b.chapman

Nov. 1, 2019
By C. Brandon Chapman – College of Education

Jose Riera is only 5-foot-6. Like Spud Webb or Al Pacino or Ben Stiller. Not an inch more, not an inch less.

But that’s OK because this is Mike Tyson’s Punch-Out!! and Jose is Little Mac, doing a great job swinging way above his weight class.

On Monday, Oct. 21, Riera won the 2019 Travel Grant Competition hosted by Washington State University’s Innovation and Research Engagement Office (IREO). By winning, Riera receives a $2,500 travel grant to further and enhance his research goals and provide him with valuable administrative support from IREO.

And he did it against seven other competitors, all of whom were faculty members.

Riera is a doctoral student in the WSU College of Education’s Language, Literacy and Technology program.

“I’m humbled that IREO would have selected this presentation over so many other impressive presenters, all whom were full-fledged Ph.D.’s and faculty,” he said. “I did not expect to be the only student who would be invited to present at this prestigious event. This is truly an honor for the entire College of Education, and I trust it demonstrates that our people and our proposals can be appreciated for their innovativeness and societal impact even in traditional hard-science spheres.”

According to the IREO website, the organization “works with students, faculty, and staff to position WSU’s creative, scholarly and technical assets in ways that maximize impact and return value to our state and national stakeholders.”

Riera was presented his award certificate on Thursday, Oct. 24 at an event that included WSU president Kirk Schulz, as well as vice president of research Christopher Keane.

About the research

Riera’s research focuses on advancing the use of visual speech recognition (VSR) technology to improve communication and learning for individuals with disabilities and health impediments.

An example of this would be someone who can’t make a vocal sound. Even though the individual is unable to make this kind of sound – or perhaps just has a difficulty doing it – the assistive technology can pick up the facial movement and translate that into actual sound.

Riera said that, with more than 50 million individuals in the United States with verbal and hearing impairments, VSR technology can help.

“VSR has the ability to facilitate more intimate, real-time conversations,” he said.

It’s research that is both important and timely. And, according to Don McMahon, an assistant professor of special education, as well as a research team member, a project that is destined to succeed not in spite of a graduate student leading, but because of who the graduate student is.

“Jose is a great example of a graduate student who came in to a program with vision and clear interests,” McMahon said. “In addition to Jose doing an excellent job creating an interdisciplinary team to support his research, he is a prime example of a graduate student working to get the most out of their program.”

A collaborative project

It should probably not be anything new that Riera aims high and succeeds. After all, he’s already an Ivy-Leaguer. Born and raised in Puerto Rico, Riera earned his MBA from the University of Pennsylvania’s distinguished Wharton School. Most folks probably wouldn’t know that. And why would they? Riera doesn’t walk around telling everybody. If his diminutive stature stands out, so does his humility. Riera refuses to take credit for, well, almost anything, deferring instead to the efforts of the team and, with this latest success, the work itself.

“This research was undoubtedly enhanced by the sponsorship and expertise from College of Education faculty members Don McMahon and Yuliya Ardasheva,” Riera said. “But it was also very collaborative across colleges, as I received unparalleled hands-on guidance from Howard Davis from the College of Engineering, and Mark Vandam from the Elson S. Floyd College of Medicine.”

Indeed, Riera is correct. He has been able to rely on the expertise of many others. Take McMahon, for example: he runs the VR2GO Lab, which uses virtual and augmented reality as assistive technology. Or Vandam, an associate professor of linguistics who runs the Speech and Language Lab at WSU Spokane.

Tariq Akmal, chair of the College of Education’s Department of Teaching and Learning, said he thinks Riera’s research has the potential to be successful precisely because of his penchant for teamwork.

“Collaboration is a vital ‘soft skill’ sought after in pretty much all fields; but in addressing complex problems, it’s critical to bring together multiple perspectives and approaches, Akmal said. “Jose is doing just that, identifying a complex problem and then thinking through available resources to assemble a team that has the capacity to effectively address that problem.”

On one hand, while having WSU work with other universities can be a positive, on the other hand, Riera said there was probably something “very special” about the fact that all the critical resources needed to bring this research to market are within WSU community.

“The judges may have perceived the significant value of sponsoring an initiative that we can nurture in-house, and one that will allow WSU to establish its preeminence in assistive technology research and social advancement,” Riera said.

A myriad of applications

Having a highly collaborative project made sense to Riera. After all, in the end, VSR has the potential for extensive applicability in a number of fields, including healthcare.

