This ambitious exhibition includes a mural by Bransford, new video works by Peter Campus (Beneath), and Sue de Beer (Sisters), a photographic project by Lyle Ashton Harris, and two large-scale outdoor relief sculptures by Dave Hardy. Nancy Barton, artist and chair of Steinhardt’s Department of Art and Art Professions, curated the exhibit of 100 artworks spread throughout six floors of the Institute’s newly renovated townhouse.

Bransford’s artwork references ancient texts from religious, scientific, and humanistic sources. The symbols in his work are a rich source of discussion for many of the legal scholars in residence who study biblical law. Bransford serves as director of the Steinhardt Department of Art and Art Professions’ BFA program.

On Thursday, December 3rd, the Straus Institute will host an inaugural event. An open house to view the art will be held from 4:00 - 6:00. RSVP for the event.

Photo: Jesse Bransford stands before Fortress, 2004..

Stuart is best-known for the performances he called “spectacles,” which often took the form of small tabletop performances and involved the manipulation of everyday objects atop a folding TV dinner tray. Performed by a poker-faced Sherman, the spectacles are a unique hybrid that move between references to various genres, including comedy, magic, musicals, minimalism, surrealism, opera, three-card monte games, fluxus, and vaudeville.

The exhibition, “Beginningless Thought/Endless Seeing: The Works of Stuart Sherman,” explores his extraordinary career, through documentation of his larger scale theatrical productions, sculptural proposals, daily collages, and poetry. Exhibited for the first time is an extraordinary series of drawings executed in the 1970s, which provide the immediate context for the performance spectacles.

We recently toured the exhibition with one of the its curators, Yolanda Hawkins. Click below to hear an audio tour of the exhibition and see highlights of Sherman’s work.

Audio tour of "Beginningless Thought/Endless Seeing: The Works of Stuart Sherman" with Yolanda Hawkins, curator. Now through December 19 at 80 WSE Galleries, NYU.

The exhibition is made possible by the recent restoration of the Stuart Sherman archive at the NYU Fales Collection, allowing many works to be exhibited for the first time.

80 WSE Galleries is operated by the NYU Steinhardt Department of Art and Art Professions, under the direction of artist and faculty member Peter Campus.

The role of the community college in New York City higher education was the focus of the Steinhardt Institute for Higher Education Policy series this fall. Institute public forums in October featured John Mogulescu, Senior University Dean for Academic Affairs at the City University of New York (CUNY) and the head of CUNY’s planning team for the new community college, Thomas Bailey, George & Abby O’Neill Professor of Economics and Education at Teachers College, Columbia University, and director of the Community College Research Center, Augusta Kappner, former president of the Borough of Manhattan Community College and former Assistant Secretary of Education under Bill Clinton, and Gail Mellow, president of La Guardia Community College.

All of the Institute’s guest lecturers acknowledged the vital role that two-year colleges play in our nation's higher education system. Community colleges currently educate nearly half of all undergraduates, provide vocational and occupational training, offer basic skills and ESL programs, and support local community economic growth and development.   In these current economic conditions, policy-makers, foundations, and legislators are looking to community colleges to re-train dislocated workers, increase attainment and persistence rates for degree-seekers, and to educate a larger and more diverse population of students than ever before. The community college sector, which has typically been severely underfinanced, has received new attention from such philanthropic organizations as the Gates Foundation and the Lumina Foundation, as well as from the federal government. This summer, President Obama unveiled a 10-year, $12 billion initiative to improve community college student outcomes.

Steinhardt Institute director, Ann Marcus, applauded recent efforts to strengthen the community college sector in CUNY and across the nation. Marcus was one of the founders of LaGuardia Community College in 1970 and served as its first Dean of Continuing Education.

Photo, from left to right: Thomas Bailey, John Mongulescu, and Augusta Kappner took part in the Steinhardt Institute for Higher Education Policy's public forums in October.

Responding to Hamre were Steinhardt’s C. Cybele Raver, professor of applied psychology and director of NYU’s Institute of Human Development and Social Change, and Fabienne Doucet, assistant professor of education. Raver discussed her work with the Chicago School Readiness Project, a model that provides professional development and coaching to Head Start teachers, and her use of the CLASS measurement tool. Doucet discussed the importance not only of children’s school readiness, but also teacher’s school readiness. In her view, teachers can best succeed when there is information sharing between parent and teacher.

