Category Archives: Educational Excellence and Student Experience

March Newsletter: Adobe Day Highlights New Teaching Tools

Photo courtesy of Michael Cheers Beginning Digital News Photography (JOUR 95) student Raven Swayne gets hands-on practice shooting a portrait with studio lighting in University Photographer Bob Bain's office/studio. The students also learned to use Adobe Lightroom.

Photo courtesy of Michael Cheers
Beginning Digital News Photography (JOUR 95) student Raven Swayne gets hands-on practice shooting a portrait with studio lighting in University Photographer Bob Bain’s office/studio. The students also learned to use Adobe Lightroom.

More than 50 San Jose State staff and faculty members attended the Fourth Annual Adobe Day at the software developer’s downtown offices. The half-day session with the Adobe Education team offered a chance for SJSU staff and faculty to use digital tools in guided training sessions that they can replicate on campus.

After the presentation from Abobe’s team on March 4,Journalism and Mass Communication (JMC) Professor Michael Cheers introduced the new visual storytelling tool Slate to his students the following week.

“Students in both classes were uploading content to Slate in less than 10 minutes,” he said. “They embraced it. Both classes will submit their midterm using Slate.”

He will also be introducing another new tool, Muse, a responsive web design tool, after spring break.

Cheers said access to the latest software, including tools in Adobe’s Creative Suite such as Photoshop, Adobe Premier Pro and Lightroom, are integral to preparing his multimedia students for internship and entry-level positions involving photography and video.

“For the first time in JMC history, two multimedia/photojournalism students from SJSU are going to the New York Times Student Journalism Institute,” Cheers said, of James Tensuan and Randy Vazquez, who will participate in the program in summer 2016. “It’s an amazing accomplishment. They had to compete against thousands of college students from across the country.”

To help students learn the intricacies of the programs, Cheers hosts labs on weekends and before class, and also posts tutorials and visual storytelling examples on Canvas.

“My hope is that the students go beyond what is required for the assignment and a letter grade, and embrace innovation and creativity,” he said. “I love it when a student comes to class and shows the instructor what they learned independently.”

Coffee with a Professor program launches

coffeewithaprofessorOLSJSU undergraduate students who want to chat with professors or graduate teaching assistants outside their classroom can take a coffee break between classes, with SJSU offering a free $12 VIP Gold Card to cover the beverages through the newly launched “Coffee with a Professor” program. The program is intended to foster informal, out-of-classroom interactions between students and faculty by providing a $12 VIP Gold Card that is redeemable at campus dining and retail venues.

Students are eligible to participate twice a semester and cards are available for pick up at the Center for Faculty Development (IRC 213.) To participate, students will need to provide a confirmed date and time of their meeting; their name, email address and student ID number; the name and email address of their professor or graduate teaching assistant; and the course section or class name if they are currently enrolled in a class taught by the professor. Students can meet with a professor or graduate teaching assistant with whom they are not currently taking a class, but the faculty members must currently be employed at SJSU. Participating dining locations include Le Boulanger in Union Square, On Fourth Café in the Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Library, Just Below in MacQuarrie Hall and the soon-to-open Starbucks (in the Student Union.)

A newly created website, Coffee with a Professor, offers more details about the program. It also includes a “Table Topics” section to help students start their conversations with icebreaker questions. Students can use the time to seek advice on careers, the future of the industry in their major or other questions that can support their educational journey. Those who participate are encouraged to take a photo to share on Instagram with the hashtag #SJSUchatwithaprof.

The Coffee with a Professor program has been created with support from Academic Affairs, Student Affairs and Associated Students, Inc.

February 2016 Newsletter: Undergraduates Gain Skills with Research

Madiha Shah and Ashleen Sandhu, ’16, Biomedical, Chemical and Materials Engineering, both became interested in creating a new way to deliver insulin for diabetic patients because of a family connection to the disease.

Sandhu said her mother was diagnosed with gestational diabetes during a pregnancy.

“It was really hard because some people don’t like needles,” Sandhu said, noting that her father helped by administering insulin injections to her needle-averse mother.

Shah’s mother also has diabetes and she said her work at a pharmacy puts her in contact with patients who have the disease.

Through SJSU’s Center for Faculty Development Undergraduate Research Pairs program, they received a grant to support research on developing a noninvasive patch to provide a daily insulin dosage for pediatric patients. Dr. Folarin Erogbogbo is serving as their faculty mentor.

“He’s there to give us technical feedback and to help us network with the right people,” said Shah, who plans to study pharmacology after she graduates from SJSU this spring.

Sandhu wants to find employment in a research lab after graduation.

“I am gaining essential skills that will allow me to apply for work,” Sandhu said. “We are working with machines and gaining lab skills from being exposed to those machines. One of the benefits of undergraduate research is that SJSU has a lot of up-to-date equipment.”

Morgan Chang, a computer science student, partnered with Dr. Katherine Wilkinson, from biological sciences, as part of the Undergraduate Research Pairs program. They studied the impact of a high-fat diet on glucose levels in mice.

“She is easing me into research,” he said, noting that they had just completed a proposal for grant funding to study the impact of obesity on the risk of falling. “I recently decided I want to go to med school so I want to do something with neurophysiology.”

This year, 34 students received grants to work with 20 faculty mentors, including students from the College of Applied Sciences and Arts, the Lucas College and Graduate School of Business, the Charles W. Davidson College of Engineering, the College of Science and the College of Social Sciences.

