The annual Faculty and Staff Giving Campaign kicks off today and runs through April 3. Participation is the goal, so please make a gift of any size to the fund of your choice.
With an outstanding giving history, WSU Vancouver is again aiming for high participation. Last year, 65 percent of faculty and staff participated—way above the national average of approximately 23 percent and any of the other WSU campuses. Help us maintain our top spot with your donation.
Colleagues from Pullman will serve up treats this afternoon! Please stop by for a pick-me-up. There will be Cougar Gold cheese, fruit, dessert bars and other treats.
Visit the Faculty and Staff Giving Campaign
website to learn more and see the funds you may choose to support. If you have questions or if you are already participating by ongoing payroll deduction but cannot remember to which fund(s) you selected, please contact Lisa Abrahamsson in the Office of Development and Alumni Relations at 6-9600.
Sawyer wins book award
A book by Richard Sawyer, associate professor of education at WSU Vancouver, and Joe Norris, professor of drama in education and applied theater at Brock University, will receive one of the top awards at the 2015 conference of the American Educational Research Association, the premiere conference in education.
The award for Significant Contribution to Educational Measurement and Research Methodology will go to Sawyer and Norris’s “Understanding Qualitative Research:
Duoethnography,” published by Oxford University Press in 2013. The award recognizes a publication for quality, originality and potential impact.
Duoethnography is a relatively new research genre created by Sawyer and Norris. It is a collaborative method in which two researchers discuss their disparate experiences with some phenomenon. Its purpose is to discern multiple ways of understanding and shatter preconceived ideas. Duoethnography has been used recently to examine institutionalized racism, beauty, post-colonialism, multicultural-identity construction, and boundaries between patient and practitioner in mental health professions.
Sawyer,
who also coordinates the MIT Secondary Program on the WSU Vancouver campus as well as the Teacher Leadership strand of the systemwide Ed.D. Program, will receive the award April 18 in Chicago.
Encourage students to complete special NSSE
WSU is participating in a special National Survey of Student Engagement this spring. This is a mobile optimization experiment, and WSU Vancouver agreed to be part of the study. NSSE surveys all freshman (fewer than 30 credits) and seniors (more than 90 credits). The NSSE provides valuable information for our campus, so please encourage students to participate. They will receive up to five reminders between March 24 and April 21. If you have questions, please contact
Nancy Youlden, vice chancellor for student affairs.
WSU Vancouver to moderate civic conversations on affordable housing
WSU Vancouver and the Thomas S. Foley Institute’s new Initiative for Public Deliberation will host six open forums around the region to hear from local residents about the challenges and opportunities related to affordable housing. One of the meetings will be held on campus this Thursday.
Each forum runs two hours. After a brief introduction, participants will be invited to meet in small groups of 8 – 12 to discuss the topic. The groups will be facilitated by student moderators who have been trained in a new course, “Civil Discourse in a Time of Incivility” taught by
Associate Professor Carolyn Long.
Participants do not need any expertise in the topic. It is important that a diversity of interests be represented at the forums. Registration is required. Visit www.500kvoices.org/contact-us/. To see all six forum dates, read the full press release.
Celebrate Women of Distinction Thursday
6 p.m. March 26
Firstenburg Student Commons RSVP TODAY
WSU Vancouver will celebrate 33 women who have made a difference for others at the annual Women of Distinction event this Thursday evening. Dr. Allen Gabriel, co-founder of the Pink Lemonade Project, will be the keynote speaker. There will be a collection bin for donations of new or used business clothes to the Dress-A-Coug Clothing Drive.
All
nominees for the 2015 awards will be recognized for inspiring, mentoring and empowering others. Three Distinguished Woman awards will be announced at the event—high school student, WSU Vancouver student and community member.
Of the 16 nominees in the community member category, two are WSU Vancouver staff members:
Merlinda Sain
is a human resource generalist and a 2007 alumna. Last winter she handmade 500 fleece hats for Share Vancouver and 43 for the Facilities Operations crew. Next, Merlinda will warm the ears of U.S. troops in Greenland.
Debra Sanders
has been a professor of accounting at WSU for 30 years. She loves helping students find meaningful accounting careers after graduation. She moved from the Pullman campus to develop a master’s program at WSU Vancouver.
Fifteen WSU Vancouver students and two high school students were also nominated. See the entire list online.
Come to hear enrollment management findings
10:10 a.m. – 12:10 p.m. March 27
Engineering and Computer Science Building, Room 122
Attracting and retaining students touches each of our jobs in some way. WSU Vancouver has invested in
SEM Works, an enrollment management consulting firm, to help us formulate an enrollment management strategy. This means you! Updating our recruitment and retention efforts will no doubt impact how many of us do business.
SEM Works was on campus March 9 – 11 to conduct a best practices audit. They will share findings from their visit via a two-hour webinar next Friday. All staff and faculty are encouraged to attend.
Off-Broadway play coming to campus
7 p.m. April 1
Dengerink Administration Building, Room 110 RSVP
to reserve your seat
Come see “Our Young Black Men are Dying and Nobody Seems to Care,” an off-Broadway hit full of history, passion and sheer drama. Performed by Flow-Theater, the non-confrontational play is a series of vignettes addressing issues facing young black men in America. The topics are as relevant as today's headlines and as real as walking through any inner-city neighborhood. "Our Young Black Men" is the spring Marquee
Diversity event. It is much more than a play, it is an opportunity to discuss real issues facing contemporary American society.
Attend the Salmon Creek Journal launch party
11 a.m. – 2 p.m. April 2
Firstenburg Student Commons
Swing by to pick up your copy of the 2015 Salmon Creek Journal. See a performance or take a poetry workshop with spoken word artists David Romero. Find the schedule of events online.
Come to a panel discussion on race, policing and justice
Recent police killings of people of color have led to protests and demonstrations across the United States, and raised larger questions related to racial and ethnic disparities in our criminal justice system. “Black, Brown and Blue: Diverse Perspectives on Race, Policing and Justice” will seat six panelists who view these issues from a variety of lenses. The panel will discuss the root causes of these disparities,
their consequences and how we can move forward. Panelists include:
Pat Escamilla, juvenile court administrator for Clark County
Alexes Harris, associate professor of sociology at University of Washington
James McElvain, chief of police for the City of Vancouver
Charles McGee, president and CEO of Black Parent Initiative
Jo Ann Hardesty, president of NAACP Portland Chapter and consultant
Facilitated by Clay Mosher, professor of sociology at WSU
Vancouver