Faculty

Excellence in Teaching (Tenure-Track)

Molly McManus

Assistant Professor, Department of Child & Adolescent Development

Molly E. McManus began her career in education as a bilingual early elementary school teacher in Oakland and San Francisco. In the classroom, she developed a deep respect for and curiosity around the sophisticated knowledge and capabilities that young Latinx children from immigrant families demonstrate when offered culturally sustaining, agentic learning opportunities. This respect and curiosity carry over into her teaching and learning with undergraduates in the Department of Child & Adolescent Development, where Molly designs learning opportunities that center students own developmental experiences as an entry point into exploring the cultural nature of development and its connections to practice and advocacy.

McManus earned her Ph.D. in Educational Psychology with a concentration in Human Development and Learning Sciences and completed a post-doctoral research fellowship with the Agency and Young Children Research Collective at the University of Texas at Austin. Her scholarship centers the perspectives of young children of color and focuses on the cultural nature of learning and development. McManus investigates the impact of different school-learning experiences on young children of color, particularly considering how young Latinx children of immigrants identify as learners and understand the process of learning. She explores the social, academic, cultural and linguistic implications of these learning experiences from the perspectives of young children themselves and examine how teachers and systems shape the type and quality of children’s learning experiences. Her scholarship has been published in a range of journals including Harvard Educational Review, Teachers College Record, Contemporary Issues in Early Childhood Education, Anthropology and Education Quarterly and Perspectives on Early Childhood Psychology and Education.

Excellence in Teaching (Lecturer)

Hamida Nusrat 

Lecturer, Clinical Laboratory Science Program

Hamida Nusrat teaches, trains and mentors Clinical Laboratory Science (CLS) and Public Health Microbiology (PHM) interns and works as a public health microbiologist at Solano County Public Health Lab. She earned her M.S./Ph.D. in Clinical Microbiology and Immunology from the University of Karachi, Pakistan, and holds dual faculty positions in the CLS Program at SF State and in the Post-Baccalaureate Program at UC Berkeley. Nusrat has always been inspired by biomedical sciences and their relevance in day-to-day life and is passionate about training students in various disciplines of clinical and public health microbiology on new methodologies of innovative diagnostic assays. She received 14 enthusiastic nominations for this award from students based on her performance in course design and pedagogy, teaching effectiveness and student development.

Nusrat has been a member of the American Society for Microbiology (ASM) since 2003 and of Northern California-ASM (NCASM) since 2008. She has served at NCASM in various leadership roles over the years and has been actively involved in the Board and Planning Committee meetings for making revisions for uplifting the organization. In her strategic position as the LabAspire Public Health Laboratory Director (PHLD) Training Program coordinator, affiliated with California Department of Public Health (CDPH), she networks with public health microbiology experts from Ukiah to San Diego, schedules meetings with state and county public health agencies, tracks and maintains training documents for the PHLD fellows, and prepares and submits the annual grant budget for the LabAspire PHLD Training Program. She is also actively involved in the training and certification of PHM interns through CDPH.

Excellence in Scholarship

Kate Hamel

Professor, Department of Kinesiology

Kate Hamel earned her P.hD. in Biomechanics and Locomotion Studies with a minor in Gerontology from Pennsylvania State University in 2002. Her broad interdisciplinary background in engineering, kinesiology, biomechanics and gerontology led to her current research program, the MAREY Lab, which is primarily focused on age-related changes in sensory systems and cognitive processes and how these changes impact the biomechanics of gait and balance in older adults.

The MAREY Lab conducts state-of-the-art research in the areas of biomechanics, motor learning and development, motor control, visual perception, gerontology and rehabilitation and provides research training opportunities for SF State students that are comparable in rigor to what they might receive at a R1 institution. These opportunities are grounded in developing self-efficacy and mastery in the research process and provide exposure and opportunity for a student population that is often marginalized in more traditional research settings. For many of the students, these experiences are critical to their development — they often have no exposure to research prior to participating in the lab and may never have considered the doors that it can open and the opportunities it can provide in terms of their future careers.

Hamel has mentored more than 75 undergraduate and graduate students through her research group, and over 80 percent have been women, students of color and/or students from disadvantaged backgrounds. Nearly all the undergraduate students from her lab have gone on to graduate or professional degree programs and many of her graduate students have continued on to Ph.D., DPT, DO, MD and PA programs, with a handful going on to manage research labs themselves. She has also provided research experience and laboratory training for hundreds of undergraduate and graduate students in the MAREY Lab through the courses that she teaches, including KIN 437/747, KIN 680, KIN 730 and KIN 736.

Excellence in Service

Anthony Mayo

Lecturer, Department of Kinesiology

Anthony Mayo has been a part of the Department of Kinesiology at SF State since earning his master's degree in 2003. He was a lecturer from 2006-2009, went to earn his Ph.D. at the University of Minnesota, and then returned as a lecturer in 2013 as a lecturer. In addition to teaching many of the department’s core, emphasis and senior classes over the years,Mayo has gone above and beyond in offering his service to the department, most prominently in his role as an advisor for the Kinesiology Student Association (KSA).

The KSA offers several career-focused events through the year (e.g., career nights, graduate school extravaganza), puts on the department’s research expo and plans and executes the department's recognition ceremony. Mayo has worked significantly to help KSA and its officers succeed. He attends all the meetings for the organization, offers feedback on events, connects students with speakers and networking opportunities, provides ideas for their year-long agenda and keeps them on track as they work toward their goals. 

