Medaille College News

Department of Education Assistant Professor Dr. Caitlin Riegel, the program director for Medaille’s M.S.Ed. adolescent/secondary education and M.S.Ed. elementary education programs, gave a presentation at the national Association of Teacher Educators Annual Conference this summer, focused on tools and tips for teaching in a post-COVID world and the smooth transition between in-person and online modalities.

The Department of Education Reading Center has partnered with the SPCA Serving Erie County and its Tale for Two Summer Reading Program. Led by Assistant Professor Dr. Christine Woodcock, students in the M.S.Ed. literacy education program have been tutoring children (ages 6-14) at the Reading Center this summer, and each morning, the children have gotten to read books to animals at the SPCA via Zoom.

Dr. Alice Villaseñor appeared as a virtual speaker at the 2021 Jane Austen Festival, “Race, Power & the Arts in Jane Austen’s World.” She presented on From Prada to Nada (2011), a film adaptation of Jane Austen’s Sense and Sensibility (1811) set in Los Angeles, and discussed how the film uses Austen’s story of the displacement of the Dashwood women to highlight the displacement of Latinx communities.

Medaille has received over $1.2 million in renewed grant funding from the Health Resources and Services Administration (HRSA), which will allow the College’s clinical mental health counseling students to continue to provide critical mental health services to medically underserved and at-risk populations within Buffalo, Rochester and the surrounding communities.

Department of Interdisciplinary Studies Professor of History Dr. Daniel Kotzin presented his research this May at the 2021 Teaching History Conference, “Challenges in Teaching & Learning History: Issues of Pedagogy & Content.” His presentation focused on teaching students to critically evaluate how slavery is taught.

Thanks to a National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) grant awarded to Medaille in 2018, the resulting project success is now able to serve as a roadmap for incorporating applied ethics into course curriculum, research projects and community-based learning activities across every academic department.

Associate Professor of Mental Health Counseling Donald E. Nowak Jr., Ph.D., CRC, recently offered his expertise on gambling addiction in response to questions related to online gaming, sports betting and online lotteries in an “Asks the Experts” feature on WalletHub. Dr. Nowak weighed in on the impact of COVID-19 on the online gaming industry and on people struggling with gambling addiction.

Department of Business, Management & Leadership Professor and Business Administration Program Director Dr. Michael P. Lillis recently authored a manuscript on entrepreneurship that has been published this April in The BRC Academy Journal of Business.

On Friday, April 30, Department of Education Assistant Professor Dr. Christine Woodcock will be co-presenting at the virtual conference of the New England Educational Research Organization (NEERO) on the topic of literacy related to civil rights issues, along with two of Medaille’s M.S.Ed. elementary education graduate students Kelli Gage and Kristy Crosby.

A Jane Austen scholar, Dr. Villaseñor was invited to write a review of the 2020 film Emma for the British Society of Eighteenth-Century Studies, an interdisciplinary scholarly society based in the United Kingdom that promotes the study of all aspects of 18th-century history, literature and culture.