in the classroom, and are more likely to have developed coping strategies. They’re actually for the benefit of white students, and in that way the trigger warning really caters to white fragility.”

Grayson describes what have been identified as “white fragility behaviors,” including defensiveness, withdrawal, opting out, and leaving the conversation. “The trigger warning tends to cater to white students, because it allows for behaviors white students already use during race talk,” she says. “The classroom space is already marginalizing to people of color, so even if the use of the trigger warning may help individual students, it doesn’t actually change anything on a structural level.”

One of Grayson’s goals with the book is to offer different, more concrete approaches that actually work in addressing student trauma and racism in the classroom.

She suggests that rather than assigning trigger notices to specific texts, professors include a “content note” in their syllabus, similar to those at the beginning of television shows. “If educators feel there really is something in their syllabus or in their classroom that’s going to be difficult for the students, framing it as a broader statement is a little more beneficial,” Grayson says. “Then, students know going in that they have to figure out the best way for themselves to engage throughout the semester, rather than finding a particular trigger warning for a particular text.”

As a writing instructor, one of Grayson’s main interests is examining how language is addressed in the classroom. How are students being encouraged to write? Are they being asked to use “standardized” English or are they allowed to use their own language practices? How much are their own stories invited into the classroom?

Grayson acknowledges that many professors find it culturally relevant to let students bring their own stories into the classroom. She wants her fellow educators to delve deeper into the matter, asking “How do we do that? Do we invite students to share their trauma? Because that can be very triggering, and it’s not exactly equitable for students to be pressured to share stories of trauma. Or do we ask students to write about the concept of trauma?”

To Grayson, the best solution is always giving students options. “Let students determine how they’re engaging. One of the things that I suggest is to really encourage the students to interrogate the concept that we are talking about, such as communication style, for example. What do you notice about the ways that we communicate? Even within their own personal communications, are there particular words that bother them? How do they react? Why might they react that way?” Inviting the students more into the conversation is the key to handling sensitive topics, she argues.

Grayson’s book is being released at a critical juncture for race relations in this country, and she believes it can add an important element of scholarship to the discussion. “We’re at a time right now where these conversations are happening on a large scale, in ways that to my knowledge haven’t happened as explicitly before, at least not in recent history. I think it gives us an opportunity to really get in the work, more broadly than just individually.”

“Educational institutions are one of the, if not the, primary ways that ideology is maintained within a society,” she adds. “We can put a new policy on top of a bad system, but it doesn’t change the system. If we really want to think about how our spaces are perpetuating the racism and white supremacy that we see throughout the country, then we have to do a lot more internal work that moves beyond things like implicit bias. It’s not about the individual. A trigger warning may be very helpful for one individual or multiple individuals. But in terms of addressing structural ills, it has not been shown to be effective.”

Anne Garrett Honored with Catherine H. Jacobs Outstanding Faculty Lecturer Award

June 11, 2020 By Paul Browning

For Anne Garrett, there is one skill that college graduates simply can not do without. “No matter what career someone goes into, it’s important that they be able to write competently,” she says.

That’s why the former composition professor in the interdisciplinary studies program at California State University, Dominguez Hills (CSUDH) devoted her career to developing those skills in her students. “Working on writing can be a vulnerable and delicate issue, but I’ve been continually amazed by my students’ receptivity. I feel my greatest strength is my ability to get through to students, which is drawn from my sensitivity to their backgrounds and needs.”

Anne Garrett honored this year with the Catherine H. Jacobs Outstanding Faculty Lecturer Award.
Retired Professor Anne Garrett has been honored with the Catherine H. Jacobs Outstanding Faculty Lecturer Award.

Garrett, who retired at the conclusion of the fall 2019 semester after 20 years at CSUDH, was honored this year with the Catherine H. Jacobs Outstanding Faculty Lecturer Award. The award recognizes faculty who demonstrate excellence in teaching effectiveness, and acknowledges the role non-tenure track lecturers play in student success and the campus community as a whole.

