TRIO Ronald E. McNair Postbaccalaureate Achievement Program

Eastern Washington University

Alumni Spotlight

Student Success Story: Martin Meraz García, PhD (EWU TRIO McNair 1996)

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Current Position: Assistant Professor, Chicano Studies, Eastern Washington University

During Dr. Martin Meraz García’s junior year at Eastern Washington University, he was introduced to the TRIO Ronald E. McNair Scholar Program. His decision to apply to the program was to have life changing consequences.

In his own words: “The program opened the door to a world I did not know, a world that historically has been only accessible to the elite. As a first-generation, low-income student, who barely knew how to read, write and speak English, TRiO McNair gave me the support and preparation that enabled me to earn a doctoral degree –a degree that allows me to teach at universities, to present my research at national and international conferences and to publish articles in scholarly journals. Most importantly, I am able to mentor students from backgrounds like mine and to encourage them to earn their degrees so that they too, will be able to contribute to their communities.”

Dr. Martin Meraz García earned his PhD from Washington State University in Political Science. His book, Ordinary Individuals Who Become Narcotraffickers, was published by Kendall Hunt Publishing in 2012.

Student Success Story: Rita Davis, Doctorate (EWU TRIO McNair 1996)

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Current Position: Acute Care Physical Therapist
Yakima Valley Memorial Hospital

Rita Davis earned her Master’s in Physical Therapy from Eastern Washington University in 2000.  That year, she also was awarded the Minority Scholarship Award from the American Physical Therapy Association (APTA). She began work at the Yakima Regional Medial Cardiac Center in 2007, and completed her Doctor of Physical Therapy (DPT) at the University of Montana in May 2011. In August 2011, she took her current position in the acute care setting at Yakima Valley Memorial Hospital.  She plans to continue her education by pursuing an MBA in Healthcare Management.
In her own words: “First of all, TRIO McNair gave me an instant support system for furthering my education. Being the first person in my family to go to college meant that although my family was proud of me, they did not always understand how to help me. The program taught me how to be a better student and to get what I needed out of my programs. McNair TRIO allowed me to develop my leadership skills by mentoring students in the cohorts after me, which I loved doing. The staff at EWU’s McNair TRIO program still offer me support as I continue to pursue higher education opportunities. I am thankful that I was given the opportunity to be a McNair Scholar. It was an experience that gave me the tools I needed to be successful and skills that I use every day.

EWU McNair Alumni Spotlight: Micheal Callaway, PhD

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Dr. Micheal Callaway
Dr. Micheal Callaway, Residential English Faculty at Mesa Community College.

EWU McNair Scholar alumnus Micheal Callaway was the first person in his family to graduate from college when he earned his bachelor’s degree in English from Eastern Washington University. Although neither of his parents had a high school degree, he credits their support for creating an educational foundation that allowed him to continue through the educational pipeline to earn his PhD, co-author a book on writing, and return to the classroom as English faculty. “My mom earned her GED at the same time I graduated from high school,” he states, “and my dad earned his GED before he entered the military. He was a very educated, self-taught man. They never went to university, but raised me as if I would. I was always being taught, and to value learning, but it didn’t really click with me until many years later when I realized, oh yeah, my parents made me do things other kids didn’t do. So what seemed like a natural ability was really them, because they wanted me to advance.”

His parents provided workbooks and flashcards at home. There were summer reading programs, and even though athletics and after-school jobs took some focus from academics, Callaway’s high school record was strong enough for him to be admitted to EWU. He arrived on the Cheney campus understanding the value of education, but still lacking skills necessary to excel. As a first-generation college student, he was not prepared to do well on the college placement tests, and he tested into remedial English and Math. He was also required to enroll in note-taking, offered through the TRIO Student Support Services program that was then on campus.

Dr. Paul Lindholdt, EWU English professor

“It just so happened that the note-taking class was right across the hall from the office of the Director of McNair [which was Dr. Karen McKinney at that time]. And about halfway through the quarter, the advisor I worked with realized I had more ability than I showed on my tests. She took me across the hall and introduced me to Karen. I learned about McNair, and it sort of started from there.”

The TRIO Ronald E. McNair Postbaccalaureate Achievement Program is one of a national pipeline of federally-funded TRIO programs that provide educational opportunities for students from disadvantaged backgrounds. TRIO McNair focuses on research and scholarly activities to prepare first-generation, low-income and/or underrepresented students for success at the doctoral level. Callaway was accepted into Eastern’s TRIO McNair program once finished his developmental courses and gone on to do well in more challenging classes. As a McNair Scholar, he completed two McNair summer research internships: Transformation of a Collaborative Learning Class with EWU English professor Dr. Paul Lindholdt, and The Journey of the Outsider: At the Beginning of the Life of a Scholar with McNair faculty mentor Dr. LaVona Reeves, professor of English and Women’s & Gender Studies and MATESL Program Director. McNair also provided him the opportunity to attend regional and national conferences to present both projects, and he credits that experience as one of the many ways McNair prepared him for success in his PhD program.

