Professional Announcements

10/11/2004

Martha Rapp Ruddell, Education, is being honored by her alma mater, the University of Missouri, Kansas City where she earned her Ph.D. in 1976 in reading education and social psychology. Ruddell currently serves as SSU's interim dean of the School of Education and professor of curriculum studies and secondary education.

The UMKC Alumni Association chose Ruddell as a 2004 Distinguished Alumna, an award given to those alums who have achieved personal success and demonstrated loyalty and a commitment to her education and the University of Missouri and has rendered outstanding service to the community.

Since receiving her doctoral degree at UMKC, Ruddell has become one of the foremost authorities, nationally and internationally, in her professional field of reading and literacy development. Prior to SSU, she taught at Northern Illinois University and at UC Berkeley.

She is the author or co-author of several highly-regarded textbooks, more than 50 articles, reviews and book chapters and earned induction into the California Reading Association Reading Hall of Fame. Her professional presentations have taken her to Mexico, Canada, Australia, France, Hawaii, England and Sweden.

Ruddell was nominated by Dr. John George, professor of education at UMKC, who said, "Marty has had numerous highly important leadership positions during her professional career including chairing conferences and serving as a member of professional committees and editorial boards. A crowing achievement was her 1998 presidency of the National Reading Conference, the most distinguished professional organization in the world devoted to research in reading and literacy."

This distinguished alumna award will be bestowed upon Ruddell at a ceremony next month on the UMKC campus.

At the Sonoma County Book Fair on Sept. 18, Francisco Vázquez, Hutchins School of Liberal Studies, and Elizabeth C. Martínez, Modern Language and Literature/Chicano and Latino Studies,, participated on a panel titled, "Cómo está? Writing in English and Spanish," making presentations on the books they have published and about Latino culture in general. The panel was moderated by Sonoma County poet Armando García-Dávila, and also included two members from the community.

This past summer, Virginia Lea, Education, published a book with Peter Lang entitled Identifying Race and Transforming Whiteness in the Classroom. The book was co-edited with Judy Helfand of Solano Community College. One of the authors included in the volume is Leny Strobel from American Multicultural Studies.

Lea and Erma Jean Sims, Education, have just had an article accepted by the International Journal of Learning, published online by Common Ground Publishing. The article is entitled, "Becoming an Anti-Racist Teacher: Addressing Whiteness in Learning Communities." Lea and Sims are continuing the research that formed the basis for their article. Students interested in helping them with the research, can contact them at 4-2186. They plan to publish the research in 2005.

Jorge Porras, Modern Languages and Literatures, delivered a paper at the XXXIII Meeting of the Linguistic Association of the Southwest (LASSO), in New Orleans, LA, in September. The paper dealt with a syntactic and semantic analysis of the 'lo' clitic pronoun in Spanish. Porras also chaired a session on word order at the same conference".

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Updated 10/11/04
Jean Wasp