Mayo has been a mentor and advocate for more than 25 students over the past five years, many of them first-generation college students who need guidance with navigating the University system, figuring out prerequisites for graduate school and determining the experiences needed to get into a program. Mayo helps them with this process, including meeting to talk about their career plans, editing drafts of their personal statements and resumes and discussing specific ways that they can strengthen their applications to allied health graduate programs. These students have gone on to physical therapy school, occupational therapy school, chiropractic school and medical school, among others, and at top schools across the country.

Excellence in Teaching Award (Tenured/Tenure-Track)

Linda Platas, Child & Adolescent Development

Associate Professor of Child & Adolescent Development Linda Platas received the Excellence in Teaching Award for tenured faculty in recognition of her broad range of accomplishments. Her primary areas of research are child development, early childhood education, early math and literacy development, professional development and teacher education, and the formation and implementation of early childhood public policy.

Platas has taught nine courses in child development, curriculum, early childhood education, professional development, research and public policy in the Department of Child. & Adolescent Development. Her experience includes 14 years of working directly with children and families as a teacher and director of an early childhood program.

Internationally, she has worked on preschool and early primary grades population-level child assessment and classroom observation instruments. She has also worked with ministries of education in low-resource countries on school readiness, curriculum development, early math and literacy assessments, and classroom quality measurement.

She serves as an expert in international meetings on early mathematics and literacy development for UNESCO, the World Health Organization, UNICEF, the World Bank, and other non-governmental organizations. She is also a member of the Expert Panel that developed the Early Grades Math Assessment (EGMA) for USAID, the Technical Advisory Group for Child Development and Learning for UNESCO, and the Development and Research in Early Mathematics Education (DREME) Network.

Excellence in Teaching Award (Lecturers)

Deborah Craig, Public Health

Deborah Craig of the Department of Public Health received the Excellence in Teaching Award for lecturers. She received the strongest nomination from students for lecturer faculty regarding the exemplary quality and impact of her achievements in pedagogy. Her background is in public health, teaching, writing, technology, music and the visual arts, and she currently teaches writing and LGBTQI health in the Department of Public Health at SF State. She also produces documentary films about health issues, such as HIV/AIDS and LGBT aging.

Craig has designed “LGBTQI Health: Health Disparities and Sexual/Gender Minority Communities,” an undergraduate health education course that focuses on how stigmatization of queer communities contributes to health disparities, and “Introduction to Public Health,” an overview of public health advances and public health concepts — with a focus on health disparities — geared specifically toward the post-baccalaureate pre-medical students in SF States’ Health Professions program.

She also teaches “The Health Education Profession,” an undergraduate Health Education course that provides an overview of the health education profession and emphasizes writing and analytical skills.

Excellence in Service Award

Sheldon Gen, Public Affairs & Civic Engagement

Associate Professor Sheldon Gen of the School of Public Affairs and Civic Engagement was awarded the College’s Excellence in Service Award for his dedication to service activities that impact student success and enhance the SF State community. His courses cover public policy processes, civic engagement in public policy, policy analysis, program evaluation, environmental policy and education policy. He also advises MPA students in the public policy and environmental administration emphases.

Gen has been instrumental in serving in ways that impact student success, most significantly through his work on the Teagle Initiative at SF State, which supports enhancing student success through curricular revisions. He served as a faculty lead for this initiative in his own department and was then selected to lead this initiative throughout the CSU system. 

He has also been instrumental in promoting sustainability education. He led the development of a Student Sustainability Investment Fund and the development of an associated course. Through this course, and a $250,000 allocation to the fund, students will be able to direct the investment of real funds for sustainability initiatives.

In addition, he is an Advisory Board member of the Funding the Next Generation project, which has brought community expertise onto campus. This project has been linked to six different MPA course sections and provided students with opportunities to analyze municipal budgets, assess political settings for children's funds and explore alternative funding streams for children. 

Excellence in Scholarship Award

Emma Sanchez-Vaznaugh, Public Health

The College presented Professor Emma Sanchez-Vaznaugh with the Excellence in Scholarship award for her support of student-initiated research that evolves above and beyond the requirements for a degree. A social epidemiologist and professor in SF State’s Department of Public Health, Sanchez-Vaznaugh is also affiliated faculty at SF State’s Health Equity Institute and the Center for Health Equity at UCSF.

Her extensive research has focused on critical social justice issues in public health based on factors such as race, ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation, and local community factors. She has been a generous mentor to many students in her department, and several of them have been authors on publications and presentations. Her recent research has been funded by the NIH and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, and involves studies on temporal changes in the fast food environment near schools, the influence of policies that regulate food and drinks in schools on racial or ethnic obesity disparities, and decision-making focused on physical activity strategies in schools.

San Francisco State University’s College of Health & Social Sciences presented its Faculty Excellence Awards at the College’s Fall Opening Meeting on August 26. These awards were established to underscore the College’s deep commitment to excellence in teaching, scholarship and service.

Each awardee received $750 and a certificate signed by Dean Alvin Alvarez and Associate Dean John Elia. Student research assistants also received award certificates and a gift from the College. (Faculty award winners are pictured below with Associate Dean John Elia.)

Excellence in Teaching Award

Associate Professor of Recreation, Parks & Tourism Pavlína Látková received the Excellence in Teaching Award for tenured faculty in recognition of her broad range of accomplishments. Her teaching and research interests are in community-based tourism, international development, sustainable travel and resident attitudes towards tourism development. Látková shares her enthusiasm and dedication to the subject by incorporating different teaching methods including group projects, guest lectures and field trip activities.