Future events in the series will focus on educational transitions during the middle school years and the post-secondary transition to college and career.   

(Photo, from left to right: Dean Mary Brabeck, Fabienne Doucet, Bridget Hamre, and C. Cybele Raver)

Marcus Ostermiller, a pianist and master’s degree candidate in Steinhardt's Department of Music and Performing Arts Professions, is the recipient of a Jack Kent Cooke Foundation Graduate Scholarship. The award is $50,000 a year for graduate study.

Ostermiller, who attended three colleges as an undergraduate and struggled to succeed on route to a piano performance degree at the University of Denver, was chosen by the foundation for his "extraordinary academic achievement, will to succeed, and the breadth of his interest and activities.” An advocate for HIV/AIDS treatment and awareness, Ostermiller has performed in benefits for the Colorado AIDS Project, the Regional AIDS Interfaith Network of Colorado, and the HIV/AIDS Awareness Committee at the University of Denver.

Mary B. McRae is an associate professor in Steinhardt’s Department of Applied Psychology. McRae teaches Group Dynamics, Cross-cultural Counseling, Program Development and Evaluation and offers a seminar in Counseling Psychology at the masters and doctoral level. Her latest book, written with Ellen Short is Racial and Cultural Dynamics in Group and Organizational Life: Crossing Boundaries (Sage Publications, 2009).

Talk a little bit about your research and how it has evolved.

Mary McRae : I had been involved in doing group work for several years and had been particularly taken by the experiential model of group relations work, often referred to as the Tavistock model, which is based on psychoanalytic and systems theory.

My oldest brother, Frank McRae, was murdered in 1997. He was a barber in Bedford Stuyvesant, the type of barbershop you see in a Spike Lee movie with old men telling stories. My brother was very proud of the fact that his baby sister was a professor at NYU, so when I took my son there for a haircut everyone stopped to hear him boast about me and challenge my son with what he was learning in school. Frank and I are children of sharecroppers. He did not finish school because he was needed in the fields to harvest the crops; I was fortunate to be too young to have to work in the fields. The Daily News ran a story about my brother’s murder that hailed him as a fixture in the community, but also implied that because he was going into an after hour social club, he must have been involved in some illegal activity. In working class black communities social clubs serve as a way of maintaining social connections, a place to relax after a hard week’s work. White clubs don’t suffer from the same stigma. His death made me think more about my own work and how stereotypes about race, class and gender impact our daily lives and relationships, the unspoken assumptions about “the other” that in fluence our behavior in conscious and unconscious ways.   At that time I was also contemplating next steps in my work, what was my passion and how could I pursue it? My area of research and work is on racial and cultural dynamics in groups. So I decided to use this multicultural lens with the Tavistock model, which allows me to create a temporary institution that explores racial and cultural dynamics as an integral part of it’s functioning.

How did you apply this to your own work?

Mary McRae: In 1999 I conducted the first Group Relation’s conference at NYU, entitled “Race and Class in Group and Organizational Life.” It was dedicated to my brother. I wanted to create a space where people could talk about difficult feelings; especially as they relate to intergroup differences.

In this conference we learned that while talking about race and class was difficult for both the participants and the staff, we often found ourselves saying things that were not always politically correct, struggling with difficult interactions and feedback, yet staying and acknowledging the value of the experience and learning. This was the beginning of the Group Relation’s Conference series at NYU. Every spring, we create these temporary experiential educational institutions, providing opportunities to study leadership, authority, and power, with a special focus on differences in group and organizational life. The themes have been race and class, ethnicity and culture, foreigners within borders and we have worked with sexual identity, age, disability, language, and other differences.

In 2002 I started videotaping groups during the weekend conferences and experimenting with different configurations of small self-study groups. In one conference with the theme of the complexity of color and culture, we separated the members into seven small self-study groups (all people of color, predominantly Latinos, all white, predominantly white, predominantly gay and lesbians, rainbow or mixed group, predominantly Middle Eastern and European). In this conference we learned that the people of color, Latinos, and gay and lesbian groups found power in numbers, something that many rarely experienced in their work and educational institutions. This experience of power gave many minority members voice, leadership, and authority in their groups as well as enhanced awareness of how they are authorized by others when in roles of leadership.

