Supporting Our Students’ Success

We regularly create opportunities to provide our students with financial awards, faculty mentorship, and more to support their success.

Alberto Camacho, ’20 English, ’21 Teaching Credential, can remember the names of all of the influential teachers in his life — from his preschool teacher, “Mr. E,” to his Chicana and Chicano Studies professor Marcos Pizzaro, associate dean of the Connie L. Lurie College of Education.

He recalls Mr. E teaching him “e for effort” almost as clearly as he remembers Pizarro honoring him at the spring 2019 Celebration of Teaching event, where Camacho was recognized for his teaching potential and awarded a $1,000 scholarship.

“My teachers had an impact; they genuinely wanted the best for their kids, and that’s what I want to do in the classroom,” said Camacho, who is completing his student teaching at Silver Creek High School in San José this spring.

“I want the best for my kids, their families and their communities. It is thanks to my teachers that I feel this way — they planted the seed.”

The Lurie College of Education Student Success Center was first inspired to start the Celebration of Teaching event in 2017, when the college joined the CSU EduCorps initiative, a CSU-wide program dedicated to increasing outreach and recruitment for teacher preparation programs. 3 14

Janene Perez, the center’s director of recruitment, student success and alumni engagement, said they first learned of a similar initiative at Sacramento State and drew on that model at SJSU in 2018.

“We wanted to reach students who might not have considered teaching as a career but had a deep commitment to their communities and exhibited qualities that were impactful in a teaching and learning setting,” said Perez.

The inaugural Celebration of Teaching event initially focused on recruiting from within SJSU but has expanded well beyond the university and into the community.

“Recognizing that the consideration of career fields often begins much earlier, we’ve grown the initiative over the past few years to include outreach to community colleges, high schools and middle schools,” said Heather Lattimer, dean of the Lurie College.

Read the full story by Julia Halprin Jackson on the SJSU Newsroom blog and read more examples of our students’ success on the following page.

Our annual Student Research Awards create opporunities for our students to receive financial support towards a research project under the guidance of a faculty mentor. For Child and Adolescent Development student Alaysia Palmer, that enabled her to conduct research around college students who have a sibling with autism and present the study at the annual CSU Resarch Competition.

“I became inspired by this research project because I have a sibling with autism,” said Palmer. “My faculty mentor and I submitted an IRB proposal to gain access to do the resarch. I have conducted semi-structured interviews with participants so I can collect and analyze the data.

Our semiannual Learning Showcase creates opportunities for our students to virtually shareout their academic achievements and development with audiences across and beyond our college. For Communicative Disorders and Sciences undergraduate students Alejandra Romo and Aminah Sheikh, they were able to synthesize their learning to analyze language development with a stutter.

“In EDSP 102 with Prof. Lustigman, I learned to analyze a child’s language development and all of the factors that either impede or help that development,” said Romo.

“In introduction to phonetics, Prof. McCollum taught us how speech comes to life with sounds as well as how to transcribe words and actual speech,” said Sheikh.

Thanks to ongoing financial support from our college’s namesake, Connie L. Lurie, we have awarded numerous Early Childhood Teacher Scholarships to future early childhood educators such as Athena Weiland, Martha Larios Gutierrez, and Cyra Sin to recognize their impact in a field that is often underappreciated by society at large.

“My career development through San José State has been helpful in so many ways,” said Weiland. “The most important way has been teaching me techniques that help me as a student. In the future, I’ll be able to utilize these to assist my children in my classrooms and all of their needs that have to be addressed for their learning.”