Congratulations to faculty member Gloria Crisp for receiving the 2020 ASHE Mentoring Award. Crisp is a Professor and Program Chair of the Adult and Higher Education programs at Oregon State University.
ASHE (Association for the study of Higher Education) awards recognize exemplary achievements and contributions to the study of higher education through research, leadership, or service to ASHE and the field of higher education. Crisp has a long record of sustained, wide-reaching, and transformative mentoring of emerging scholars. Above and beyond mentorship as a condition of academic service, Crisp has studied mentorship as a mechanism for addressing inequities facing marginalized groups and, most notably, has extended this line of inquiry into her everyday practice. In ASHE, she has consistently mentored new faculty members as chair of the Early Career Faculty Workshop.
“Elephants are what counselors should be – empathic and caring.”
That’s what Oregon State University College of Education counseling program coordinator Gene Eakin believes. And that’s the motto he lives by.
His belief stems partially from a story he heard about a veterinarian whose death was mourned by a group of elephants.
The veterinarian cared for the elephants, and when he passed away, the herd was reported to have stood in front of the veterinarian’s house bowing their heads.
Eakin’s favorite animal is an elephant, to no surprise.
Channeling his “inner elephant traits”
A counselor known for his own empathy toward others, Eakin was honored as the recipient of the 2017 Leona Tyler award.
Established by the Oregon Counseling Association, the annual award recognizes individuals whose work has had statewide implications for counseling. He is the 8th person from Oregon State to receive the Leona Tyler award. (Past winners listed here)
Eakin works at both the state and national level to strengthen school counseling and connect people to current issues found in K-12 schools.
As an Oregon State alumnus and experienced counselor educator, Eakin is passionate about his work in the OSU counseling program, where 31 of 35 students are employed full time during their third year in the counseling hybrid program.
“Elephants are what counselors should be – empathic and caring.”
The hybrid (in-person and online) format fulfills Oregon State’s land grant mission of providing individuals from all areas of Oregon access to becoming a counselor.
His counseling experience has spanned 42 years in Oregon, where he’s held roles at Lebanon High School, West Salem High School, Lewis and Clark College and Oregon State University.
Receiving the Leona Tyler award is unique and means a great deal to Eakin, considering most previous award recipients have been clinical mental health counselors. Eakin is one of a few to be recognized for his work as a school counselor and educator.
A long road ahead, but large strides to get him there
He hopes this award will give him a platform to speak to the mental health needs of children and adolescents.
As elementary school counselors across the state report more and more students’ lives are being affected by family trauma related to the recession and the resulting family poverty, there is an increase in the number of elementary school students who need this support.
Moving forward, he says, counselors who advocate for these needs and have the empathic and caring traits of an elephant will be essential.
“There are a limited number of mental health counselors in most communities providing services to children and adolescents, and Oregon ranks 49th overall in provision of mental health services to our citizens,” he says.
“We need more school counselors and social workers doing the good work that they do in order for Oregon schools to increase attendance rates, graduation rates, post high school education matriculation rates, and improve the behavioral and mental health of our students.”
With Oregon’s student-counselor ratio of 510-1, Eakin vows to continue to advocate for the school counseling profession and the work they do to meet youth’s career and college readiness, and academic and personal-social-emotional counseling needs.
And he hopes to show others the power of thinking and acting like an elephant.
Congratulations to Terry Adams, a senior instructor in the double degree program through the College of Education, who has been named the Professional Faculty Leadership Association’s June 2017 ‘Our Hero’ award by Life@OSU.
Darlene Russ-Eft-“leading the profession through research”
Since 1984, Darlene Russ-Eft has been an on-going contributor to the Human Resource Development (HRD) field by “leading the profession through research” and the “development of new knowledge”. She is considered one of the founders of the field of HRD, with a passion for teaching and research that has awarded her with an Academy of Human Resource Development (AHRD) Hall of Fame honor.
This Hall of Fame award is unique in that it is only given to those who have received the AHRD Outstanding Scholar Award prior. Russ-Eft received this award in 1999 with evidence of scholarly publications that contribute to the fundamental theory and practice of HRD. This practice is more specifically seen in her books and articles that emphasize and highlight the role of program evaluation. At this time Russ-Eft was the Director of Research for Achieve Global, an international training provider. She also contributed to the development and adoption of the AHRD Standards on Ethics and Integrity (AHRD, 1999) and is currently co-chair of a task force working on revisions of those standards. She has served on the AHRD Board, as the vice president for research, and recently as president.