When she is not discussing sustainable tourism efforts with her class in Costa Rica during spring break, coordinating the 400-hour culminating internship experience for graduating seniors, organizing student retreats each semester and planning the semi-annual career fair, you can find her preparing to implement new curriculum and pedagogical ideas. Her creative instructional contributions include RPT 605: Ecotourism Principles and Practices and RPT 470: Travel with Purpose — a faculty-led, study abroad program.

More than 20 students collaborated on Látková’s nomination. They described her as an inspiring professor and mentor who genuinely cares for and supports her students, always showing great commitment in helping them successfully accomplish what they set out to achieve.

Ana Maria Barrera of the Department of Kinesiology received the Excellence in Teaching Award for lecturers. Her interest and passion revolves around social justice and supporting underrepresented populations, and her instruction focuses on reflective and dynamic learning processes that maximize student learning and foster cooperative and collaborative learning environments. Barrera recently developed a new course that instantly became an essential foundation for the successful educational and developmental experience for kinesiology students to ultimately become self-sufficient lifelong learners.

Through appreciative advising, Barrera helps students realize their potential and use their strengths as resources. She strongly believes that students become empowered when someone listens to them and cares about their well-being and needs as they navigate higher education. Barrera started her department’s peer advising program, and has also developed several long-term and systematic advising strategies to enhance the quality of advising. Her talents have been recognized at the University level and she was appointed as a member of the Dream Resource Center Advisory Board for undocumented students. Her passion for diverse and underserved populations is also evident in her doctoral dissertation topic, which focused on documenting undocumented students’ experiences in higher education and how such experiences impact their academic success and fulfillment.

Excellence in Service Award

Associate Professor Jackson Wilson of the Department of Recreation, Parks & Tourism was awarded the College’s inaugural Excellence in Service Award for his dedication to service activities that impact student success and enhance the SF State community. Wilson has a strong commitment to directly cultivating practical knowledge and skills to enable students to achieve their professional goals and help them become better citizens. He teaches graduate and undergraduate classes in research methods, leadership, organization management and information technology.

Wilson has been a faculty fellow for Quality Learning and Teaching (QLT) since 2015 and currently serves as the lead faculty fellow. He continues to serve as a faculty researcher in a CSU-wide online education research project (SQuAIR), serves as a faculty fellow with the Center for Equity and Excellence in Teaching and Learning, co-chairs one of the AMP working groups and serves on SF State’s Enrollment Management Committee. At the college level, Dr. Wilson has served on the Leave with Pay Committee and the Elections Committee and on the FINA RTP committee. He is also the department graduate coordinator and leads the multi-campus Master of Science in Recreation, Parks & Tourism collaboration with two other CSU campuses.

Excellence in Scholarship Award

The College awarded Assistant Professor of Sociology and Sexuality Studies Valerie Francisco-Menchavez the Excellence in Scholarship award for her support of student-initiated research that evolves above and beyond the requirements for a degree. She provided opportunities for students Stephanie Ancheta, Jessa Delos Reyes, Katrina Liwanag, Tiffany Mendoza and Jeannel Poyaoan to assist in data collection and analysis by training them in qualitative and quantitative research methods, such as interviewing respondents, conducting focus groups and administering surveys. Together as a group, they wrote a co-authored peer-reviewed publication, “Claiming Kapwa: Filipino Immigrants, Community Based Organizations and Community Citizenship in San Francisco,” which was presented at UC Davis’ inaugural Filipino American political symposium in 2018, the CHSS Annual Showcase in 2018 and the SOMA Pilipinas Community Network gathering in 2019.

As an educator, Francisco-Menchavez continues to develop her pedagogy to engage students’ ideas and spirit in learning how to analyze the world of sociology. She does this by preparing her courses with a global perspective and preparing a range of learning activities in and outside of her classroom that cultivate students’ ability to think critically about the complex times we live in and in their potential to change the world.

SF State researchers created a new software tool for evaluating health content on universities’ health center websites

The project was led by a team composed of San Francisco State Associate Professors Anagha Kulkarni from Computer Science, Venoo Kakar and Sepideh Modrek from Economics, Anastasia Smirnova from Linguistics and Carrie Holschuh from Nursing, along with their students.

Modrek says that colleges formerly based their student health policies on the residential models of the 1950s and 1960s, which were predominantly for male students living on campus. Since then, campus demographics have changed dramatically, as have the health care and contraception landscapes. The researchers wanted to know if universities were keeping up with the changing times.

The answer: it depends. Focusing on public four-year universities in the United States, the team used a newly developed software tool to look for information about condoms, pap tests, long-acting reversible contraception (LARC) and injectables on universities’ health center websites. Of the 545 schools assessed, 66% had some information about contraception. Kakar added that these results can be visualized on an interactive map hosted on her website.

Further analysis revealed that schools with higher female student populations were more likely to have accessible contraception information, while schools with more low-income students (based on Pell grant recipients) were less likely. Information about LARCs/injectables was significantly more common at schools offering medical degrees.

“I think that the map was not surprising,” said Modrek. “It’s what you expected, but it’s a stark reminder that these disparities — beyond the [topics of gender and income discussed in the paper] — are [also] regional. The same places that now want to ban abortions offer limited information on contraception to students.”

These findings were published in Contraception Journal. A second paper by the team, published in JMIR Formative Research, describes the software tool they developed for the study, called Quantitative Measures of Online Health Information (QMOHI). The researchers’ goal is not that all schools should present the same information, Modrek explains, but to encourage schools to continuously evaluate and update websites to meet students’ needs.

