Shoba Joneja, Amy Lueck, Lee Panich, Alex Perez, Katie Stafford, Isabella Gomez, Gloria Gomez.

SCU hosted its first summer camp for Muwekma Ohlone teens. The brainchild of incoming first-year Isabella Gomez '27 (Philosophy), the camp was held from July 12 to 15 with tremendous support from Amy Lueck (English), Lee Panich (Anthropology), Katie Stafford '23 (Anthropology), Shoba Joneja '24 (Anthropology), and Alex Perex '23 (Public Health Science, Political Science, Women's and Gender Studies). Participants visited the SCU Archives, learned about Muwekma language and culture, toured historical sites on campus, and strengthened a small, passionate network of Native American youth and elders. Isabella is the first recipient of SCU's Ohlone and Muwekma Ohlone Student Scholarship.

Dear College Faculty and Staff,

I hope you all are enjoying your summer and finding ways to relax and recharge. We, here in the Dean’s Office, have been busy planning to welcome the Class of 2027 to campus and making sure we are prepared for this next academic year.

Some of that preparation involves the usual planned events, like the Fall Convocation, Grand Reunion and Open House. In addition to those, I'm focusing some of my summer energies on conversations about supporting faculty mentoring of undergraduates (during summer as well as the academic year) and associate professors in their career development.

I also have an eye on the strategic planning process and the subsequent revisions to the Core Curriculum. It’s vital that the new Core draws on the College’s strengths and priorities in the humanistic liberal arts. Many of us in the College also feel it is important for each academic department to maintain a healthy balance between contributions to the lower-division Core, on the one hand, and upper-division courses aimed at majors, on the other hand. I look forward to many conversations with you about these topics!

Finally, it’s been a while since I’ve provided an update on our College of Arts and Sciences Leadership Board, so I wanted to share some details regarding our plans for this next year. We currently have 13 members on the board who work in industries ranging from law and government, to healthcare and welfare, to tech and academia. In alignment with the strategic vision and goals of the College, I am asking the board to put their expertise to use in helping us achieve those goals. My team is working with the board to identify ways to utilize each member’s skills and networks to help move us forward in today’s educational landscape.

You will see from this College Notes that our faculty, staff and student colleagues are as busy as ever this summer; it is so inspiring to read about your work! Please keep your notes coming!

Sincerely,

Daniel

Highlights

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Jesica S. Fernandez (Ethnic Studies) was invited to be the inaugural speaker for the Critical Psychology Program at Sanata Dharma University. In addition to delivering a talk, entitled "United States Critical Psychology: Connecting Past & Present Developments", she also facilitated a workshop, "Turning Inward: Engaging Critical Ethical Reflexivity," where she described the importance of engaging in a critical ethical reflexive praxis. Both the lecture and workshop highlight Jesica's current edited book project, tentatively titled Decolonial Psychology Praxis (Routledge). This writing project and edited handbook is a collaboration between Drs. Sunil Bhatia (Connecticut College) and Christopher Sonn (Victoria University).

Kristin Kusanovich (Theatre and Dance, Child Studies), a liturgical movement, dance, and drama specialist, co-produced (with director Mark Larson) a performance on a bare wooden stage in the center of the Mission Santa Clara entitled, The Resurrection Project: A Theatrical Installation. It featured actors Skylar Adams '20 (Theatre Arts), Christian Barnard '25 (Political Science, Theatre Arts), Roselyn Jauregui-Mejia '25 (Psychology, Theatre Arts) and Anthony Sampson Semandiris '20 (Marketing, Theatre Arts) who transformed into every character found in the various gospel accounts of the resurrected Christ.

This unique durational presentation took place every Monday evening in May in the form of an open rehearsal; performers repeatedly worked their way through the words of the gospel without leaving the stage for hours, finding new insights into the complex beauty of the sudden appearance of the risen Jesus Christ. The audience was invited to sit and share in these discoveries or move about freely.

This multidisciplinary performance installation utilized the flute music of Edgard Varese, a 16th century Lutheran cantata libretto, the short story Jesus by Swiss author Robert Walser, and an original sound score from Minnesota composer Dan Maddock.

The Resurrection Project is the sixth original work created for the Mission Church by Kusanovich and Larson since 2000. It follows these film/theatre/dance installations: The Book of Ruth, The Book of Job/Aeschylus, The Life of St. Clare, Noche Oscura by San Juan de la Cruz, and Six Psalms: A Score for Actor and Dancer.

Image: Rehearsal for The Resurrection Project, May 2023, Mission Santa Clara.