How did you come to write Racial and Cultural Dynamics in Group and Organizational Life: Crossing Boundaries?

Mary McRae: My book is a compilation of years of study on racial and cultural dynamics. The book includes a lot of transcript data drawn from the annual group relation’s conferences.   It was written with my former doctoral student, Ellen Short, who worked with me as a teaching assistant and as a consultant in many of the conferences at NYU. We talked about our frustration with textbooks that usually had only one chapter on working with multicultural groups. We wanted a text that included racial and cultural issues when discussing group development, dynamics, roles, and leadership. I had lots of videos and transcripts that spoke to the various topics we thought important to cover and that is how we decided to write the book.

We provide a number of examples to illustrate group formation, group development, ethical issues, social roles, leadership, power, authority, and we have one chapter to demonstrate what we think a mature group working with racial and cultural differences would look like. While the focus is mostly on racial and cultural differences, we include others such as social class, age, gender, language, and sexual orientation.

In the book we have case examples of racial and cultural boundaries that polarize group members into different camps. This is usually during the early stages of group development. As members get to know each other better they are less polarized. In one group an African American man talked about being accustomed to being attacked in groups, so he had come ready to do battle, stating that his heart was racing and he wished that people could see that he could be vulnerable. A gay man responded he was a gay child, who felt alone in the world, that he felt that he had to hide his sexual identity. In this same group a Jewish man talked about his discomfort with a young German woman in the group who seemed proud of her identity. An Asian woman talked about how the group influenced her to take up a stereotypical passive role, when it was not how she usually saw herself.   These are all examples of the power of group influence and how individuals manage given the context.   Leadership in these types of groups requires a level of multicultural competency, a capacity to accept that the experience of others is valid and to work collaboratively. Leaders also need to have a capacity to be vulnerable in the service of one’s own learning and the learning of the group.

What do people take away from your teaching gives insight into their experience in the workplace?

Mary McRae: Those who participate in the group dynamics course that I teach and in the annual Group Relations Conferences develop an understanding of boundaries, authority, role and task in group and organizational life. They develop skills in managing themselves and others in work roles when ethnocentricity and racial bias stand at the boundary between them. It helps people to ask the question: Is this about my race, ethnicity, religion, or social class or is this about personality or interpersonal differences? The question relates to the power and access to resources that often exists between groups. They also develop an awareness of multiple identities that each person has, with one becoming more salient than others in certain situations and context (i.e. race, gender, sexual identity). They develop the ability to identify and acknowledge the roles that they take up in groups and organizations and how this role enhances or impedes effective functioning. There is increased awareness of authority structures, who has authority and how are they authorized in their role, what are the relations between those with authority and those with less authority?    We explore how different cultural perspectives impact authority and authorization of roles in groups and organizations. There is an increase in the ability to recognize and manage hidden agendas, stereotypes, and unspoken assumptions about Western, Eastern, and African groups.

Final thoughts?

Mary McRae: Racial and cultural dynamics are an integral part of functioning in diverse groups. From a psychoanalytic perspective there is a pull to split between what is “like me” and “the other,” usually attributing positive aspects to self and one’s own group and negative aspects to the other. This is a rather basic concept, however, there is a complexity in working with diverse groups that is not often recognized. We use racial/cultural identity attitudes and cultural values as a way of exploring this complexity. For example, during the last presidential primary the press attempted to label Barack Obama as having racist attitudes because of his association with the minister of his church, Reverend Wright. The assumption was that all African Americans hold similar racial-cultural attitudes. The thinking was that Obama could not belong to a church and be at a different status of racial-cultural identity.

What we know is that there are many factors that influence racial-cultural attitudes such as age, religion, internalized messages about others, and historical relations between groups. Obama was in the precarious position of having to choose between his racial and spiritual family group and the broader U.S. constituency. In group relations work, we would describe Obama’s response as a ‘Janus-like,’ the capacity to look internally and externally simultaneously, being both the observer and the participant. His speech on race noted the biases and stereotypes that exist on both sides. As a Black man he could speak to experiences of racism, as a bi-racial person he could speak to positive experiences with a white grandmother who loved him and yet held racist beliefs.