“My sense is that the judging panel connected very directly with the positive societal impact of this research proposal,” Riera said. “I could feel the way the audience immediately bonded with the presentation when I was discussing how we would enhance the quality of life and social integration for so many citizens with disabilities and limiting health conditions.

“It was a very powerful feeling.”

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VIEW RIERA’S PRESENTATION (AT 1:45:05)

August 23, 2019

VANCOUVER, Wash. – Books by Native American authors intended for use by teachers in K-12 classrooms are now available at the WSU Vancouver Library.

The books in the Native American Teaching Library were acquired through a grant to help implement the State of Washington’s Time Immemorial curriculum on Native American history and culture. The books in the Vancouver library were selected to reflect the experiences of young Native American people both past and present.

Shameem Rakha, assistant professor of education at WSU Vancouver, coordinated the selection and purchase of the books. She worked with Roben White of the Native American Elders Council and Karen Diller, library director, to choose a range of books appropriate for primary, middle and high school students. They settled on 17 titles, purchasing multiple copies of each for potential use as class sets. Powell’s Books in Portland, which supplied much of the library, helped locate obscure books and books from small publishers, and provided a discount that enabled Rakha to purchase additional titles.

One example of a book in the Native American Teaching Library is “I Am Not a Number,” a picture book about the boarding school system in the United States and Canada in the late 19^th to mid-20^th centuries. Rakha considers it relevant to a wide range of experiences in human history. “It’s the story of children taken away from their homes, culture and ways of being, and the horrors this created for them and their parents,” she said.

“Black Elk’s Vision” tells the life story of an Oglala-Lakota medicine man, who lived through the battles of Wounded Knee and Little Big Horn. “House of Purple Cedar” is about a Choctaw girl’s growing up in Indian Territory in pre-statehood Oklahoma.

“It is our goal to support the important work of teaching our children that American Indian people have had a significant impact on American history, and that despite an ongoing genocide, they are still managing to do amazing things today.”

There is no charge for teachers to check out books from the Native American Teaching Library (library cards are free for residents of Southwest Washington). Over the coming year, students in Rakha’s social studies methods classes will add summaries and questions to the books to enhance their utility as teaching materials.

If you have questions, contact Rakha at shameem.rakha@wsu.edu.

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About WSU Vancouver

As one of six campuses of the Washington State University system, WSU Vancouver offers big-school resources in a small-school environment. The university provides affordable, high-quality baccalaureate- and graduate-level education to benefit the people and communities it serves. As the only four-year research university in Southwest Washington, WSU Vancouver helps drive economic growth through relationships with local businesses and industries, schools and nonprofit organizations.

MEDIA CONTACT

Brenda Alling, Office of Marketing and Communications, 360-546-9601, brenda_alling@wsu.edu

PULLMAN, Wash. – The College of Education announced its annual faculty and staff excellence awards on Thursday, May 2, 2019.

This year, College dean Mike Trevisan announced that there would be two staff awards. The awards are as follows:

Faculty Excellence in Diversity: Katherine Rodela – Educational Leadership

Faculty Excellence in Teaching: Kristin Courtney – Educational Leadership

Faculty Excellence in Research: Yulia Ardasheva – Language, Literacy, and Technology

Faculty Excellence in Service: Judy Schultz– Kinesiology

Staff Excellence: Kelly McGovern – Director of the Office of Graduate Studies

Staff Excellence: Lindsay Lightner – Coordinator, Alternate Route Teacher Certification

https://education.wsu.edu/college/facultystaffawards/

By C. Brandon Chapman – College of Education

A Washington State University mathematics professor has been recognized by the Association of Mathematics Teacher Educators (AMTE) with its 2019 Outstanding Reviewer Award.

Amy Roth McDuffie, who is also the College of Education’s associate dean for research and external funding, was recognized for providing exemplary feedback as part of blinded peer-review of scholarly manuscripts for Mathematics Teacher Educator journal.

“As an associate dean, Amy has done meticulous work in development of strategic documents, internal grant processes, and critiques of external funding proposals,” college dean Mike Trevisan said. “She is analytical, reasoned, and well thought. In addition to my experiences and observations, I have heard the same from upper level administrators throughout the university. This award is a well-deserved honor for Amy and testament to the high-quality work of a consummate professional.”

Roth McDuffie is a well-published scholar in her own right, whose research focuses on teachers’ professional development, as well as equitable teaching practices and curriculum.

She has also served as the series editor for the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics’ Annual Perspectives in Mathematics Education.

She will receive a plaque from the AMTE, as well as be recognized at its annual meeting in Orlando, Florida in February.