“Talking about [these resources] is important because it will reduce the barriers that students have to access contraceptive care or reproductive health in general,” said Kakar.

Although the researchers are focusing on contraception, the team hopes that QMOHI can be applied more broadly.

“There isn’t anything like QMOHI out there — at least not in the open source, free-to-use public domain — where the public health researcher can simply give the software a list of universities that they want to study and the topic that they want to study at these universities,” said Kulkarni. Her lab spearheaded the development of QMOHI, which assesses online information based on eight quality metrics, including navigability, prevalence, coverage and readability.

The software is currently limited to assessing student health center websites. But Kulkarni would love to expand it to other health topics on other websites or see it used beyond health care for social topics like critical race theory.

However, Modrek notes that it’s no coincidence that this team chose to study contraceptive health. An interdisciplinary team of female faculty led the project.

“As you bring more female scholars into data science and computer science, you ask questions that are relevant to different populations,” explained Modrek.

Kakar agrees, noting that this project would not have been possible without each of these faculty and their expertise. “It makes me think that such projects exemplify the essence of SF State, the interdisciplinary nature of things and how we innovate more when we talk to each other and not live in our silos,” said Kakar.

Source: SF State News

Program

Jump to specific time in video:

• Introduction by Dean Alvarez
• "A phenomenological study of critical aspects of pandemic academic work," by Mickey Eliason
• Moderator and Panelist Introductions
• Panel Discussion
• Q&A

Panelists

Gretchen L. George, Ph.D., RDN, ACUE (moderator)

Associate Professor of Nutrition & Dietetics, FINA

Gretchen L. George is passionate about prevention and empowerment. In her position as associate professor of Nutrition and Dietetics and program lead in the Family, Interiors, Nutrition & Apparel Department at SF State, she facilitates learning through nutrition education, metabolism, community nutrition and research courses. In the classroom she includes students in her food literacy and basic needs research on the community and college student. More recently she has begun exploring weight stigma in health-related majors from a social justice perspective, with the overall goal of eliminating weight bias in health professionals through incorporation of intuitive eating models in the classroom. Beyond the focus on eliminating weight bias, an imperative goal of hers is to strengthen the understanding of what health means, connecting individual, trauma, access, environment, and biological mechanisms to dispel stigmatizing false information. In her free time, Dr. George lectures for Stanford Healthy Living, part of the BeWell Program, enjoys hiking, and loves traveling with her family.  

Julie Chronister, Ph.D.

Professor, Counseling

Julie Chronister is a professor in the Department of Counseling at SF State and a faculty member in the Clinical Mental Health Counseling program. She is a committed teacher, scholar and advocate who has published over 50 peer-reviewed articles, book chapters and books. Dr. Chronister has received funding from NIMH to conduct research in the area of social support and serious mental illness and has been awarded training grants from the RSA to provide scholarships for her students. She is committed to improving the lives of the most marginalized and stigmatized communities through her research, teaching, and community partnerships.

Dr. Chronister received her Ph.D. from the University of Wisconsin, Madison in 2004 and has been writing and conducting research in the areas of social support, coping, caregiving, serious mental illness and disability for more than a decade. She is also a co-editor of the book, Understanding Psychosocial Adjustment to Chronic illness and Disability, and has presented at mre than 50 national conferences. Dr. Chronister is on the editorial board of several top-tier peer-reviewed journals and is currently a CALPCC board member.

Dr. Chronister recently received a behavioral health workforce grant from DHHS to fund the Equity and Justice-Focused Integrated Behavioral Health Counselor Training Project, of which she is the principal investigator. The project aims to increase the supply of counselors trained to work in integrated behavioral health settings from an equity and justice-focused orientation. A primary aim of the project is to strengthen relationships with community health centers that provide services to the most underserved, including our communities of color and other communities that have been harmed by our health care system.

Ruby N. Turalba, MPH

Lecturer, Public Health

Ruby Turalba is a child of immigrants from La Union, Philippines. She is an educator, ally, and mentor who describes herself as a scholar practitioner working for community, health and justice. She has been teaching public health at SF State since 2010, and her teaching practices integrate cultural humility, liberation education and personal narratives to explore social and health inequities. She has served 2000+ undergraduates, many who are low-income, immigrant, and first-generation college students of color. She regularly infuses class time with health and wellness, self-reflexivity and relationship building.

Much of her community work centers on the health and wellness of the Filipino community, particularly in the South of Market area. In partnership with a local organization, she recently conducted a Community-Based Participatory Action Research project working with multi-generational, multilingual community health ambassadors to improve health among Filipino residents of San Francisco. While the primary focus was on chronic diseases, the project pivoted in response to the pandemic and included COVID-19/vaccine education, distribution of basic needs to seniors and families, as well as mental health and community support while in lockdown. The opportunity also provided workforce development and employment opportunities especially during economic uncertainty. The initiative was truly a collaborative effort among Filipino residents, scholars, activists, and entrepreneurs embodying the spirit of Bayanihan/community and kapwa/connection.

She previously worked in tobacco prevention within school, community, and health department agencies and is now working on a project that focuses on the development of students’ self-confidence, positive identity, and sense of belonging in relation to their participation in a Filipino language program at their school. She is also currently pursuing an educational doctorate and is a research consultant for the South of Market Community Action Network, a non-profit serving Filipinos in San Francisco.

Stephanie Windle, DNP, RN, CNE

Assistant Professor, Nursing

Stephanie Windle is an assistant professor in the School of Nursing at SF State. She received her Doctor of Nursing Practice degree from the University of San Francisco and her MSN and BSN from the University of Wisconsin. She teaches psychiatric mental health nursing and integrates holistic health content and healing practices in the curriculum.

