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FOCUS:
Puente Hills Native Habitat Project
FACULTY:
Professor Janet Brodie,
School of the Arts and Humanities
In Southern California, natural habitat is an endangered species. In 1994, The Puente Hills Landfill Native Habitat Preservation Authority in eastern Los Angeles County came into existence to try and change that hard fact. The Habitat Authority manages more than 3,800 acres of native habitat for use and enjoyment of the public.
Led by professor Janet Brodie, and funded by a $60,000 grant, CGU students from the History Department of the School of the Arts and Humanities are assisting the managing board of the Preservation Authority with special projects on environmental history, history of native peoples of the area and a history of settlement and development of the area. These materials will be made available to residents using the park and for educational purposes of the public and local school children.
The team led by Brodie included Rosanne Welch, John Macias and Michael Keating. “We wanted to make the history of the land available as a good point of reference for residents,” said Brodie, “especially for the children who come here to enjoy the land today and in the future.”
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FOCUS:
Boyle Heights Learning Collaborative
FACULTY:
Professor Charles Kerchner,
School of Educational Studies
Fifty years ago, the question for education was, “Why can’t Johnny read?” Today, the question is equally relevant for Juan, who struggles to learn English in a neighborhood  where more than half of the students drop out before finishing high school and where only 4 percent go to a university.
In a long-range evaluation project, Educational Studies Professor Charles Kerchner and doctoral student Laura Mulfinger are working in an east Los Angeles community to document the creation of The Boyle Heights Learning Collaborative, a coalition of educators, parents and grassroots organizations. The collaborative is creating a “culture of literacy” by shocking people with the truth about low achievement, increasing expectations and building the political muscle to turn dreams into reality.
Already, collaborative members have formed an Achievement Academy that equips parents to be advocates for their children as well as their first educators and the Society of Students that arms elementary school students with the skills and resolve to make it through high school. They also began the “Feria del Libro,” a Latino book fair that this year drew 25,000 participants—this in a community that has no bookstores.
Joining Kerchner and Mulfinger are CGU Education faculty member David Drew, current student Susana Santos, and CGU graduates Michelle Tellez, June Hilton, Alejandra Favela, Sara Exposito and Weijiang Zhang.
Not just post mortem evaluators, the team has been involved in the birth of the Collaborative as well as throughout its growth and development. “There are great advantages in evaluating a project from its beginnings,” said Professor Kerchner. “There is much that is learned in the drama and uncertainty of organization building.”
“The greatest pleasure of this research is in interaction with people who are trying to change the circumstances in which they work and learn—people who are realistic enough to know that it is a struggle, but strong enough not to be defeated because of the odds,” said Kerchner.
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FOCUS:
Memories of September 11th
FACULTY:
Professor Kathy Pezdek,
School of Behavioral and Organizational Sciences
“Has it been five years? Really? I will never forget where I was and what I was doing.”
The morning of September 11, 2001, remains absolutely clear in our memories—or does it? Professor Kathy Pezdek conducted research into the memory of that day with three populations at different geographic locations (New York, California and Hawaii) to  examine how personal involvement in a stressful event affects event memories (memory of the external event) and autobiographical memories (memory for the personal circumstances in which one first learned of an event). “This study afforded the opportunity to test if memory for a stressful event is subject to the same distortions that everyday memories suffer from,” said Pezdek. “This issue has important implications to eyewitness memory research and the veracity of witnesses’ accounts of stressful events.”
Inaccuracies in the event and autobiographical memories of those events were revealed through the study. For example, 73% of the participants incorrectly reported that they saw a videotape of the first plane striking the first tower as it happened. In reality, videotapes capturing that part of the day’s events did not surface until much after the attacks had concluded.
Inaccuracies in memory continued on the chronological timing of the events and duration and varied across the groups. As was hypothesized, the New York group’s emotional experience of the actual event memories was more accurately retained than their autobio- graphical memories and differed from the other two groups at a greater “emotional” distance from the events.
“Future research is necessary to understand the conditions under which relatively more of the emotions produced by an event become attached to memory for the event itself versus the autobiographical memory,” said Pezdek.
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FOCUS:
Campus Diversity Initiative Evaluation Project
FACULTY:
Professor Daryl Smith,
School of Educational Studies
In 2000, The James Irvine Foundation funded the Campus Diversity Initiative (CDI) with $29 million to help 22 independent colleges and universities in California address issues of diversity on their campuses. The project had a strong evaluation component.
The CDI Evaluation Project has been a joint effort with Claremont Graduate University and the Association of American Colleges and Universities (AAC&U). Professor Daryl Smith took the role of the lead evaluation designer and co-director with Sharon Parker, senior research associate at CGU; and Alma R. Clayton-Pedersen, vice president for Education & Institutional Renewal at AAC&U.
The evaluation team worked with Irvine CDI campuses to measure successes and to find ways to monitor progress on institutional change and increasing the success of underrepresented students. Additionally, the CDI Evaluation Project was charged to find and communicate new and effective diversity practices for use by all of higher education. The CDI Evaluation Project is has issued three research briefs and its final report and a resource kit.
The resource kit, final report on the impact of the CDI and all three research briefs are now available. A monograph published by AAC&U will be published in the fall.
The first of these reports, “ ‘Unknown’ Students on College Campuses,” was published in December 2005. The second report: “ ‘The Revolving Door’ for Underrepresented Minority Faculty in Higher Education,” was published in April 2006. The final report and executive summary, “Building Capacity, A Study of the Impact of The James Irvine Foundation Campus Diversity Initiative” is now available. These reports can be found at (http://irvine.org/evaluation/ program/cdi.shtml).
The third brief, “Using Multiple Lenses: An Examination of the Racial/ Ethnic and Economic Diversity of College Students,” is available and a book on the research is underway. The resource kit is available online from the Association of American Colleges and Universities at (www.aacu.org/irvineediveval).
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FOCUS:
Institute For Signifying Scriptures
FACULTY:
Professor Vincent Wimbush,
School of Religion
The recently established Institute For Signifying Scriptures (ISS), directed by Professor Vincent Wimbush, raises questions and issues about “scriptures.” The focus is less about the content meaning of “scriptures,” more about “scriptures” as a phenomenon in societies and cultures. The ISS focuses on transdisciplinary research about what work human societies make scriptures do for them.
The Henry Luce Foundation, Inc. (New York) has recognized the importance of this research and its implications for our current world with a recent grant of $300,000 to further strengthen the research of the ISS on scriptures in terms of rituals,  performances, texts, art, music and power dynamics.
Professor Wimbush underscored the importance of this grant to the ISS: “This generous grant from the Luce Foundation will allow us to continue our effort to model a different approach to the study of religion. We must fathom the psychology, sociology, anthropology, the material-expressive criticism, the politics embedded in the phenomenon of ‘scriptures.’ ”
The ISS, originally established at Claremont with a grant from the Ford Foundation, is the only research institute of its kind in the United States. Staffed by graduate students in various fields in Claremont, the ISS continues to experiment with different projects, initiatives and approaches. Nearly 100 scholars from all over the world participate in the conversations, programs and initiatives facilitated by the ISS as research associates.
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