From the Director…

Commencement represents the most significant event of the year for our students, their families, friends and our faculty.  For students, it is a passage from academics to new career paths, more responsibility, and new challenges.  I join with Dr. Rene Dahl, CAD Coordinator, the CAD Council, and all our staff at the Marian Wright Edelman Institute in congratulating our 60 graduates and honoring them for the choice they have made in preparing themselves to be educators.

Your responsibility is awesome in its ability to significantly impact the development and thus the future of young children.  We all hope you will stay connected to each other, to your University and to advances in the field because you are the future leaders. Faculty in the Child And Adolescent Development Program will be looking to you as role models for future CAD students.

To support you in your continuing education, we at the Institute will be hosting a series of conferences, panel discussions and speakers on policy, leadership, childcare, and other issues that will support you in your new roles.  These events will also provide you with opportunities for networking with other educators in the community.  We hope you will complete the alumnae information form located on the CAD website (http://cad.sfsu.edu/) so that we can contact you about these events and continue to assist you in addressing the needs of the children, youth and families you will be working with in the future. 

We thank you for challenging us, making us grow and expanding our horizons, and we wish you the best for a happy, productive, and successful future.

-- Charlotte Ferretti

Mini-Grant Awards Announced

The Marian Wright Edelman Institute is pleased to announce the three recipients of its first Mini-Grant Competition.  The competition yielded a total of nine exceptional, worthy and thought-provoking proposals from seven departments and six colleges, making the selection process a difficult challenge.  Because of limited funding, however, the Institute was able to give awards only to those proposals that most clearly met our stated guidelines and addressed our initiatives.  The selected recipients are: 

"Youth to Youth Dissemination and Promotion of HIV/AIDS and Other Health-Related Prevention Via International Technology Projects Using Peer Education Models" -- $10,000 -- Michael Ritter, Derethia DuVal and Ann Auleb, Co-PI's.  This project addresses the Edelman Institute initiative for its Global Learning Center: the marketing and promotion of international technology projects that impact youth, health and education.  Funding will cover phase one of this two-phase project with the end-goal of establishing global youth to youth HIV/AIDS prevention networks utilizing five established Community Information Centers in Kenya.  These centers, a partnership project of the Global Learning Center and WiRED International, provide instruction and training, guidance and advice, contacts and support for dissemination of information on health-related issues.  This mini-grant project lays the necessary groundwork by providing an initial forum for the establishment of an HIV/AIDS-educated core cadre of Kenyan and SFSU peer educators at the International AIDS Conference in Barcelona.

"Addressing Trauma Confronted by Children and Adolescents: An Educational Intervention" -- $5,500 -- John P. Elia and Roma Guy, Co-PI's, is a new project that definitively speaks to Institute's three-fold mission.  This project will systematically investigate and then address through workshops if or how the elementary and secondary credential programs at SFSU provide training and/or information pertaining to all forms of trauma from which children and adolescents suffer on a daily basis — accidents, athletics injuries, domestic violence, physical violence, head trauma, divorce, gang activities, immigrating from war-torn countries or from refugee camps, being of gender and sexual minority status, neglect, childhood sexual abuse, homelessness and chronic and terminal childhood illnesses.  The project includes a thorough evaluation component and will result in a resource list consisting of key readings, websites and community resources that will be distributed broadly to programs and departments at SFSU.  The results of the project will position the investigative team to develop a larger, more in-depth community action research project and curricular development.

"Collecting Narratives from Native-Speakers of Spanish as part of The First Amendment Project" -- $4,500 -- Adela Robles-Saez, PI.  This project addresses the Edelman Institute mini-grant initiative for the SHINE/SAIL literacy project: developing models for project-based work using the "Learners' Lives as Curriculum" model in community settings.  This project will contribute to the initiative by collecting narratives from a wide range of Hispanic community members in the Bay Area on the topic of "Speaking Up to Authority" (the First Amendment Project's topic of choice).  The project will send specially trained bilingual SFSU students into the community to elicit, transcribe and translate narratives from native speakers.  The resulting narratives will form part of the First Amendment Project's pool of narratives with the purpose of creating curriculum for ESL and SSL and the "Learner's Lives as Curriculum" model.