The 10th anniversary celebration of the partnership between SCU Child Studies and Sacred Heart Community Service took place during the last week of June. Together we celebrated 10 years of partnership in providing a parent education program called Safe, Secure and Loved-Resilient Families Program (SSL-RF) in the San Jose and Gilroy communities. We also were celebrating 5 years of partnership with Santa Clara County Department of Family and Children Services and the award of a new contract for 2023-2027. SSL is a community-led parent education program designed to foster responsive and nurturing caregiving and prevent child maltreatment. The program is based on a community-healing-community public health model and more than 1300 families of young children have graduated from the program. SSL-RF was created by Barbara Burns (Child Studies) and since 2013 more than 50 undergraduates from SCU have contributed to all aspects of its growth and continued expansion in the San Jose and Gilroy regions of California. These amazing undergraduates on the SSL-RF team have continued in diverse fields of clinical psychology, education, public health, nursing, social work as well as medicine and engineering. We thank our colleagues and friends from SCU who attended the 10th anniversary event and encourage SCU faculty to contact Barbara Burns if you are interested in collaborating with us on this partnership in teaching or research.

On June 7, Barbara Burns (Child Studies) and Gina Chavez ‘21 (Psychology), a current doctoral student in clinical psychology at Xavier University, presented a paper titled “Leticia's Journey: An Evaluation of an Audio-Novella to Strengthen Habits of Resilience in Caregivers of Young Children” at the 2023 International Congress on Evidence-based Parenting Support. The paper detailed the impact of an audio-novella about Leticia’s journey as a parent of young children beginning when she joins a parent education program in the midst of family crises and community adversities. Across seven episodes of the audio-novella, Leticia learns and practices new habits of resilience to promote child and family well-being in the midst of family adversities. Near the end, Leticia chooses to become trained as a leader of the parent program and we witness her helping her community. The paper reported participants’ high levels of memory comprehension from each episode and the adoption of new ways of thinking about family resilience. "Leticia’s Journey" represents an innovative approach to the prevention of child maltreatment and is now being employed as part of both community outreach and the training of community leaders who facilitate the Safe, Secure, and Loved-Resilient Families parent education program in Santa Clara County.

Tom Plante (Psychology) published a journal article, "Confronting religious and spiritual discrimination in clinical and professional practice." in Spirituality in Clinical Practice.

Abstract:   
Religious- and spiritual-based stereotyping, prejudice, and discrimination are common phenomena both within and outside of the professional psychological and mental health care community. Since many psychologists and other mental health professionals are secular and personally unaffiliated with any religious tradition, they may be especially vulnerable to religious and spiritual implicit bias in their professional and personal lives. Our code of ethics highlights the need to be respectful, proactive, and informed about diversity, broadly defined, which includes religious and spiritual diversity. Being mindful of our implicit biases and prejudices and embracing cultural humility would serve us well, and most especially, better serve our profession and clientele. Mental health professionals need to be proactive in their efforts to ensure that they are informed and sensitive to discrimination and bias among their religious and spiritual clients and colleagues. This reflection asks us to be more vigilant in doing so. 

Images: Faculty, community partner, and students involved in the work presented at the Consortium of Universities for the Advancement of Hydrologic Science (CUAHSI) conference.

Iris Stewart-Frey (Environmental Studies and Sciences), School of Engineering faculty Ed Maurer (Civil, Environmental, and Sustainable Engineering) and Allen Baez Morales (Frugal Innovation Hub), with Raul Diaz from Centro de Información e Innovación Asociación de Desarrollo Social de Nicaragua (CII-ASDENIC) and student researchers Briana Guingona '25 (Environmental Studies), Alex Avila '24 (Civil Engineering), Turner Uyeda '24 (Civil Engineering) and Gautam Chitnis'23 (Computer Science and Engineering) presented a poster on "Climate change forecasts, information, and adaptation in Central American smallholder communities through participatory and student-centered research" at the CUAHSI biennial colloquium in Tahoe, CA. Many parts of Central America have experienced warming over recent decades, accompanied by greater frequency of drought with the capacity to disrupt critical crop cycles in the region. Farmers face the daunting challenge of anticipating when the typical lull in the wet season will occur in any year. As a response, the team has developed an automated system to download short-term and seasonal forecasts for individual communities, which, together with metrics from a local weather station, feed into a lightweight app that can operate on a mobile phone and delivers graphical and text summaries of the forecasts and how current climate in the region deviates from that in the past. Ongoing user surveys and focus groups provide feedback on how the probabilistic information is received and what might be most useful. As climate change amplifies the extremes already being experienced in this region, the aspiration is that accessible, skillful, and effectively communicated climate forecasts can help with climate change impact mitigation strategies.

College of Arts and Sciences Calendar

Camino classes (Virtual)

Camino Basics

July 21 1:00 - 2:30 PM
August 1 10:00 - 11:30 AM

Camino Course Design

July 25 2:00 - 3:30 PM
August 9 1:30 - 3:00 PM

Optimizing Teaching and Learning in Camino

August 1 1:00 - 4:00 PM

Camino Quizzes

August 2 1:30 - 3:00 PM

Camino Gradebook

August 3 2:00 - 3:30 PM

The Mobile Professor

August 8 1:00 - 3:00 PM