It is the paradox of working with both sides that my work has forced me to examine and reflect on. It is what I find most difficult, yet most exciting.

Natan Edelsburg, a junior in the Department of Media, Culture, and Communication, got sold on Twitter at the Eden Rock Hotel in Miami, Florida. While exercising on a LifeFitness machine, he sent a tweet to the company: LifeFitness Love your new machine. Within a few minutes he got a thank you and a recommendation for a portable treadmill for his New York City apartment.

Edelsburg, who is interested in new digital media, PR, social media tools, advertising and other forms of marketing, liked the way that Twitter allowed you to pose a question to your followers and hear back immediately. He was also taken by Gregory Galant, the CEO of SawHorse Media, a guest lecturer in his production class. Before his lecture, Galant tweeted to his followers: Going to speak at NYU, what should I speak about? One of the tweets he received from a follower was: Why don’t you talk about how in the future there won’t be a New York Times because their stock is worth less than the Sunday paper?

Edelsburg kept Galant’s business card. He was interested in how the CEO's media company developed Twitter sites to mainstream conversations among niche communities. Higher education was the niche community Edelsburg knew best. He created GlobalQuad, a site that aggregates tweets from colleges and universities, during his internship with SawHorse.

“The site links different schools across the country and the globe, and you really get a sense of those who had been smart enough to venture onto Twitter to try and connect with current and prospective students,” Edelsburg said.

GlobalQuad picks up all tweets from NYU’s official Twitter accounts. At any given moment, a visitor can read a post generated from Steinhardt’s Undergraduate Student Government, NYUAlumni, and even select faculty.

“If you follow NYU's feeds, you'll learn who Jay Rosen is,” Edelsburg said. “Professor Rosen has over 28,000 followers and is constantly ‘mind-casting.’”

Edelsburg notes that GlobalQuad is not only an easy way to see these different conversations, but “it's a fun and exciting portal into the minds of many of the influential people who make up our great university.”

Follow Natan Edesburg on Twitter at http://www.twitter.com/twatan.

Jane Bear-Lehman is an associate professor and chair of Steinhardt's Department of Occupational Therapy. She is a co-investigator in a National Institutes of Health/National Institute of Aging (NIH/NIA) grant studying the cognit ive and physical bases of disablement in adults. A specialist in orthopedic and upper limb rehabilitation, she currently serves on the editorial board for The Journal of Hand Therapy.

In your Ph.D. dissertation you sought to understand emerging “upper limb cumulative trauma disorder’ that plagued early computer users. Talk a little bit about your study and what you learned.

Jane Bear-Lehman: The findings from my dissertation, now over a decade ago, note that the computer keyboarder who expresses upper limb cumulative trauma disorder presents with a collection of painful symptoms in their arms and hands that seem to resolve on weekends when they are not at work. As time continued, the discomfort spread and did not resolve itself when the keyboarder was not at work. The discomfort gradually impeded the quality and quantity of performance for daily life tasks. The control and amelioration of these symptoms was found to related to treatment on a continuous basis. Moreover, this type of problem seems to be analogous with long term, chronic medical conditions where the onset is slow and insidious over time, and the work of the practitioner is to control the patient’s symptoms rather than to treat the ‘disease’ directly.

Have you seen a difference in the type of hand-related repetitive injuries since you wrote your dissertation than you are seeing now? How do you measure these 'injuries?'

Jane Bear-Lehman: Since I completed my doctoral work, there has been a rapid growth in the types of tools used requiring key entering, and all of the tools have become smaller, many mobile. In my study, keyboarding was primarily a desk-related function. This was just before the rapid growth of technology: laptop computers and cell phones were not a common form of communication exchange.

What can an occupation therapist offer someone who has chronic digital media-related pain?

