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Congratulations Mayumi Hagiwara on Two New Grant Awards

Mayumi Hagiwara, Department of Special Education, and Julie Paulson, English Department, have been awarded both a federal Transition and Postsecondary Programs for Students with Disabilities (TPSID) grant (in partnership with CSUN) and a grant from the California Center for Inclusive College (CCIC) to help support the SF State Inclusion Pilot Project. SF State’s IPP will receive $190K for 5 years from the TPSID grant (for a total of 950K); the CCIC grant is a one-year grant for 75K. Both grants support efforts to improve opportunities for students with disabilities in university settings, embedding career design and skill development, Universal Design for Learning, and integrated academic experiences. It’s great to see this important project moving forward with this funding. 

SFSU offers full scholarships for first-of-its-kind PK-12 certificate in climate justice education

The program trains PK-12 educators to teach climate change, justice-based solutions at all grade levels

SAN FRANCISCO – September 25, 2025 – San Francisco State University (SFSU), the premier public university that educates and equips students to thrive in a global society, is offering scholarships to fully cover the cost of attendance to pursue its Graduate Certificate in PK-12 Climate Justice Education. 

The certificate provides teachers from pre-kindergarten to 12th grade the skills and knowledge to effectively teach about climate change and climate justice, which focuses on the unequal impacts of climate change on marginalized and underserved populations as well as justice-based solutions to address those inequities. SFSU is the first major public university to offer a PK-12 certificate specifically focused on climate justice education — not just climate change.

“Young people are interested in climate change and doing something about it. However, they don’t know how to approach it or even that they have the agency to take climate action,” said Aritree Samanta, co-director of the Climate HQ campus hub that promotes and supports climate-related activities across the University. “Teachers are best positioned to work with young people. Training them is hugely important because they can channel students’ interests and passions to where they’d be most effective.” 

Read the full story of SF State News

GCOE Research Roundtables Feature Faculty, Doctoral Students

Once a month we gather via Zoom to learn about our colleagues’ research, scholarship, and creative activity. As we saw last year, this has been a great opportunity to appreciate the good work happening among faculty in our college and the emerging scholarship of our 3rd year doctoral candidates. The series is coordinated by Kathryn Lige, and supported by the Melvin B. And Dorothy E. Henson Fund. We invite all faculty and 3rd year doctoral students to apply to share their RSCA. This can be work in progress, sabbatical insights, recently published pieces, interdisciplinary collaborations, research with students, and more.  Presentation spaces are filling up for 2025-26, so complete the application here without delay!

Learn more about the Fall 2025 Research Roundtable Series

Congratulations to MJ Hart on Selection for Sally Casanova Pre-Doctoral Award

The CSU’s Sally Casanova Pre-Doctoral Program provides opportunities for students to explore and prepare to succeed in doctoral programs. Under the guidance of Helen Hyun, one of the students in the Equity & Social Justice Education MA Program - MJ Hart - has been selected as one of the 2025 Pre-Doctoral Scholars, one of eight awards at SFSU and the only one in GCOE. Congratulations to MJ on receiving this prestigious award! They are interested in exploring doctoral-level, interdisciplinary research on identity development related to social psychology, philosophy, neurobiology, and the law. The Sally Casanova award will allow MJ to visit and apply to several PhD programs around the country.  MJ's ultimate goal is to become a tenured professor at a research university. 

John Kim received a Kenneth Fong Translational Research Grant Award

John Kim, a Joint Doctoral Candidate in Special Education, and Alyssa Kubota, an assistant professor in Computer Engineering, received the Kenneth Fong Translational Research Grant Award from San Francisco State University, College of Science and Engineering. Their work is titled "Take a look through my eyes: Integrating lived experiences with aided communication systems to enhance the learning of socio-emotional concepts for nonspeaking children". This investigation observes how nonspeaking students leverage their funds of knowledge to express abstract socio-emotional concepts. Specifically, this project will analyze the display features of socio-emotional concepts, the design of AAC systems for these concepts, and the system implementation with nonspeaking children. 

Open Advising Mondays for Perspective SPED students! Feb 10 - March 17

The Department of Special Education will be holding office hours (in person at Burk Hall 156 and online via Zoom) to answer your questions about the program and assist in the application process! From 3:00 pm - 4:30 pm on Mondays from February 10 - March 17, 2025. 

Here is the zoom information:

Zoom link: https://sfsu.zoom.us/j/81519029381?pwd=nnPRFWe73Gn7YXqEZikZhKVDpp26nI.1

Meeting ID: 815 1902 9381

Passcode: 115177

For more information, please contact sped@sfsu.edu.

EDDL Students Presenting at AERA Featured in Campus Memo

It was good to see Lauren Sneed and Shanice Robinson-Blackwell featured in this week’s Campus Memo. Lauren Sneed, who presented her work at a GCOE Research Roundtable session in December, and Dr. Robinson use strength-based approaches to study the successful exits of Black boys and men from the “School-to-Prison Pipeline,” addressing literature gaps and challenging the narrative of inescapability. We’re proud of our doctoral candidates and alumni, and glad to see them featured campus-wide.

In addition to Ms. Sneed and Dr. Robinson-Blackwell, four other doctoral candidates or alums have had their papers accepted at AERA 2025: Chu Hsi, Carmen Madden, Sarah Stein, and Ruby Turalba. The EdD Evaluation Project led by Dr. Robert Gabriner will also be presented at AERA, with Violet Ballard, Barbara Henderson, Catherine Aragon, and Sara Yuen Marcopoulos. Congratulations to all on these accomplishments!

New Faculty Publication – Congratulations Maria Zavala

Maria Zavala was part of the STEM team that was commissioned by the Spencer Foundation to author one of the new papers in their Culturally Sustaining and Relevant Education Approaches White Paper Series. These papers were written by teams of scholars over the last two years, and the full set was released in December. Maria’s paper, written with Carrie Tzou, Symone Gyles, and Julia Aguirre, is titled An Urgent Need for Transformation: Culturally Responsive and Sustaining Math and Science Education Towards Thriving Futures. 

Congratulations Mayumi Hagiwara on a New Book Publication

Dr. Mayumi Hagiwara has a new book being published entitled Promoting self-determination for students with intellectual disability through standards-based instruction. It is written in Japanese, allowing Mayumi to share her work on self-determination in Japan – both cutting edge and so critical for individuals with intellectual disabilities. Mayumi and colleagues trained 15 Japanese special education teachers to develop and implement instruction with the focus on self-determination for a half year and wrote about how the instruction went. As detailed in the book, they saw positive outcomes among students with intellectual disability

New Publication by Gloria Soto and Jennifer Vega

Gloria Soto and Jennifer Vega, a GCOE graduate student, have published a second article titled "Exploring Core Competencies for Language Facilitation in Parent Training Programs in AAC," in the international journal Disability and Rehabilitation: Assistive Technology.

This article presents the core competencies that professionals (clinicians and educators) should target in parent coaching sessions. These competencies are designed to support parents in becoming more effective communication partners for their children who use AAC.

The full article is available here.  Congratulations, Gloria and Jennifer!

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