Meet the 2024-2025 Scholars Across the University

(SARATOGA SPRINGS, NY – JULY 16, 2024) Three people were named Empire State University’s Scholars Across the University for the 2024-2025 academic year. Alexandra Rush, assistant professor in the Department of Psychology and Human Development, Cailyn Green, assistant professor of addiction studies, and Bernadet DeJonge, assistant professor in the Department of Health and Human Services, will continue their research and present it to the university community over the course of the next academic year. Participants also receive an honorarium for their participation in the program.

Examining cultural trauma across different generations, cultures, and contexts:

Alexandra Rush embraced the Scholars Across the University program as an opportunity to share her research related to intergenerational trauma across cultures. Her interest stems from her own familial connections to political refugees from Poland.

“I’m the daughter of two political refugees from Poland to escape the Nazi and Soviet regimes,” Rush said. “I grew up learning a lot about what my culture experienced, I saw how it affected the children of survivors in interesting ways, and I saw that there were a lot of parallels with what other cultures experienced.”

That experience led her to examine inherited trauma across other cultures, including Indigenous peoples and African Americans. Her research asks key questions about the processes that transmit trauma, resilience, and post-traumatic growth.

Rush is also interested in seeing how adversity drives purpose in individuals, something she has already explored through the co-ed expansion of the Boy Scouts of America in 2019. 

“I’m interested in youth purpose development,” Rush said. “I looked at their experiences and if it helped shape the sense of purpose they’re experiencing and navigating that traditionally all-male space.”

Rush said presenting her research to the university gives other people a chance to examine their own interests across different fields.  

“Depending on your interests, it can become very specialized so people may not always know about it and how it might apply across different contexts,” Rush said. “We may not always know how we can draw parallels or gain knowledge, or insights and I like to communicate how it can be applied across contexts.”

Centering curriculum on diversity, equity, and inclusion:

Cailyn Green and Bernadet DeJonge initially started working together to develop a new course for Empire State University based on diversity, equity, inclusion, and social justice, but their efforts have now evolved into the development of a 14-chapter textbook.

“As we were researching the possible resources, we realized this stuff is expensive and it’s not covering everything we wanted to cover,” Green said. “Our university prides itself on helping and supporting students from a wide variety of diverse areas where money can be a problem and does hinder people and that’s what sparked this idea to make our own resource — and that resource morphed into a 14-chapter textbook.”

When it comes to building that resource from scratch, DeJonge said it’s a welcome challenge and a learning experience to see how they, as educators, can better teach and approach diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives to their students.

“It’s been a really interesting process,” she said. “I’m looking forward to that experience of trying to take this into the student realm.”

The book, titled “Social Justice and Advocacy,” is expected to be released over the summer. According to DeJonge and Green, it will cover a broad overview of different concepts in diversity and social justice.

“We’re writing the chapters to be individual chapters, so you don’t necessarily have to read chapter one and two to understand content in chapter three,” Green said. “We did that so any instructor teaching in any discipline can grab a piece of it if they need to embed it in their class.”

Green and DeJonge said they ultimately hope professors and students will be able to learn from their book across disciplines.

“I feel so much more educated on the topic through this writing process,” Green said. “We included a bunch of opinions, deep dives, and discussion questions. We want someone to take the chapter, read it for the content, get the basis of it, and then if they want to dive deeper, we encourage that in the discussion questions or in the writing itself.” “It’s about framing,” DeJonge said. “Can we create a framework where a student gets enough interest, enough education, that they want to know more, but also when they bump into issues of diversity, equity, and inclusion, they know what to do with them.”