Her research focus is on teaching guided imagery in undergraduate nursing education and teaching stress management skills to nurses and nursing students. She teaches guided imagery and relaxation techniques in our skills lab to give students a chance to both experience and provide those practices. She also chairs the School of Nursing Success and Wellness Committee and provides brief stress management tips in the weekly School of Nursing newsletter. Dr. Windle also works with horses and has an equine therapy practice that harnesses the power of horses for healing, growth and insight.

Roberts joined the faculty at SF State in 2005 after spending 22 years of her career in the field. A Fulbright scholar, she joined the ranks of higher education from the National Park Service, where her employment stemmed from a graduate internship in the Intermountain Region while completing her Ph.D. at Colorado State University. At SF State, her leadership positions included serving as director of the Pacific Leadership Institute and, most recently, as the current faculty director of the Institute for Civic & Community Engagement.

Roberts was a prolific researcher and author of numerous publications in areas including outdoor programming and leadership, youth development, and race/culture and gender issues. She conducted youth development research with a variety of organizations, including the U.S. Forest Service, Golden Gate National Parks Conservancy and East Bay Regional Parks. Roberts also served on numerous boards, including Yosemite Institute, GirlVentures, UC Berkeley’s Institute for Parks, People, and Biodiversity and the Lawrence Hall of Science.

Memorial information will be available on the Department of Recreation, Parks & Tourism’s tribute page to Roberts.

Find out about the Dr. Nina Roberts Memorial Scholarship Endowment Fund.

Project will examine post-COVID 19 migrations among Filipino care workers

San Francisco State University Associate Professor of Sociology Valerie Francisco-Menchavez received a Fulbright U.S. Scholar Program award for a project titled “Migrant Care Workers and Multinational Migrations in the COVID-19 Global Context,” which considers how multinational migration strategies might shift in response to the demand for care workers globally and the restrictions that arise from the pandemic. During the Spring 2022 semester, Francisco-Menchavez will examine the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic on migration aspirations for Filipinos in the Visayas region of the Philippines. Her work will be based out of the University of San Carlos in Cebu.

The Fulbright project builds on Francisco-Menchavez’s previous research, including her award-winning 2018 book “The Labor of Care,” in which she explored how migration shapes the lives of Filipina migrants in the U.S. and their families in the Philippines. Her current research has focused on Filipino migrants working as caregivers in the Bay Area during the COVID-19 pandemic.

“My past research program is concerned about similar topics but has dealt with the matter after Filipinos have arrived to the U.S.,” Francisco-Menchavez said. “This study proposes to examine the various processes and institutions Filipinos interact with before they migrate, to consider how these factors shape their migratory journeys, especially within the conditions of a pandemic that is demanding their labor globally.”

While most migration research in the Philippines has focused on urban centers such as Metro-Manila, Francisco-Menchavez will conduct her research from Cebu City to explore the types of labor migration patterns that emerge from the Visayas, a region that is an emerging migration hub. She will study how mechanisms and processes of pre-migration decision-making and multinational migrations are made among Visayan families with overseas worker migration histories and in response to the global pandemic.

As she did in her earlier ethnographic study of Filipino transnational life, Francisco-Menchavez will use qualitative research methods including participant observation, interviews and what she calls “kuwentuhan,” a type of focus group that revolves around a Filipino cultural practice of exchanging important details through talk-story.

“The global COVID-19 pandemic has reorganized public health, care work and health services,” Francisco-Menchavez said. “Filipino care workers have been lauded as global essential workers while statistics show an unprecedented rate in deaths because of their work on the frontlines. In the United States, one out of four Filipinos work in the health care industry as nurses, caregivers to the elderly, and personal attendants. The unprecedented global pandemic will undoubtedly call on more Filipino migrants in the care industry all over the world. And while Filipino care workers have been a historic, formidable migratory population, the aftermath of the pandemic will surely reorganize their lives, as well.”

The Fulbright Program is the flagship international educational exchange program sponsored by the U.S. government. It is designed to forge lasting connections between the people of the United States and the people of other countries, counter misunderstandings and help people and nations work together toward common goals.

Participants in the Task Force on Teaching 2019 Summer Retreat (left to right): Associate Dean John Elia, Nicole Corrales (Associate Dean’s Office), Wei Ming Dariotis (Center for Equity and Excellence in Teaching and Learning), Carrie Holschuh (Nursing), Maria Veri (Kinesiology), Valerie Francisco-Menchavez (Sociology/Sexuality Studies) and Sheldon Gen (Public Affairs & Civic Engagement)

One thing many faculty members benefit from is the sense of community and camaraderie they find during chance meetings in the hallways or in face-to-face meetings, in which they hear about others’ experiences and find new inspiration and ideas. With courses at San Francisco State University moved online for the fall semester due to COVID-19, Associate Professor of Kinesiology Maria Veri and many other instructors at the College of Health & Social Sciences (CHSS) are worried about the loss of those valuable in-person interactions.

One solution they are hoping to keep advancing is the CHSS Teaching Academy. The academy was launched in the fall of 2019; it arose out of the CHSS Task Force on Teaching begun by Dean Alvin Alvarez (then associate dean) when the college was reorganized, and it was continued by Associate Dean John Elia.

“It kept coming back to me that we needed not just a task force but an actual long-term plan for how to help faculty at every level — as graduate teaching assistants, lecturers, assistant professors, associate professors, professors,” says Elia. “The goal was to support super-effective teaching on the part of faculty. A lot of college teachers receive no pedagogical or teacher training at all, and the idea was to develop a mini-academy within our college that can serve the faculty well.”

