Embedded Files
Workshop Facilitators
Julia van der Ryn is the Executive Director of Dominican University of California's Center for Community Engagement. She founded Dominican's Service-Learning Program in 2004. Advocating a critical social justice and community assets-based approach, she has developed, taught, and collaborated on more than 30 Service-Learning classes and has mentored faculty in critical pedagogy, course design, critical reflection, and reciprocal partnerships. She has implemented numerous community-engaged, participatory initiatives and research projects, many with a special focus on education justice and building capacity for youth/community voice. Her work with students, faculty, administration, and community partners fuels her appreciation for the power of creative collaborations with colleagues on and off-campus and social justice education.
Emily S. Wu is the Assistant Director of Community Outreach and Project Development of Service-Learning Program at Dominican University of California. Her Service-Learning work is primarily in establishing and maintaining mutually-beneficial partnerships with nonprofit organizations and social services agencies, as well as exploring opportunities to create community-oriented engagement placements and projects for students. She also works closely with community partners to create processes and support infrastructure for effective student engagement and learning in the community. As an experienced and published Service-Learning faculty, Dr. Wu trains and supports her Service-Learning faculty colleagues in community-engaged pedagogy and course design. She is a Religionist by training, with academic expertise and research interests in Asian religions, medicines and healing in religious contexts, and religions in the globalized world.
2022 Workshop Participants
Aaron Winkelman is a Dominican Sister. She first came to Dominican College as an
undergraduate student and later entered our Dominican Congregation. After many
years in several of our high schools teaching English, Spanish, and Religion, she studied at UCLA for a doctorate in English. Then in 1986 she came back to Dominican as a full-time instructor. Since that time she has taught courses in General Education, English, and Humanities for traditional undergraduates and also for those in the adult degree completion program (“Pathways”). She has also taught in the Master’s in Humanities Program. Retiring from full-time faculty, she became a member of the Adjunct faculty. Her commitment to social justice shows itself in many ways, most notably at Dominican within our Adjunct Union under SEIU 1021. Since our Union’s beginning in 2015 She has served as a member of our bargaining teams, Chapter Board, Labor Management Committee, and as a Steward.
Catherine Borg is a first generation American, born and raised in San Francisco, who now lives in San Anselmo. After 21 years in banking (starting as a teller and ending as a Senior Vice President and Regional Banking Director), she decided to fulfill her intellectual curiosity and pursue her life-long dream of teaching. She obtained both her B.A. and M.A. in Humanities from Dominican University of California, where she was awarded the title of Academic Scholar. She has taught at Dominican since 2013 and is currently an Associate Adjunct Instructor for the School of Liberal Arts and Education, teaching courses in Women’s History, Effective Communication, and General Education for the Adult Degree Completion Program. Her pedagogical interests include women’s history, gender and sexuality, cultural studies, film history, and technology. Her personal interests include staying politically active (both locally and nationally), traveling, hiking, and collecting vintage jewelry.
Claudia Morales is a new full time faculty in the Literature and Language Department at Dominican University of California. She is an author and anthropologist from Cintalapa de Figueroa, Chiapas, Mexico. Her debut novel, No Habrá Retorno (Coneculta Chiapas 2015, reissued by Los Libros del Perro 2021) won the prestigious National Rosario Castellanos Prize for Short Novels and was a finalist for the Lipp Novel Prize. Her work has been supported by the Fulbright Program and the Foundation for Mexican Letters where she was a writing fellow. Her stories have been featured in Ficción Atómica (Palindroma 2020), Mexicanas: Trece Narrativas Contemporáneas (FondoBlanco 2021), and more of her work is forthcoming in Columbia Journal and the Rio Grande Review.
Elizabeth Miller is an educator, assessment specialist, organizational consultant, program designer, and editor. With passion for people and synthesis that often has her working on multiple projects at once, over the last 15 years she has held leadership and consulting roles at nonprofit, educational and corporate organizations with focus on social and ecological justice, learning and health equity. She brings together two decades of research and professional experience in Eastern and Western philosophical, religious and scientific traditions, as well as neuroscience, psychology, educational design, contemplative studies, and ecology. Her research on evaluation identifies more life-giving approaches to the valuation, activation and assessment of learning, innovation and community-building, with application to individual, social and systems change.
GeBren Blakely works for the University of La Verne as an assistant director for student initiatives and serves as an instructor for the Office of Civic & Community Engagement. Dr. Blakely has taught Learning through Service: Purposeful Life’s Work, for the past five years, which explores human rights, advocacy for veterans, and working with children and youth at risk. With over 20 years of experience in roles related to academic, career, admissions, and financial advising, Dr. Blakely is passionate about supporting and motivating students on their educational journey. Dr. Blakely’s doctoral research highlights advising and support strategies that contribute to the academic success of military and veteran students.
Gail Tang is Associate Professor and Chair of Mathematics at University of La Verne. Her primary research interests are in how to support students’ mathematical creativity development. She co-founded an afterschool math course at a local after school program. College students taught math to middle schoolers. Dr. Tang also co-created a Math in Society course that is based around social justice. The course looks at police data to see if there is racial profiling (spoiler alert: there is!). Students also study gerrymandering. Dr. Tang believes in educating the whole person, including for herself. She is interested in many things: creativity, community, sustainability, and broadening participation in STEM (especially for minoritized groups). When she is not engaged in teaching, research, mentorship, or shared governance, she enjoys gardening, feeding her chickens, being surrounded by nature and animals, and learning about world history through food.