February 2016 Newsletter: Study Grant Aims to Improve Resources for Vietnamese Dementia Caregivers

Dr. Van Ta Park shares her background as a Vietnamese refugee and the role of personal connection in improving resources for dementia caregivers.

Dr. Van Ta Park shares her background as a Vietnamese refugee and the role of personal connection in improving resources for dementia caregivers.

As a refugee from Vietnam, Dr. Van Ta Park, an associate professor in the Department of Health Science and Recreation in the College of Applied Sciences and Arts, has a unique understanding of the challenges that face family caregivers.

“We escaped by boat, but I was very young so I have no recollection,” Ta Park said. “My parents shared stories with me of the refugee camps and the violence…For a lot of refugees this experience follows them in their everyday lives.”

Ta Park has received a grant for $150,000 over three years from the Alzheimer’s Association to develop culturally-tailored mental health resources to support Vietnamese American dementia caregivers. San Jose has one of the largest Vietnamese populations in the nation. Among Vietnamese Americans, 68 percent are foreign born and 87.5 percent speak another language other than English at home. Prior research, including Ta Park’s, have shown that Vietnamese Americans are less likely to utilize mental health services compared to the general population, which is concerning as caring for a family member with dementia is associated with higher rates of depression than in the general population.

William Fisher, the CEO of the Alzheimer’s Association Northern California and Northern Nevada Chapter, presented Ta Park with a check for her grant on Feb. 19. He noted that grant proposals are selected through a peer evaluation process, with the top eight percent of proposals receiving funding. Ta Park was one of only two scientists to receive the Mentored New Investigator Research Grant to Promote Diversity (MNIRGD). She will be working with her mentors, Dr. Dolores Gallagher-Thompson and Dr. Gwen Yeo from Stanford University, School of Medicine, and will work closely with the Vietnamese American community.

Before receiving the Alzheimer’s Association grant, Ta Park received funding for a qualitative study from SJSU and her college that allowed her to interview mental healthcare providers who work with the Vietnamese population to understand the way they used existing services and the best way to reach clients.

“I found consistently that they recommended incorporating spirituality and the need to ask personal questions as well as allowing them to ask personal questions,” Ta Park said.

Through this input, Ta Park is developing a face-to-face, cognitive behavioral skill training program that will meet at the homes of Vietnamese caregivers in small groups, with five to six caregivers at a time. The participants will be divided into two groups: 30 people in the control group will receive existing resources from the Alzheimer’s Association website that have been translated from English into Vietnamese, and the other 30 will receive newly developed resources that have been created specifically for the program. All participants will be recruited through community organizations that serve local Vietnamese residents.

To support the research, Ta Park has recruited bilingual and bicultural Vietnamese SJSU students to be research assistants.

“I see the language barrier,” Trieu Vy Nguyen, ’16 Health Science student. “There is a lack of resources. I want to be involved to have a positive impact on their quality of life.”

Spring University Scholar Series Launches with Meniketti lecture

Dr. Marco Meniketti works with a then-graduate student Chris Keith, '15 MA Applied Anthropology, on excavating a burial site.

Dr. Marco Meniketti, left, works with a then-graduate student Chris Keith, ’15 MA Applied Anthropology, on excavating a burial site.

Dr. Marco Meniketti, a professor of archaeology in the College of Social Sciences’ anthropology department, will launch the Spring 2016 University Scholar Series (USS) on Feb. 24, from noon to 1 p.m. in MLK 225/229, with a lecture about the intersection of environmental change and the ascendancy of capitalism from the age of exploration through the late Industrial Revolution.

Meniketti has built a robust research portfolio since he attended his first field school in Jamaica at the start of his career when he helped excavate the sunken city of Port Royal, which had been destroyed in 1692 by an earthquake. From there, he participated in a search for the last two ships commanded by Columbus, followed by research in the Cayman Islands and the Caribbean.

“I began to branch out into the study of early colonial systems, slavery and environmental change,” he said.

Meniketti sees archaeological research as providing important lessons from the past about environmental change, labor and economics. His recently published book, Sugar Cane Capitalism and Environmental Transformation (The University of Alabama Press, 2016) explores these themes.

“While the outcomes of the current practices and environmental change may be uncertain in the present, we do know what the outcomes were in the past and, therefore, we may be able to influence the future outcomes or better comprehend the directions we are headed,” he said.

Meniketti actively engages students in field school projects through SJSU’s Faculty-Led Programs, where they are able to gain academic credit while participating in authentic data collection, mapping, artifact analysis, and other related activities in the Caribbean. Meniketti is also engaging students in a field project in Santa Cruz in partnership with the California Department of Parks and Recreation. He regularly attends conferences to report on student findings and the students who have participated in the field schools often continue onto graduate school.

“Archaeology is more than just digging up artifacts,” Meniketti said. “It is a means of exploring our past cultures, behaviors, patterns of settlement and industry, and environment. It is a science that can address everything from ancient technology to issues of social justice.”

Upcoming lectures:

Dr. Ivano Aiello, a professor of geological oceanography with the College of Science Moss Landing Marine Laboratories, on his research of microfossil-rich marine sediments and the information it provides about past climate conditions.

March 23, from noon to 1 p.m., in MLK 225/229

Dr. Janet Stemwedel, a professor and chair of the philosophy department in the College of Humanities and the Arts, will explore the ethical dimensions of being a good scientist that extend beyond avoiding or responding to scientific misconduct in her lecture.

April 20, from noon to 1 p.m., in MLK 255/257

The University Scholars Series is co-sponsored by the Office of the Provost, the University Library and the Spartan Bookstore.