A plan comes to fruition

In the spring of 2019, Veri says, she and other members of the task force, Elia, and a faculty member with the Center for Equity and Excellence in Teaching and Learning (CEETL), held a retreat and began putting those ideas into action, creating a three-year plan.

“We wanted to provide a sense of community among everyone teaching in the College, to establish mentoring relationships, help new lecturers, grad students just getting into teaching, even faculty on the tenure track,” she says. One of the main goals for the academy is to foster a culture of inclusive teaching practices and a social justice pedagogy, Veri explains. “We also want to cultivate faculty engagement and retention and a sense of belonging and to develop a repository of resources, as well as to foster teachers as lifelong learners.”

The Teaching Academy launched with three one-and-a-half-hour workshops, facilitated by faculty experts throughout the University. Topics included developing a self-reflective teaching practice (pictured), designing a social justice syllabus and developing a presence in the classroom. The classroom presence workshop, led by Amy Kilgard, professor and department chair of Communications Studies, gave people exercises to help their presentation style, including posture and practicing tongue twisters and modulating pitch and speed of speech.

Remote teaching brings unforeseen challenges

With courses moved online, Veri says, faculty members need even more support. “Not only are they having to teach in a way that could be partly new to them, but they’re doing so in a time of anxiety and possibly trauma. The same is true for students, and we need help being more compassionate with them too.”

Associate Professor of Sociology Valerie Francisco-Menchavez, a member of the teaching task force who serves as the college-level facilitator for the Faculty Learning Community (FLC) for tenure-track faculty, agrees that the Teaching Academy can be more helpful now than ever, as new challenges have cropped up with online teaching. “One day you might have had a really ‘off’ class where you ran into someone in the hallway and explained that you really bombed it and compared notes. You could think through the everyday challenges we have in the classroom together. But what do you do when you lose your students midway through shelter-in-place and then they pop up again in the last week, for example?”

Teaching can be a very isolated experience, Francisco-Menchavez points out, but the academy can help keep them connected. “You go to your own office, plan your course, and go and teach it again,” she says. “You carry the burden of designing the course and helping students meet learning objectives. The idea of the academy is that teaching has to be collective, that many educators are better than one.”

Francisco-Menchavez says she “re-mixes” ideas from other teachers, not only college teachers, sometimes even from K-12 teachers. “You can have Ph.D.s, but that doesn’t make you a better teacher, it doesn’t give you a community to make you a better teacher.” The academy crosses all ranks, she says. “Sometimes lecturers in our department are some of the best teachers. Even though they’re often in a precarious position they are not saddled with the commitments tenure-track professors are. They may be precarious in the eyes of the institution, but to us, they are our peers, and our students are inspired by them in the classroom.” She hopes the academy will also draw out long term professors that haven’t redesigned a course in over ten years. “You don’t have to change everything, but maybe you can change one thing,” she says. “We want to support all of those folks.”

Veri hopes the academy workshops will give people specific techniques to use in their teaching practice, and tangible goals to work toward. “How can I redesign a syllabus so that it’s more equitable; how can I use language that creates a stronger sense of belonging for students?” she asks.

Looking towards the future

Veri says that although continued funding for the academy could be a challenge during the uncertain times ahead, she plans to move it forward as much as she can. She wants to set up a website with teaching and pedagogical resources, as well as materials from the workshops, and will link it with CEETL’s website. She also hopes to conduct a series of interviews, probably via Zoom, with instructors in the college about their online teaching experiences this past spring. “Questions I plan to ask include what was hardest, what went really well, what do you miss about the semester, what are you planning for the fall with online teaching? Do you have a new digital strategy? How do you establish a sense of community for students online?” she asks.

Carrie Holschuh, assistant professor in the School of Nursing, and another member of the teaching task force who helps advise the Teaching Academy, says one perpetual challenge for faculty — whether courses are held online or in the classroom — is to find the time, with everything else on their plates, to focus on personal growth and development. Holschuh attended last year’s workshops and found them worth her time. She thinks the focus on developing social justice curricula is timely as well. “We have so many amazing teachers and educators in CHSS. My hope — and I’m really excited about this — is that we can support the community more broadly in the College that supports our shared goal of social justice — it’s paramount.”

Associate Professor Emma Sanchez-Vaznaugh (Photo by Jim Block)

Trained as a preschool teacher in Mexico, Sanchez-Vaznaugh, now an SF State associate professor of health education, immigrated to the U.S. to join family members and had only recently learned English herself, through City College’s ESL program. But with her education and growing language fluency, she was able help more recent migrants tackle immediate needs, including health issues like locating affordable doctors and vaccines. The resources her clients needed weren’t always available.

As soon as she’d help one family, there was always another family, a new crisis. The endless cycle of need might have driven some people to burn out, but Sanchez-Vaznaugh — who understood the isolation of not knowing the language — loved the work and was inspired by the resiliency of the people she served. She started thinking about how she might make a bigger impact.

That impact turned out to be a public health career launched, and later anchored, at SF State’s College of Health & Social Sciences. Public health policy, she soon discovered, was her path to a broader impact: How could society — schools and communities, cities and states — narrow the health disparities she’d observed between the low-income, minority communities like the migrant families she served and the broader population? What levers could be pulled to narrow the gap between rich and poor on key health indicators like high obesity rates and low physical activity rates — and the litany of health problems that can accompany those indicators?

