DRAFT: This module has unpublished changes.

Tira Ann Affatato

Tira Ann Affatato is a Peer Mentor for the office of Student Academic Success Programs.  She is majoring in Law and Society and minoring in Philosophy with the hopes of becoming a lawyer one day.  She is half Japanese and half Italian so she gets the opportunity to indulge in two very different cultures.  She has three brothers with whom she is very close.  They play all kinds of sports together whenever they get the chance.  When she's not doing school work or working, she loves to rollerblade, practice the piano, hang out with friends and find new things to do.  She can’t stand being bored or doing the same thing over again so going on spontaneous adventures is a must.  She's very passionate about her education and working.  She believes that education is the ultimate route to success and that finding a job through education is a key component to a stable future.

 

Daniel Auld

Daniel Auld is the Academic Program Director in the Office of Undergraduate Studies and is responsi-ble for all student learning centers including the Foreign Language Lab. Daniel worked at Fordham University as an administrator and is completing a doctorate in educational psychology. Daniel’s most recent publication examined students’ motivational approaches to learning and preferences for traditional or online learning environments, which he presented at the June, 2010 American Association of University Professors Conference in Washington, DC. Contact him at: dauld@jjay.cuny.edu.

 

Christopher Davis

Christopher Davis is the Director of the Center for English Support. Prior to his directorship, he was the ESL Editor and Materials Developer for the Research Foundation at CUNY. With a Master degree in TESOL (Teachers of English to Speakers of Other Languages), Dr. Davis and his team have presented at many ESL conferences and created resources for students, lecturers and tutors. We were glad he could share his thoughts. Contact him at: cdavis@jjay.cuny.edu.

 

   

Professor Janice Johnson-Dias

Professor Johnson-Dias has dedicated her life to bridging the gap between the so-called thinkers and the do-ers. She has dedicated her life to examining and ameliorating the economic, political and social factors that influence the health behaviors, outcomes and opportunities of impoverished mothers and children. In addition to her academic work, she has spent the past two decades working with, evaluating and building collaborations among social service and community organizations. Her most recent work in Long Island with Stony Brook University and community stakeholders on issues of black girls’ mental, sexual and physical health earned the collaborative special Congressional honor. Her experiences in the community so profoundly influenced her that she developed a national organization to respond to the health crises in low income communities. She is the co-founder and President of GrassROOTS Community Foundation (www.grass-rootsfoundation.org), a national health advocacy organization that supports, develops, and scales community-driven solutions to the health challenges facing women and girls living in poverty. Along with Chairman of the Board, Tariq “Black Thought” Trotter lead MC of the Grammy Award winning band, The Roots, and a host of doctoral level researchers and practitioners, they have developed a 10-city health initiative directed at improving the mental, physical and sexual health of low income women and girls. Currently, GrassROOTS has five programs in three major cities: Philadelphia, PA; Newark, NJ and Greensboro, NC. Contact her at jjohnson-dias@jjay.cuny.edu.

 

Professor Carmen Kynard

Carmen Kynard is an associate professor of English.  She looks race, rhetoric, and the politics of writing and literacy instruction in secondary and post-secondary settings. She is a former high school teacher with the New York City public schools/Coalition of Essential Schools and has led numerous projects focused on language, literacy, and learning with agencies like the Community Learning Centers Grant Project in Harlem, African Diaspora Institute/Caribbean Cultural Center of New York, Center for Black Literature at Medgar Evers College, and the New York City Writing Project.  She has published in Harvard Educational Review, Changing English, College Composition and Communication, College English, Computers and Composition, Reading Research Quarterly and more. Her first book, Vernacular Insurrections: Race, Black Protest, and the New Century in Composition-Literacy Studies (SUNY Press, 2013) makes Black Freedom a 21st century literacy movement.  She is currently working on a new book that focuses on Black female college students’ writing as sites of recursive memory as well as new research that continues to look at the racism that schools produce. She traces her research and teaching at her website, “Education, Liberation, and Black Radical Traditions” (http://carmenkynard.org). 

 

Professor Jodie Roure

Professor Jodie G. Roure graduated from Douglass College, Rutgers University with a Bachelor’s of Arts in English and a minor in Spanish.  She is a former United States Supreme Court intern.  She obtained her Juris Doctor from Western New England College School of Law in Massachusetts. She also studied International Human Rights Law Protection in San Jose, Costa Rica at the University of Costa Rica Law School.  In Costa Rica, she spent time among the Bri Bri Indigenous tribe.  She obtained her Ph.D. at the University at Buffalo-SUNY in American Studies with a major in Intercultural Studies and International Human Rights and is an Arturo A. Schomburg Fellow.  She has conducted extensive research in the area of human rights including violence against women in Brasil, Puerto Rico, Dominican Republic, Cuba, and the United States.  She is also an expert witness in this area.  She conducts research on pipeline education, race, class ethnicity and gender in the United States. 

 

Nancy Yang

Nancy Yang is a student success coach passionate about helping students succeed.  Listen to how a John Jay student describes her: "My entire life line, my motivation, is our student success coach, Nancy Yang. Nancy is an extraordinary person to get to know. Nancy is like my own personalized cheerleader. She is always there to listen to me talk about the challenging professors that I run across. She gives me advice on how to tackle certain situations and how to deal with not being completely motivated in school. Nancy is that one person that I am always looking up too. Without her, I would be completely lost and I probably would have quit school already. Every Friday I come into the office and leave her a long and nice note near her desk so when she comes in she can read it. Those notes are always about things that I have accomplished, things that I anticipate, and, more importantly, I am always thanking her for being there for me." Contact her at: nyang@jjay.cuny.edu.

DRAFT: This module has unpublished changes.