Jane Bear-Lehman: Occupational therapists first assess the problematic or painful regions and seek to calm the symptoms through traditional therapeutic measures. Key to success is to then review the aggravating conditions and to work closely with the individual to develop safe working patterns and conditions to keep the symptoms under control. Thus, the OT will redesign how an activity is performed by changing posture, for example: to abate symptoms when the wrist is bent, the recommendation for handwriting could include the use of an enlarged pen with rubber or foam near the tip and to use an inclined plane to neutralize and de-stress the wrist position for the writer. The individual may be directed to use a knife with an 11-degree angle so that the wrist is in an unstressed position when dicing vegetables. If a change in positioning does not produced symptom control, then the OT will suggest a different type of tool, for example: changing the trackball, type of pen, or encourage the use of a timer for forced rest periods, where the individual might take a walk or do some stretches to work a different group of muscles. If these measures don’t provide relief, an OT may suggest recommend a voice-activated computer or avoiding the ‘painful’ tasks completely.

What is the prognosis for the generation that is born into this technology as we add video game playing controls, Nintendo DS keypad, and even iPod touch finger game playing into the mix?

Jane Bear-Lehman: The rate and severity of discomfort from constant use of computer and hand held-communication devices is interesting to track. The initial injuries tracked in the 1980’s were focused on office workers in workstations as described in Daniel Berman’s book, Death on the Job. The mobility, the varied types of communication, and the myriad of tasks we now perform take the single continuous force that challenged us in the 1980’s to a different level.

Whether injuries are increased or abated has a lot to do with the user and how he or she engages in the tasks and seeks variation in posture, pressure, etc. The younger population also has access to, and a strong desire to engage in some mobile (DS; PSP), or not mobile (XBOX), or physically interactive (Wii) games in addition to communicating on IM, social networks, and the like. Some question whether the increased time game playing and social networking takes away from time on the sports field and run the risk of obesity. Also, we question whether these children are putting their visual systems and fine motor skills at risk as they are over-working their eyes and small muscles groups.

Final thoughts?

Jane Bear-Lehman: Hand- held devices seem innocuous, however continuous, uninterrupted use of them can cause discomfort. The earlier the user takes notices this and modifies how they are engaging with the device by changing posture or pattern, then the sooner long-term problems can be prevented.

Learn how Kevin Weaver, a clinical assistant professor in Steinhardt's Department of Physical Therapy, diagnoses and treats digital media-based hand pain by visiting his Q & A.

To read more about Jane Bear-Lehman's collaborative work with cellist Duo-Lin Peng, visit this blog post.

Talk a little about your scholarship. What do you study, and what is your particular method of inquiry?

Finn Brunton: I work in a zone I like to describe as the social history of technology: how we make our tools and how they make us. Every technology is a collection of metaphors and ideas -- about the future, what we are and what we want to do, how the world works -- but it’s also a bunch of capacities and capabilities for use, and we often take them in unexpected directions. Th at divergence between how a technology is envisioned and how it gets adopted and adapted in practice is the sweet spot for me, because that's where the things I’m interested in become easier to see. So I work a lot on how things fail, break, and get misused, when the invisible "black box" of a technology stops working and makes us ask: How does this work, why, and for whom, and under what circumstances? That's why I wrote my dissertation on spam: spammers expose the complex socio-technical history of the Internet and Web by exploiting the disparities between plan and practice. I came to this approach by a winding road: I was something like a failed architecture student as an undergrad at UC Berkeley, and I became more and more interested in how people interact with the built environment -- how they inhabit, or appropriate, or resist. I ended up writing about radical political movements and the process of seizing cities and buildings for unintended purposes.

When you study the history of technology where do you begin?

Finn Brunton: Lots and lots and lots of research. Because of the particular Internet-centric nature of what I do right now, most of that research is online, in remote corners of big databases. I do a lot of emailing and chatting, too, tracking down leads, trying to get interviews from understandably skittish and busy people. (Matthew Kirschenbaum has just published a book, Mechanisms: New Media and the Forensic Imagination, that superbly describes the problems of doing serious archival research on digital material.)

How would you describe the ‘primitive period” of the Internet?