While she didn’t start out with a plan, her widely published and often cited research has already impacted generations of students, programs and policies focused on health disparities. From co-writing a seminal paper that helped get snack machines removed from public schools to serving on the National Institute of Medicine’s Committee on Physical Activity and Physical Education in the School Environment, Sanchez-Vaznaugh is a thought leader in the field.

An SF State connection blossoms

The bridge from direct service to policy research arrived in the person of Zoe Cardoza Clayson, an SF State health education professor who’d been assigned to conduct an evaluation of the migrant-family agency where Sanchez-Vaznaugh worked. The two worked closely on a survey of client satisfaction, and a public health researcher was born.

“I loved the whole process of designing the survey, collecting the data, analyzing it, and writing up a report,” Sanchez-Vaznaugh recalls of the collaboration. The project became the basis for her undergraduate thesis at the University of San Francisco, and the bond she formed with Clayson, who died in 2010, led to a job working for Clayson at SF State.

One part of Sanchez-Vaznaugh’s new job was administering a partnership program with city’s Department of Public Health – her first real peek behind the policy curtain. She also coordinated a partnership between the SF Department of Public Health and SF State’s new master of public health (MPH) program designed to serve students who worked day jobs.

Mary Beth Love, a health education professor who, together with Clayson, wrote the grant for the new MPH program and supervised Sanchez-Vaznaugh’s work, says SF State’s program emphasized community-based research, “working closely with the people who will be affected both by the research and its outcomes, involving them as full stakeholders. It's really a partnership.”

When the MPH program launched, Sanchez-Vaznaugh entered its inaugural cohort as a student. It was clear that the program’s community-based focus was right for her. Professor Lisa Moore’s class on the theories of social production of disease was particularly eye-opening.

“That class really blew my mind… that what I saw in the Mission — the cycles, the poverty, the health issues, the housing — that all of that was related. It was the enactment of disparities, the production of disease,” she observed in hindsight. “I learned that there was a science around it, and I immediately became passionate about doing this work, because I knew a lot about it in practice but I didn't know that this whole scientific perspective on disparities existed.”

Love became Sanchez-Vaznaugh’s advisor, and says the new student brought her thoughtful, insightful demeanor from the office to the classroom. For their culminating project, Sanchez-Vaznaugh and another student, Celia Graterol, developed an online course on the social determinants of health. “These days, ‘social determinants of health’ rolls off everybody's tongue just like ‘online learning’ rolls off everybody's tongue,” Love says, but in back 2000, the research was not widely known, and online learning was still novel. “So this course Emma and Celia developed — it was brilliant. It was way ahead of its time. We still teach it.”

Research that informs policy

Seeking to deepen her knowledge and scientific skills, Sanchez-Vaznaugh followed her MPH with a doctoral degree at Harvard, where faculty members were leaders in the field of social epidemiology. There, she focused on methodologies, diving into biostatistics — which numbers are important and how to crunch them — and learning how to structure studies that would stand up to rigorous peer review.

With her top-notch resume and research skills, Sanchez-Vaznaugh would have had many opportunities available to her. Why did she choose to come back to SF State?

“We had very meaningful conversations about disparities in a very innovative way — intellectual ideas about how you studied disparities,” she says, adding that some colleagues and many students across the University come from diverse populations. “We have a rich experience here.”

In her research, Sanchez-Vaznaugh continues that innovative approach, investigating, for example, not just the policies that lead to good outcomes, but how those policies get enacted. In a current study, her team is surveying schools serving immigrant and low-income populations to better understand why they’re effective in supporting physical activity among students. Much is known about the benefits of physical activity for health and for learning, “But we don't know a lot about how successful schools make decisions about how to implement physical activity for their students. What stimulated those decisions? If we understand that process perhaps other schools across the nation and maybe the world can replicate that success,” she says.

Next, Sanchez-Vaznaugh launches a $3.2 million, five-year National Institutes of Health (NIH) study that was awarded this February. With partners at the University of Michigan, she’ll be analyzing 16 years of health data to understand the effects of nutrition policies and community environments on childhood health disparities. It’s an enormous undertaking, but one thing that motivates Sanchez-Vaznaugh to take it on is that the research can actively inform policy — it won’t sit on the shelf gathering dust.

“It's very important to monitor, reduce and maybe even eliminate child health disparities now, because if they continue unabated, they will have a domino effect on a lot of segments of society.”

That’s important for everyone, she points out, not just for the populations at the disadvantaged end of the social spectrum. A sick childhood population will impact all of society in the future — including employment, work productivity, health care costs, the military and, by association, national security. Given that children are the most diverse segment of the population, she says, “It's very important to monitor, reduce and maybe even eliminate child health disparities now, because if they continue unabated, they will have a domino effect on a lot of segments of society.”

Universities play a key role

Love says Sanchez-Vaznaugh’s ability to land major grants like the NIH study is highly unusual in the Cal State system, where the focus is on teaching more than research. “She’s getting highly competitive grants that support her insightful queries of large data sets,” Love says. “Her work is game-changing — it’s the result of her passion for both health and social justice. She’s receiving state and national attention for her knowledge and expertise.”

Sanchez-Vaznaugh acknowledges that the enormous support she’s received at the College of Health & Social Sciences has made pursuing research like this possible. She says universities play a central role in reducing economic- and race-based health disparities: they produce research that informs policies; train practitioners for hands-on programmatic work; and train new generations of leaders.

Her own story is just one example, she says. In addition to supporting her research on disparities, “[SF State] trained me and shaped me so that I could be competitive for a Harvard application, and has faculty who really care about their students.”