The focus of Russ-Eft’s research involves the connection of human resource development and program evaluation. At OSU, she engages in evaluation of educational programs and activities related to the Bioenergy minor program, the Science and Math Investigative Learning Experience (SMILE) teacher workshops, and the SMILE Summer Bridge program that introduces Bioenergy concepts.
Russ-Eft’s education and research efforts have allowed her to travel as well. As a graduate student, she served as a teaching assistant in undergraduate psychology courses. While a researcher at the American Institutes for Research in Palo Alto, she taught undergraduate courses in psychology. One of her recent travels for teaching has been to Bangkok, Thailand where she taught a course titled Ethics and Good Governance in Complex Organizations in the doctoral program in Human and Organizational Development at the National Institute for Development Administration (NIDA). Russ-Eft shares that she has also guest-lectured at other universities in the United States and internationally.
Russ-Eft has worked at Oregon State University’s College of Education since 2002. Today she continues her work as a Discipline Liaison in Adult and Higher Education (AHE) and a Professor in the doctoral program for Community College Leadership, Higher Education, and in the AHE Masters program. Russ-Eft shares how she “love[s] both research and teaching” and how she has “enjoyed the various research and evaluation projects that have been a part of [her] OSU position.” She emphasizes that she has especially “enjoyed teaching the various courses here; including Learning Theory at the masters level, Instructional Leadership at the doctoral level, Research Analysis and Interpretation at the doctoral level”, as well as her current courses. In addition, “advising both masters thesis students and doctoral advisees have been a highlight” for her.
Along with her love for teaching and research, Russ-Eft says, “for fun [she and her] husband, who is a retired Division Counsel (lawyer) for the Army Corps of Engineers, love to travel, hike, bicycle, and cross cross-country ski, and sing in a choir.”
The office of Childcare & Family Resources is currently accepting nominations for the 2013-14 Family Friendly Faculty Award. The Family Friendly Faculty Award is awarded to a faculty or staff member who has provided exemplary support to an OSU student with children.
Support may come in the form of mentoring, encouragement, accommodations, or anything parents have found helpful in and out of the classroom to remove barriers to success and/or elevating the campus awareness of students with children.
If you know of someone deserving this award, please take a few moments to write a nomination letter including within: their name and department, your name and department, why you would like to nominate this person, and examples of ways they have helped you (or someone you know) be successful at OSU. Nomination letters are due to amy.luhn@oregonstate.edu or delivered to the Childcare & Family Resources office before July 31, 2014.
Assistant Professor, Karen Thompson, was awarded the AERA Bilingual Education Research Special Interest Group 2014 Outstanding Dissertation Award at the AERA Annual Meeting in Philadelphia on Sunday, April 4.
The Outstanding Dissertation award is part of a competition open for recent and in-progress graduates, who earned or will earn a PhD or EdD degree between January 2012 and December 2013. The topic of the dissertation should be related to the area of bilingual education research, including work with any language-minority population and either qualitative or quantitative research methodology. The Dissertation Competition Committee will be comprised of researchers representing the broad areas of expertise within bilingual education research, and who are members in good standing of the Bilingual Education Research SIG. The criteria used for evaluating the applications submitted will center on the quality of the dissertation (rigor of methodology and theoretical and educationally applied contribution to the field), as well as the innovations generated by the research work.
Thompson’s dissertation is entitled “Are We There Yet? Exploring English Learners’ Journey to Reclassification and Beyond.”
Here’s a brief one-sentence summary of her dissertation below:
I use nine years of longitudinal, student-level data from the Los Angeles Unified School District, combined with interviews and observations from a cohort of San Francisco Bay Area students initially classified as English learners, to explore the time that English learners (ELs) take to acquire English proficiency, the factors that are related to students’ English acquisition trajectories, and the relationship between reclassification as proficient in English and later academic outcomes.
Congratulations to Karen Thompson on this outstanding achievement!
Congratulations to the FIESTAS Project team (Kathryn Ciechanowski, SueAnn Bottoms, Jennifer Bachman, Jenny de la Hoz, and Ana Lu Fonseca) for being nominated and selected to receive the Outreach & Engagement Vice Provost Award for Excellence Diversity Award for the FIESTAS Project!
The FIESTAS Project team will be recognized for their outstanding work and presented with a plaque and a team award of $1,000 (service and supplies index fund) at the O&E Awards for Excellence Luncheon,Wednesday, April 16, 12 – 2pm, at theCH2M Hill Alumni Center.