During her two decades at CSUDH, Garrett taught the Writing Adjunct course, an upper-division composition class which meets the university’s Graduate Writing Assessment Requirement (GWAR), as well as English 350, an advanced composition class. For many years, Garrett was also in charge of the GWAR program.

Much of Garrett’s connection with her students stemmed from the unique one-on-one nature of the Writing Adjunct tutorials. “Working one-on-one, you can tailor what you’re doing to what the person really needs,” she says. “Students always told me that I broke things down and made them seem simple, so that they could understand it.”

“A lot of people have negative feelings about writing, or they’ve been told they can’t write. We also have a lot of students for whom English isn’t their native language, so automatically that’s going to make writing more difficult for them.”

Garrett grew up in Berkeley, California. She received her bachelor’s degree in English at the University of California, Santa Barbara (UCSB), and attained her master’s at CSUDH, with a focus on composition and rhetoric. One of her mentors at CSUDH was the catalyst behind her entire teaching career.

“I never saw myself in a teaching role,” says Garrett. “I thought I was too shy to teach. But my mentor in the English Department, Larry Ferrario, called me after I graduated. He said that there was a job in the Department of Interdisciplinary Studies that he thought I would be good at.”

Ferrario knew the person running the program, and with the semester about to begin, it was crucial that they hire someone for the position. “I kept telling Dr. Ferrario that I couldn’t teach,” says Garrett. “He said, ‘Of course you can. Get down here.’ Anyway, he was right and I was wrong. It was definitely the right career for me.”

“After about a week of doing the job, I realized that being shy has nothing to do with being a teacher. As soon as I started engaging with people, I just cared about what they needed and my shyness went away.”

Garrett was surprised and delighted when she heard she had won the award. “I didn’t think that they would ever choose someone who taught composition,” she says. “It’s often seen as ‘grunt work’.”

“I’m pleased that composition got acknowledged as an important discipline through this award. I chose to concentrate on rhetoric and composition for my master’s at Dominguez Hills because I felt that writing was such a vital skill. I love literature, but I think that having competent writing skills is even more important.”

Garrett found CSUDH to be a uniquely rewarding place to work. “For me, the best part about Dominguez Hills is the diversity. I liked working with students from different walks of life and different ethnicities,” she says. “I also learned throughout the years that students’ native language dictated the problems they would have in English. Someone coming from a Spanish background is going to have different problems writing than someone coming from an Asian language background. It was fun for me to come up with ways to solve those problems.”

The professor also found Toro students to be particularly eager to learn. “Our students are very appreciative of education and the opportunity they have here, partially because a lot of them are first-generation college students. I never had a problem with students being disrespectful, they were just so hungry to learn and appreciative. No one ever said, ‘Oh geez, lady, you’re so boring!’”

From Monsters to Romance, Outstanding Professor Award Winner Debra Best Brings Literature to Life

June 6, 2020 By Paul Browning

Professor of English Debra Best has been honored with the 2020 Presidential Outstanding Professor Award.
Professor of English Debra Best has been honored with the 2020 Presidential Outstanding Professor Award.

Whether it is medieval romance or monsters, Professor of English Debra Best has an uncanny ability to find just the right stories and plays to successfully integrate students intellectually and artistically into the study of challenging literature.

Best specializes in medieval literature and Shakespeare, and creatively incorporates high-impact teaching into her literature and composition courses, including student research, group and performance projects, and imaginative assignments.

Her teaching style has turned her students into fixtures at conferences, in the pages of academic journals, and at CSUDH’s Student Research Day awards ceremonies. This ability to bring student learning to life and her many contributions to the English Department have garnered Best the 2020 Presidential Outstanding Professor Award.

“I was truly honored to be nominated for this award by my colleagues and former students. When I found out I won, I was left truly speechless and must have reread the email five times before it sank in,” shared Best, who arrived at CSUDH in 2005 and has since won three Outstanding Advisor Awards in the English Department. “I always try to focus on the students, so it is quite gratifying to have this recognized.”