She’s gratified, both personally and professionally, to continue that cycle, seeing her students discover themselves and the field of health disparities. “It's just wonderful that I get to see that same flourishing that I went through,” she says, adding that for universities to close the health gap, “they must continue to train people who deeply care about this work — that it's not just a job, but it is something that we really need to do to have a better society, a better country and a healthier population.”

Kristal Osorio and Aya Francisco-Menchavez table to collect surveys at Kasayahan Filipino American History Month celebration in Daly City in 2019.

“Under COVID-19, we have a new angle,” says Francisco-Menchavez. “So many Filipinos are on the front lines right now — as caregivers in home health care and nursing homes.”

The team had completed 102 surveys and eight interviews, and drafted a manuscript for publication. Now, while they wrap up the manuscript on their initial study, they are conducting new research on how the global pandemic has affected front line Filipino caregivers, especially since Filipino Americans make up a large percent of California’s health care workforce. While many work as nurses in hospitals, where they are unionized and receive benefits, others work in nursing homes and extended care facilities, or for home health agencies, where they have less protection and can experience different types of stress. For example, Francisco-Menchavez and her research team found that while many caregivers reported in written surveys that they were not experiencing stress or anxiety associated with their work, during oral interviews they revealed the opposite: many of them worried about their families in the Philippines, and experienced fears related to their immigration status and working conditions. “We need to give more attention to the precariousness of these caregivers,” says Francisco-Menchavez.

Thought partners and collaborators

As her group moves forward despite the new challenges they face, the relationship between Francisco-Menchavez and her assistants continues to strengthen and grow, even as their in-person meetings have switched to Zoom and email. “I view the students more as collaborators than research assistants,” Francisco-Menchavez explains. “They really have been thought partners and collaborators in terms of how we analyze the data we have collected. We are all working with a community we know very intimately — we all have relatives who are caregivers. So I think knowing that puts so much of my trust into them.”

Osorio, a senior who is also a community organizer, says she appreciates Francisco-Menchavez’s community organizing background and the fact that she doesn’t focus on mistakes, but constantly pushes her assistants to become better researchers. “She’s very straightforward in what she wants and asks really intentional questions,” says Osorio. “She’s very intentional in how she gets you to think about things you don’t normally think about, in expanding how you think about things.”

Celemen, who first met Francisco-Menchavez at the University of Portland while she was a student there, says she appreciates how the professor followed up with her, kept in touch when Celemen moved back home to the Bay Area, and offered to include her in her research project this summer. Like Osorio, Celemen says Francisco-Menchavez’s organizational skills and attention to detail have helped her understand how to take on large, seemingly overwhelming projects.

“She has such a clear idea of what we are doing; it’s all about organizing lists and agendas. Even at the beginning of our project in the early stages she set forth a whole five-month plan,” Celemen says. “She shows us how to break things down into smaller goals, in order to get to the larger goal. Seeing it piece by piece really helps when there are so many things to do, and you’re thinking, ‘what do I even start with?’”

Both students see Francisco-Menchavez as a mentor and an inspiration. “Working with her made me realize how much work goes into becoming a professor, especially for a Filipina professor in sociology, and how much work it takes to get our stories out there,” says Osorio. Celemen says she is in awe of Francisco-Menchavez but also realizes that she is a genuine person who cares about her students as people first. “I really like how before we meet — at the beginning of every meeting — she asks how we’re doing. She cares about our well-being first.” Celemen says she was inspired by Francisco-Menchavez’s personal story, which she first learned about during the professor’s Labor of Care book tour in 2018. “I really identify with her experiences growing up as Filipino-American. She’s someone I look up to, and she’s given me opportunities to work in academia and helped me step into the real world.”

With Francisco-Menchavez’s guidance, Celemen recently began working for CREGS as a research assistant on the Together Study; she is balancing the two research projects while she takes a gap year before possibly going to grad school in public health.

Supporting and learning from each other

Francisco-Menchavez sees herself less as a mentor and more as helping two Filipinas navigate the academic world and gain skills they will need. “I’m just transferring my skills to them. I see it more as democratizing the research process. They’ve always been part of a community that looks for information systemically, that tries to answer questions in a deep and profound way. Our community has always done that and always will. We all come to the research table with strengths; I’m not the only person with skills and expertise. When I ask Kristal and Elaika, ‘What are your thoughts on this?,’ they are both empowered enough to say, ‘I think this is happening,’ or to question whether our approach is right or wrong.” She says both women are brilliant. “I really believe in them and I appreciate working with and learning from them. The experience they bring as Filipina American immigrants helps me be a better scholar, teacher, mother, parent, friend.”

Francisco-Menchavez emphasizes that her philosophy is to make sure that everyone understands that they all come to the table with unique strengths — and that together they will make the research project better. “I have skills I can train them in as a professor — academic writing and the research process, for example—but in our research group I try to break those vertical power lines and redistribute them horizontally a little more.” She says she constantly learns from her students and that their collaboration makes her work sharper and more dynamic. “I think the biggest impact is that it helps the research I do have more relevance than just being in an academic journal. Research should really belong to communities and organizations and young people and teachers; everyone should be able to access knowledge and participate.”

All three team members feel very strongly that their research not wither in academia. Some of the research Francisco-Menchavez and her students have done helped inform a report that led to state Senate Bill 1257, which gives domestic workers increased health and safety protections. Says Osorio, “Our objective is to help our community have this data and to have a better picture of how we can serve our community better or advocate for them better in terms of policy and services.”