Finn Brunton: That's a good question. As a matter of convenience and personal taste, I'd put the "primitive period" as running from the formalization of "the Internet" in 1974 -- that's when the wide array of computer networks then in operation were specified as one continuous system with a common protocol -- to the arrival of the Web in the early 1990s. This is very arguable, but it works for me, for now: the text-based world of bulletin-board systems, Usenet, Gopher and so on would probably be unrecognizable as "the Internet" to a young person today. It was full of fascinating things. To take a notion from the designer Matt Webb, the early Internet was like the early solar system, before the planets gathered out of the big loose accretion disk of gas and dust and rocks. Now things are huge and getting huger, with so much of our on-line experience happening on Planet Google, Planet Facebook, Planet Amazon, but once we had many, many little planetesimals with their unique species of conversations, archives, projects, games; you could stumble onto them as though onto the Little Prince's asteroid. I miss it, but I'm not complaining -- the Web has opened up entirely different terrain and for vastly more diverse communities.

Given what you know of past and present, do you think we will see more steady progress or will it taper off?

Finn Brunton: One thing you learn from the history of technology is that predicting the future is a losing game (and that the concept of “progress" hurts more than helps, as it presets the discussion with some implied ideas about how things develop and towards what ends). 
That said, a safe bet: I think the effect of networking our computers is only beginning to be felt, but the glamorous visibility of the Internet will be short-lived. Soon it will be entirely boring, ubiquitous and invisible, and then the changes will really kick in. There was a concept in the 1920s and 30s of "air-mindedness," an evangelical fervor for flight, this utterly modern and thrilling technology that evaporated as flying became increasingly banal -- and increasingly profound in its effects on matters as diverse as commerce and war and migration. The same is true of the prefix "electro-," 
which was very exotic until electricity became a quotidian aspect of most every appliance and home. We can see it happening with "cyber-,"
which has already become rather embarrassing. I'm watching with fascination as the Internet become truly boring as a topic -- saying you "read something online" is as redundant as saying you have an electro-blender -- even as the changes we can make on ourselves and our society through it ramify.

A few off-the-cuff predictions -- I can't resist: the future of networked computing will be mobile, about things and places as much as people, and sensor input as much as human-generated content, and will have some of its most profound and interesting effects on the scale of water and electricity grids, cities, global logistics, and very large crowds. I suspect there will also be interesting bleed-over from gaming culture and user experience design into the structure of daily life, particularly money...but I'm already drifting into science fiction. That's enough from me.

Stay in touch with your academic colleagues: follow Finn Brunton on Twitter http://twitter.com/finnb.

Halkitis, professor and associate dean for research and doctoral studies at NYU Steinhardt, is co-editor of Barebacking: Psychosocial and Public Health Approaches (Informa Healthcare, 2006) and HIV+Sex: The Psychosocial and Interpersonal Dynamics of HIV-seriopositive Gay and Bisexual Men's Relationships (APA, 2005). SciTech Book News called Methamphetamine Addiction 'a comprehensive look at the methamphetamine epidemic.'

To learn more about methamphetamine addiction and read an interview with the author visit Steinhardt's Inside Books.

Marc Beja (BM ’09) is the recipient of The Chronicle of Higher Education ’s David W. Miller Award for Young Journalists. A graduate student in Steinhardt’s Department of Music and Music Professions, Beja received the award for three articles he wrote for The Chronicle during a summer internship. As an undergraduate student, Beja pursued both music and writing, earning his degree from Steinhardt’s program in music education and the College of Arts and Science’s journalism program.

As a journalist student, Beja worked as an enterprise editor for NYU’s Washington Square News and now serves as a senior editor. In 2008, Beja was an intern at Newsday and continues to write freelance articles for the Long-Island-based newspaper.

As a Steinhardt undergraduate, Beja worked as director and music director on two student productions. He was also student teacher at Manhattan New School and LaGuardia High School.

The Chronicle praised Beja for his “investigative drive, detailed reporting, and strong writing.”

the Annals of Surgery demonstrating the benefits of omega-3 enriched nutrition for surgical cancer patients. (Read more about this study in Steinhardt's Research News blog.)

The Irish Nutrition & Dietetic Institute (INDI) is the national organization for clinical nutritionists/dietitians in Ireland. INDI's mission is to encourage, foster and maintain the highest possible standards in the science and practice of human nutrition and dietetics, to positively influence the nutrition status and health of the individual and the population in general.