We previously hosted Tamara Holmlund on our podcast (Education Eclipse 027 Today’s STEM Education) and she told us about a Next Generation STEM Teacher Preparation project that she and other researchers were working on. This past summer, Holmlund and a colleague from UW Bothell collaborated to put engineering and sustainability into the STEM collaboration she’s been doing for the last five years.

“The outcome was very positive, even beyond the third grade classrooms,” Holmlund said.

The Battle Ground School District featured part of this project in a recent blog post. We republish here:

Pleasant Valley Primary 3rd graders help endangered butterflies

Armed with little more than pencils, clipboards, and their own ingenuity, the third graders in teacher Talea Jones’ class at Pleasant Valley Primary School are working to solve quite the complex problem: how can they, acting as ecologists and designers, help create a healthy habitat to attract and protect endangered Taylor’s checkerspot butterflies to their school grounds?

This fun and scientifically engaging project is part of an annual Science, Technology, Engineering and Math (STEM) collaboration between the third grade classes at Pleasant Valley Primary in Battle Ground Public Schools and the student teachers at Washington State University-Vancouver. The partnership benefits both the district and the university through the practical application of STEM learning. WSU-V students earning their K-8 masters in education degrees visit the PVP campus and act as guest teachers for two hours a week over the two-week course of the project. The specific theme changes from year to year, but always involves a STEM project with a focus on sustainability education, design thinking, and engineering concepts.

“It’s a great opportunity for these young learners to experience a field-based research project,” said guest teacher and WSU-Vancouver student Stephanie Pederson. “Project based learning like this provides students with an engaging experience that is highly valuable and completely authentic.”

Taylor’s checkerspot butterflies were once abundant in the inland prairies of the Pacific Northwest, located west of the Cascade Mountains from British Columbia south through Oregon’s Willamette Valley. Almost two centuries of agriculture and the growth of urban areas has eliminated about 99 percent of the butterflies’ native habitat. As a result, the once abundant Euphydryas editha taylori are now a Washington state-endangered species and listed under the U.S. Endangered Species Act.

To develop a design solution, the students have learned everything they can about the butterflies, including their habitat needs throughout all four stages of their life cycle. The students then learned to identify the native plants that serve as both food and shelter for the Pacific Northwest pollinators before heading out to the great outdoors to identify plants and make field observations in their project notebooks.

After their field books are full of notes and sketches, the young engineers-in-training head back to the classroom so they can start designing solutions that will help protect the butterflies throughout all stages of their life cycles. After creating their designs, the students swap booklets and peer review each other’s’ work, helping to refine their ideas and collaborate on the best, most practical solutions.

“I like that I got to be creative and make something,” said William Johnstone, a student in Mrs. Jones’ class. “Before this project, the only thing I can remember designing in school was a math word problem, so this was really fun.”

The Oregon Zoo began recovery efforts with the Taylor’s checkerspot butterfly in 2003. Zoo staff work to save these delicate pollinators from extinction with partners from the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife, Xerces Society, the Nature Conservancy, as well as several regional universities, zoos, conservation groups, government agencies, and correctional facilities to help protect and supplement wild butterfly populations. More information is available at https://www.oregonzoo.org/conserve/fighting-extinction-pacific-northwest/taylors-checkerspot-butterfly.

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In the 2006 documentary film, An Inconvenient Truth, former United States Vice President Al Gore comments on the perils associated with uncritical belief in conventional wisdom (in his case, on global warming) by citing Mark Twain: “What gets us into trouble is not what we don’t know. It’s what we know for sure that just ain’t so.”

The same could be said about China, a country most Americans probably think of mainly as a political and economic threat to the United States.

The threat is probably overrated. More importantly, as philosopher Slavoj Žižek often says about a range of topics, “it’s a bit more complicated than that.”

Hence, while your blogger traveled to China this summer to teach a course in sport journalism, he probably learned about the Middle Kingdom just as much as the students enrolled in the course did about the fourth estate. Their own version of “fair trade.”

One learning outcome for the visiting lecturer of a course taught to 116 second-year undergraduates pursuing degrees in the English language at Beijing Sport University, or BSU, was that college-aged youth have rather similar interests regardless of the country they live in. During a class discussion, Wu Jingwei, who goes by the “English name” Ekko (pronounced ECK-oh) in courses with non-Chinese instructors, named Taylor Swift as his favorite singer.