Dr. Reeves
Dr. LaVona Reeves, professor of English and Women’s & Gender Studies and MATESL Program Director

“I got to graduate school at ASU and some of my colleagues had all the credentials, Ivy League schools and all, but McNair had given me the chance to present at conferences, and to work with and develop strong relationships with faculty. So that even though I came from a small school, I had confidence. I felt prepared. My EWU mentors would sometime mentor me overtly, tell me what I should and shouldn’t think about, but also, they sometimes kind of looked at me and would say, ‘Hey figure it out.’ They gave me books to read, and I read them. And they treated me more like an equal than I probably deserved as an eighteen- year-old kid showing up in the summer and asking question and writing papers.”

Dr. Callaway is now on the other side of that conversation. After graduating from Eastern, he went on to earn a PhD in Rhetoric and Composition from Arizona State University, doing research on authenticity and identity construction and completing a dissertation titled Authentic Performances: The Paradox of Black Identity. He is now residential faculty (equivalent of tenured) at Mesa Community College, where he teaches developmental and introductory English, as well as literature classes. Mesa is the largest of ten institutions in the Maricopa Community College District in southern Arizona, serving a diverse population of more than twenty-thousand students, over half who are the first person in their family to go to college. Many must overcome a negative view of education, and Dr. Callaway works to get students to make connections between their own lives and how a liberal arts education might be of value to them.

“I teach writing, but I want them to think of writing in terms of communication. It’s thinking about how you would engage with people in your day-to-day life, and using those same skills when you write. So, for example, if you go into a room and you’re going to have a conversation, you don’t just jump in and start talking. First you listen for a little while and figure out what the important parts of the conversation are, and then you contribute. It’s the same thing in writing. You don’t just start writing about something you don’t know anything about. You have to do a bit of reading, understand what’s going on, and then you contribute. I try to get them to think about that, and about the writing they do in their life, because that shapes the way they view communication as much anything.  And a writing class is also a reading class as well. We do a lot of critical reading and talk about current events. I try to get them to pay attention.”

He wants his students to learn to write and communicate in ways that facilitate understanding, not antagonism, and encourages students not to trivialize important issues. From his perspective, part of his job as an English professor is to “try to get my students to see that these issues aren’t really jokes, that the joke is on you if you don’t get that it’s not really a joke. These are important issues to pay attention to, and I try to take two or steps back to really talk about the issues.”

Emphasizing to his students the importance of how to approach their audience, he  reminds them that, “people don’t respond well to being laughed at,” but that “if you can define and talk about the real issue, then that can be something worth addressing and talking about.”

Sage advice for our times.

Submitted by Cynthia Dukich, EWU McNair Assistant Director, November 29, 2018

Alvina Marris

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Alvina Marris always planned to come home — to the Confederated Tribes of the Colville Reservation — almost three million acres of rural land in northeast Washington State, where distance between houses is measured in minutes by car, and the largest town still does not have a stoplight or fast food restaurant.

“It’s really remote, here,” she tells me during a recent video conversation. She hasn’t changed much in the nearly fifteen years since she was an undergraduate research intern in the Eastern Washington University TRIO McNair Scholar Program, where I still work, and now sit at my desk talking to her image through my computer. She sits at a computer back home, in an office in that town without a stoplight, where she now works as the licensed clinical psychologist for the Confederated Tribes of the Colville Reservation.

“I grew up picking berries in the summer, and playing outside all the time,” she continues. “I have lots of first cousins who are like my brothers and sisters — it’s a huge family. We didn’t play video games, and were always running around and doing stuff, really just country bumpkins.”

As an undergraduate, Alvina completed two faculty-mentored TRIO McNair research projects at Eastern, then graduated with a bachelor’s degree in psychology and went on to earn a PhD in clinical psychology from Oklahoma State University. Currently, she provides psychological evaluation and therapy for tribal members on the Colville Reservation, seeing clients as young as three, all the way through the last years of life. As busy as she is, she has still agreed to share her time and experience in the first of a series of profiles about the work EWU TRIO McNair Scholars are doing after earning their PhDs. For her — and the other strong and community-minded people out there using education to make a positive change in this world — I am grateful.

“My grandmother would tell me stories about how they used to go out on horseback for a week to pick berries, and what it was like when the electricity first came on. She worked so hard her entire life, and has always been a really strong role model — an elder with high morals and standards who wants people treated well, and for people to respect others. I am deeply honored and proud to be named after her.”