Photo: Aoife Ryan received the Research Dietitian of the Year award at the Irish Nutrition and Dietetic Institute’s Annual Research Conference in October. Pictured from left to right : Aine Brady, Minister of State at the Department of Health and Children, Aoife Ryan, and Sinead Duggan, chair of the research interest group of the INDI.

Kevin Weaver is an clinical assistant professor in the Department of Physical Therapy at New York University. He is a certified Orthopedic Clinical Specialist (OCS) by the American Board of Physical Therapy, and is certified in ergonomics by the Board of Certified Professional Ergonomists (CEA) and the Oxford Institute (CIE). Weaver owns and practices at Academy Physical Therapy and Employee Wellness Solutions.

In you practice as a physical therapist what kind of computer related injuries have you seen recently?

Kevin Weaver: The increased use of the computer in the workplace has lead to a number of musculoskeletal repetitive strain issues (RSI). The most common being neck and back pain which can be attributed to prolonged sitting, poor posture, an employees not adjusting an ergonomic chair correctly, and/or awkward keyboard, mouse, and monitor placement.

Carpal tunnel syndrome is commonly cited as a problem for computer users, but the incidence is a just fraction of neck and back pain incidence. Other arm and hand RSI’s include tunnel compression at the forearm and elbow. Epicondylitis on the inside (aka Golfer’s elbow) and outside (aka Tennis elbow) can also be the cause of symptoms at the elbow. The arm RSI’s can often be attributed to repetitive action of the forearm and wrist in an awkward wrist or elbow posture while using keyboards or mice. De’Quervain’s syndrome is a tendonitis at the base of the thumb into the forearm and is o ften the cause of mouse use that combines awkward wrist postures with repetition.

What wrecks more havoc on the hand -- computer keyboards, track pads, mice, or text messaging?

Kevin Weaver: Mouse use has increased over the years and is often the main culprit of problems in people’s dominant hand and arm when using the computer.

Text messaging is presently poses the most risk to the hand because the size of the keypads on the various smart phones requires increased precision for typing. And typing on a smaller keypad requires people to use more muscle contraction and increased flexed postures in the fingers – especially the thumb.

Keyboards were given a lot of negative press in the 90’s but the newer ergonomic designs and the increase in mouse use for software input and web surfing have lead – in my opinion – the keyboard to be the less likely culprit vs. the mouse.

I perceive the trackpad to be the least likely culprit of hand pain. I often recommend a movable trackpad in lieu of a mouse for people with RSI because you can use it on either arm with a little practice, which will help decrease ergonomic risk factors.

How does a physical therapist help cure these injuries -- by brace, by exercise, by recommending getting off the computer?

Kevin Weaver: The main focus of physical therapy with any of the discussed RSI’s, neck and back pain is patient education. The patient/client must understand the ergonomic risk factors that have contributed to their symptomatology. These can include repetition, awkward postures, and force of muscle contraction in the forearm and hand. The literature cites the combination of two of these factors is often what causes people to be symptomatic. When clients are educated they are often able to make most of the changes to their existing workstation with the equipment that they already have. The physical therapist may then recommend additional equiptment, breaks and/or stretching exercises to further reduce the effects of the risk factors.

Bracing during sleep is an excellent way to reduce awkward postures at the thumb, wrist, and elbow that can often contribute tosymptoms. Patients need to know what they do in their leisure activities, hobbies, and during the rest of their day outside work activities can contribute to their problems. Bracing during work activities is controversial. Some people can often increase force on symptomatic tendons and muscles by “fighting” the brace so they must brace at work with caution and be aware of any problems that may arise with the introduction of the brace.

Exercises are necessary and stretching at work may reduce the effects of repetition that may otherwise be unavoidable. Ultimately people need to strengthen the muscles around the involved structure but this may stress the injury further in the beginning of intervention. Rest from any symptomatic activity is an important step. Inflammation reduction with ice is a simple and important step in the beginning of symptoms. When people begin to reduce their symptoms they need to begin strengthening the muscles directly related to the involved area. But you can often begin strengthening weakened postural muscles in the shoulder and neck without stressing any symptomatic structure. Most people with upper extremity RSI do not realize that these areas of their body are weak and contributing to their ergonomic risk factors of poor postural habits.