Jocelyn Gómez is Community Engagement Student Initiatives Manager in the Service-Learning Program at Dominican University of California. With a PhD in Communication and Journalism from University of New Mexico, she also teaches Effective Communications courses as an adjunct faculty. Her research interests include: Intercultural communication, critical race theory, organized labor, immigration, social movements, Latinas, leadership, feminisms, media, and Latinx representation in the media. She enjoys working with people and organizations that aim to make social change.
Josefina Steinmetz was born in the City of Mexico, DF. She came to the US hoping to complete a career in education. She attended Pasadena City College and finished an AA Degree in Fine Arts and then transferred to University of La Verne where she completed a BA, two Master Degrees, and a Doctoral Degree in Organizational Leadership. She is currently the Assistant Principal of Student Services at Baldwin Park High School, and she continues to support University of La Verne as an adjunct professor. She is a single mother of two young men. She hopes that my work and passion for learning will inspire them to contribute and give back to their community.
Lucia Leon is an Assistant Professor of Latino Studies and Social Justice at Dominican University of California. She obtained her PhD from the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) in Chicana/o and Central American Studies. Lucia grew up in Orange County, California where she began organizing with immigrant youth and their families. Her journey into the professorship is motivated by her personal and political commitments to immigrant communities and social justice. Her teaching and research interests include immigration law, immigrant families, Latina/o/x families, race and ethnicity, gender, sexuality, social inequalities and social movements.
Lynn Sondag is Professor of Art and Honors Program Director at Dominican University of California. Her scholarship is committed to the multiple ways in which art intersects with community concerns and plays a valuable role in promoting justice and sustainability. Over the past ten years, she has designed community-engaged art projects that focus on specific issues and physical spaces. Teaming up with local non-profits she has facilitated the production of three large-scale, site-specific, temporary public art projects that address pressing issues in the community such as homelessness and educational equity.
Invited to work with key stakeholders in the Downtown San Rafael Arts District, she helped implement the Fall 2018 launch and collaborated with the Business Improvement District to create temporary artwork in empty storefront spaces. In a recent project, she worked alongside nine other artists to create an interior mural for Canal Alliance. “You Are Home” is intended to visually express the celebration of diverse cultures, and the aspiration and courage of newcomers.
Matthew Davis integrates leadership in educational, corporate and non-profit settings, and brings two decades of experience in moving organizations from concepts to systems and deliverables, with innovative methods for building bridges and locating common goals between diverse communities both internally to and on the periphery of an organization. This work is built on over twenty years spent living and cultivating relationships abroad, and more than fifteen years of focused scholarship in educational leadership, qualitative worldviews, the conditions for learning, health, ecology, social justice, and meaningful human dialogue across cultures.
His work has included teaching, facilitations and program development at levels, from preschool to medical school, juvenile detention centers to public/private high schools, colleges and universities to corporations, guided by a belief that learning can be the source of greatest aliveness at every age.
Susan Shaw has served as an educator for the last twenty-one years and counting. In this time, she has served a local school district and its students as a classroom teacher, teacher specialist for expanded learning (after school programming), and currently as a school site administrator. She has worked with the University of La Verne since 2017 as an adjunct professor teaching service learning with a focus on youth engagement. she is grateful for the opportunity to help university students experience the beauty of providing Asset Based Community Services within their community, mentoring elementary and middle school youth, while learning about their own assets in the process.
Vivian L. Tamkin is a dual state licensed, community-oriented psychologist (CA and WI) and a third-year postdoctoral research fellow in the Health Disparities Research Scholars Program at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. She holds a PhD in Counseling Psychology and a minor in Child Clinical Psychology from Southern Illinois University, Carbondale (SIUC). Broadly speaking, her research program systematically examines the lived experiences of racial socialization messaging in Black/African Americans across the lifespan. Specifically, Dr. Tamkin’s research interests are centered on African American/Black maternal and young child relationships.
Dr. Tamkin’s current line of qualitative research aims to identify ways in which low-income African American mothers with depression demonstrate the capacity to recognize their child’s emotional states that shape their child’s interaction behavior (Luyten, et al., 2017). Dr. Tamkin looks forward to returning home to CA, and will continue to move her scholarship forward as she transitions into her new tenure-line faculty position this fall as Assistant Professor of Counseling Psychology at Santa Clara University.
Xiomara Mateo-Gaxiola directs programming for the Office of Equity and Inclusion at USC Rossier’s School of Education and serves as Adjunct Associate Professor in Rossier’s Educational Leadership Doctoral program. She has held leadership positions in K-12 education and non-profit spaces. Her leadership centers advocacy for the positive conditions that educators, children, families, and communities need to thrive.
Her current research interests include reflection and storytelling as the nourishing source of creativity, innovation, and collective uplift. She has presented at international, national, and local conferences on critically reflective and culturally relevant teaching and coaching practices, teacher wellbeing, resilient school environments, participatory decision-making, and community school implementation.
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