However (it’s a bit more complicated… ), for every American pop music fan, there was also a student who consumes quality Western media. Ekko’s classmate Li Zhaoxiang (“James”), a Beijing Guoan F.C. fan, named the Voice of America as his favorite media outlet and regularly updated your blogger on news highlights published by the BBC. Another student, Gao Jianzhu (“Hebe”), had completed an internship with the Beijing Morning Post newspaper and is proud for having seen her pictures published on the outlet’s website.

A second learning outcome was a better understanding of the phrase, “Socialism with Chinese characteristics,” which is the expression used to describe the People’s Republic’s system of political theories and policies. The system involves adopting elements of a market economy to attract foreign investment and increase productivity. As a result, Beijing’s commercial districts are not unlike similar areas in New York, Rome, Cape Town, or other metropolises. An unadventurous traveler could sustain themselves on food from KFC and shop for Nike apparel while sipping Starbucks brews (though they would miss out on a lot).

China is not immune to globalization; rather, it is one of its driving forces. This influenced the decision of some Chinese universities to offer study programs taught entirely in the English language.

One such institution is BSU, the country’s top school for sport studies and one of the top (about) 100 schools included in Project 211. This status provides the school with additional funding to raise its research standards and cultivate strategies for socio-economic development. In 2017, there were 2914 colleges and universities nation-wide, up from 2542 in 2014.

To enhance the quality of its “English major,” BSU invites several international lecturers from the English-speaking world. This year’s faculty included Professor Scott Martyn from the University of Windsor in Canada, Dr. Jo An Zimmermann from Texas State University in the United States, Emeritus Professor Tony Collins from De Montfort University in England and the College of Education’s Simon Ličen.

This was the third time your Sport Management program’s expert in communication and sport was invited to the university. The course in sport journalism provides students with an introduction to journalism and broadcasting about sport as it is conceived in the United States and Western Europe.

Throughout the 15 lectures, students master the basics of covering sports events, discuss “hard news” topics such as match-fixing and corruption, and even record a short play-by-play broadcast of a game. This equips them with the fundamentals to explore the field at a more advanced level: upon graduation, many students pursue advanced degrees in China or other countries. Some, like Hu Hua (“Sunny”), are already pursuing related degrees and enjoy the course as it provides them with additional insight. Quite a few aspire to become broadcasters or pursue other careers in media. They are among the students who keep in touch upon completion of the course via WeChat, a social media service.

This year, your correspondent was also invited to prepare a general lecture for interested students and faculty of the institution whose people have collectively won 73 gold medals in the Olympic Games. In a lecture entitled “Current Trends in Sport Media,” we discussed automation, some features of Olympic broadcasting and some characteristics of social media usage, a topic that included a reference to a study currently in progress by Wei Ching Liao, a graduate student in our Sport Management program.

All in all, the visit was successful and BSU invited your blogger to teach the course next spring as well. The two institutions are developing an initiative that would involve student exchanges and year-round collaboration. Additionally, several ideas for research and professional opportunities have emerged during and after the third stay in Beijing. Follow us in the coming months to learn the details.

The invites are a professional and personal achievement. They mark the third continent on which your correspondent has taught a university course, after Slovenia in Europe and the United States in the Americas. Also, teaching in a communist country while working in the foremost capitalist one is an accomplishment that is rarely bestowed to a scholar born in a non-aligned socialist republic. While the latter country has since crumbled, the values of quality education, collaboration and brotherhood among nations are still passed on by some. Also, the College of Education’s expert on sport communication can keep learning, expanding his horizons and sharing more diverse content and perspectives to students at WSU.

When your blogger returns to BSU next year, perhaps he will finally cross paths with some of the prominent…co-workers who visit the school just days before or after him. In 2017, basketball superstar Yao Ming was appointed honorary president of the university’s China Basketball Academy just days before the Sport Journalism course started. This year, the WSU prof left the day before IOC President Thomas Bach became BSU Honorary Professor.

Even if he does not shake hands with bigwigs, it will be a pleasure to reconnect with many of the students who completed Sport Journalism this and previous years, and meet their peers who will enroll in the course next summer.

PULLMAN, Wash. – The College of Education has given its annual faculty and staff excellence awards.

Faculty Excellence in Diversity: Pam Bettis – Cultural Studies and Social Thought in Education

Faculty Excellence in Teaching: Kira Carbonneau – Educational Psychology

Faculty Excellence in Research: Brenda Barrio – Special Education

Faculty Excellence in Service: Tom Salsbury – Language, Literacy, and Technology

Staff Excellence: Matthew Vaughn – Director of Information Services

https://education.wsu.edu/college/facultystaffawards/