Intuitively, Dr. Best understood that though I did not participate in class that I was still a hardworking, yet shy student. As a result, she motivated me to take her graduate level seminars as an undergraduate and to participate in Student Research Day. Though she intimidated me at first, I think Dr. Best is one of the most caring and supportive professors in the department.  – Jennifer Henriquez

The Presidential Outstanding Professor Award recognizes excellence in teaching, and is presented to an individual who has demonstrated outstanding achievements in all areas of faculty performance, who is a respected educator and expert his or her field, and is an outstanding member of the Toro community.

When she was a college student, Best experienced a dramatic academic shift. As a freshman who had planned to study physics at Pomona College of Claremont, she enrolled in a general education course on early British literature taught by Martha Andresen. Her class studied Beowulf, an Old English epic poem consisting of 3,182 alliterative lines, and the medieval text turned Best into an English major.

Professor of English Debra Best holds a first edition manuscript of Copernicus' work at the California Rare Book School at UCLA.
Debra Best holds a first edition manuscript of Copernicus’ work at the California Rare Book School at UCLA.

“Martha was an exceptional teacher. She had won multiple teaching awards at the college and at the state level. She also taught Shakespeare, so I took that class and fell in love with it,” Best said. “She was one of those people in whom you could just feel the love of the literature when she walked into a classroom. I try to be like her when I teach and communicate my enthusiasm for the texts to my students.”

Best’s study of Beowulf years ago sparked her interest in a Ph.D. dissertation on monsters in Middle English romances that developed into a graduate seminar at CSUDH that examines medieval monsters. “There are some wonderful medieval dragon stories that my students just gravitate to, such as the story of St. Margaret, and the story of an adulterous woman being transformed into a dragon in Handlyng Synne. It is disturbing in that the latter is  based on how women were regarded during the 14th century, yet important and interesting at the same time.”

To really engage students in courses such as Shakespeare, Best breaks them into groups to develop and rehearse scenes that they perform for the class.

“Shakespeare is meant to be performed much more than read, and I like to give my students that experience. I want them to be able to understand his work in all the various ways – reading it, watching it, and performing it,” said Best, who also uses the work of the 15th century English poet Geoffrey Chaucer to create storytelling competitions for her students.

Outside the classroom, Best has been an active faculty member of the English Department since she arrived at CSUDH in 2004. She was an essential contributor to the development of the university’s Faculty Advising Fellow Program and has served in various capacities in student advisement and scholarship.

Academic advisement at CSUDH had previously been run by non-faculty staff. “Advising is near and dear to my heart. When we brought faculty back into the Advisement Center I was one of the first ones in there,” said Best, who has been the coordinator of the English Graduate Program since 2008. “When it comes to curriculum, there are very nuanced things that only faculty know.”

Last fall, Best began leading her department’s curriculum committee and has since initiated nearly 20 program updates that address such issues as student graduation rates and new general education courses.

Best has published eight articles and chapters, including the regularly cited “The monster in the family: a reconsideration of Frankenstein’s domestic relationships” (Journal of Women’s Writing, 1999), and she has two books under development. To keep current in her field, she attends the California Rare Book School, contributes annually to the Chaucer Bibliography, and regularly presents on monsters and medieval romance at national conferences.

As an educator, Best is energized by her students, and her respect for them is derived from the hard work that they put into their studies. “They appreciate everything that they get. They work so hard in college, many of them after working at jobs all day long,” she says. “They sacrifice so much for a good education and a better life.”

Trigger Warnings in the Classroom

September 24, 2019 By Paul Browning

Mara Grayson

Are trigger warnings helpful in the classroom? In today’s Academic Minute, Mara Grayson of California State University, Dominguez Hills, says maybe not. Grayson is an assistant professor of English at Cal State Dominguez Hills.

Source: Inside Higher Ed

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