The elder Alvina Cawston (pictured above with her granddaughter Dr. Alvina Cawston Marris) is the matriarch of the family. A strong full-blooded Nez Perce woman with an unyielding work ethic, she retired just last year, at 83, from the tribal higher education office. She is central to the strong community that Alvina attributes to being able to complete her education.

This education wasn’t easy. It required travelling great distances, not just physically, but mentally as well. The Colville Reservation has an all-native school from kindergarten to eighth grade, but high school requires taking an early morning bus down to the small town of Coulee Dam, just off the reservation. She played afterschool sports for the high school, which was half white students and half native, and wondered why she sat on the bench more than the non-natives, even as people from her own community would tease her for being a white girl. Most nights she did not get home until 8:30 or 9:00 pm, and one night she was jumped at the bus stop by people from her own community. Still, she received enough encouragement and support from family, teachers and others in the community, that she believed she could succeed in school, and should not waste any talents or gifts she had been given. She graduated from high school with her class, one of only five of the approximately twenty-four reservation students who began high school in Coulee Dam together.

With a tribal scholarship, she continued to college, where she took psychology classes at Eastern Washington University.

“If I would have known about the thousand of steps ahead, I might have just quit, but a lot of times I would just look around and notice things that other people were doing around me right then. I would ask myself stuff like: Why are people doing research?”

One day she asked this question about research to an EWU professor, Dr. Russell Kolts, who walked her over to Eastern’s TRIO McNair Program office. Eastern’s TRIO McNair program is one of 151 federally-funded McNair programs currently awarded competitive grants through the U.S. Department of Education to provide research opportunities and other scholarly activities to prepare first-generation, low-income and underrepresented students for success at the doctoral level. Eastern’s TRIO McNair program uses a cohort model to build an academic community of research scholars. All services, including faculty-mentored research internships, conference presentations, and graduate school preparation seminars, among others, are designed to build skills and create a strong network of scholarly support. Essential for anyone’s success in preparing for graduate school, such networks have been shown to be particularly important for students who have not been traditionally represented in higher education.

“One of the biggest challenges when I first moved away was not having a sense of community,” Alvina says of the first years in college. “But at McNair I did have that support. It felt like a family with everyone there. I know I wouldn’t have worked as hard, or been as committed to coming there to do research every day without that. I think anybody who comes from a community-oriented background needs to feel that connection, because if they don’t, it’s really isolating. You can just kind of close yourself off.”

As a psychologist, Dr. Cawston Marris encounters different forms of isolation every day.

“I see a real disconnect in our culture, an absence of traditions and culture passed down. People are really lost. They don’t know what to do. There’s lots of immediate gratification, technology and stuff, but even if they finish high school, its like people become stuck, afraid to leave here and with no cultural background to guide them. So one of the things I’m trying to incorporate in therapy is bringing back the culture into people’s lives. It is a big part of identity and strength.”

She speaks of the importance of “grit” and the things in her culture that are really hard but beautiful, “One thing I often share, it applies to therapy too, is that when people pass away in our culture, you are not allowed to cry for three days. This is to help your loved ones leave this world and make it to the other side. Because if they see you crying, the loved ones will not want to go on to their relatives and family on the other side. Those practices are hard, but they make you strong, and teach you how to persist and endure. It is these things that are missing. The next generation is unaware of these practices. Hard things really helped me. Helped me through grad school when I wanted to quit.”

There are certainly many hard things on the Colville Reservation. The tribal population exhibits high rates of cancer, and chronic diseases such as lupus and fibromyalgia, but there is little data to explain this. A few years ago, extremely high rates of suicide caused the governor to declare a state of emergency, and Dr. Cawston Marris sees a relationship between high incidences of depression and drug addiction with the chronic pain that accompanies many chronic diseases. There is a large gap in the research to identify and incorporate cultural traditions into psychological evaluation and treatment. But if one believes in the power of education and research, that knowledge can be applied for community benefit, then there are many positive changes.

The Tribe has started a research branch to collect more data to inform tribal programs, and Dr. Cawston Marris has begun a research project with the Frontiers of Innovation Program where she will focus on implementing a culturally sensitive intervention program with the birth to 5 population.

When asked about any advice she might give to current students preparing for graduate school, or anyone, she speaks of mindfulness, “Being present is very important,” she says. “It’s hard to go forward the more we worry about the future or live in the past. And any time that you don’t know or you are just a little bit curious about something, I would ask questions. It’s really hard sometimes as a minority to ask, because you don’t want others to perceive you as less than, but you don’t know what you don’t know a lot of times. You just have to keep asking. I now find that the ability to ask questions or say ‘I don’t know’ as a strength.”

She remembers the professor who in answer to her question about research walked her from his office to the TRIO McNair offices, “That little five minute walk definitely changed my life. Just ask. A question might open a door, and you never know what’s on the other side.”