What can a physical therapist offer someone who has chronic computer-related pain?

Kevin Weaver: Chronic symptoms are usually more difficult to deal with regardless of the source of symptoms. If someone is dealing with an upper extremity RSI lasting longer than several months the inflamed tendon (tendonitis) usually begins to turn to a degenerated and scarred state of tendonosis. In most cases of arm RSI the focus should be strengthening the muscle group that attaches to the tendon. This will promote proper healing and reduce the degenerative effects.

Tell me one thing I don't know about computer-related pain.

Kevin Weaver: Many people with RSI, neck and back pain present with trigger points in the involved muscles. Trigger points are what many people describe as a “knot” in the muscle and can often be a secondary or primary cause of symptoms.

Many of the same ergonomic risk factors that may cause an upper extremity RSI can cause a trigger point in the surrounding muscles. These trigger points can be successfully addressed with ergonomic risk factor reduction, stretching and deep tissue massage as well as patient instruction in self-stretching and massage at home.

Learn how Jane Bear-Lehman , associate professor and chair of Steinhardt's Department of Occupation Therapy, diagnoses and treats digital media-based hand pain by visiting this blog post.

Awarded Tenure     

Susan A. Kirch (Department of Teaching and Learning) is a science educator and a biologist whose research includes: investigations of teaching and learning science in urban elementary schools and studies of teacher learning in the areas of science and inclusion. Kirch, an associate professor, has participated in a variety of initiatives designed to bring teachers, K-12 students, educational researchers and scientists together to study access to science and the nature of scientific inquiry. She has published chapters and articles on school funding, inclusion, feminist pedagogy, co-teaching, and discourse in elementary school classrooms in journals such as Science Education, School Science and Mathematics, Cultural Studies of Science Education, and the Journal of Science Teacher Education. Kirch is currently the principal Investigator of ‘The Scientific Thinker Project, an exploratory study of teaching and learning the nature of scientific evidence in elementary school, which is funded by the National Science Foundation Discovery Research, K-12 program.

Promotion to Associate Professor with Tenure     

Sarah Beck (Department of Teaching and Learning) studies the literacy development of adolescents in school contexts.  Her research investigates how school contexts support adolescents' purposeful, engaged learning about reading and writing.   Beck's work has been supported by grants from the Spencer Foundation as well as from the New York University and Steinhardt School's Research Challenge Funds.   She has published her findings in many journals, including Research in the Teaching of English, Educational Researcher, and the Journal of Literacy Research.  Beck is the co-editor (with Leslie Nabors Olah) of Perspectives on Language & Literacy:  Beyond the Here & Now (Harvard Educational Review, 2001).

Charlton McIlwain (Department of Media, Culture, and Communication) studies issues related to the language and imagery of racial discourse in American political life, including how political candidates produce and deploy race-based persuasive appeals, how voters are affected by them, and how the news media frame their reporting of minority candidates and racial issues. McIlwain is co-author of the forthcoming book Race Appeal: The Prevalence, Purposes & Political Implications of Racial Discourse in American Politics (Temple, 2010), and co-editor of the forthcoming, Routledge Companion to Race & Ethnicity (Routledge, 2010). His work has also been published in the International Journal of Press/Politics, Semiotica, Journal of Black Studies, TAMARA Journal of Critical Postmodern Organizational Science, American Behavioral Scientist, and Communication Quarterly.

Christine McWayne (Department of Applied Psychology) studies how children's early skills, parenting, family involvement, and neighborhood can affect low-income children's social and academic competencies. Her community-based research has taken place in Head Start programs in New York City and Philadelphia, and her research has been published in many journals including, Developmental Psychology, Early Childhood Research Quarterly, Journal of Educational Psychology, American Journal of Community Psychology, and the Journal of Applied Developmental Psychology. McWayne has received funding from the National Institutes of Health, the Administration for Children and Families (USDHHS), and the Society for the Study of School Psychology to conduct research on parenting, family involvement, and low-income children's school readiness.

Lisa Stulberg (Department of Humanities and Social Sciences in the Professions) 
researches the politics of urban schooling, race and education policy, affirmative action in higher education, and school choice policy and politics. Stulberg is the author of Race, Schools, and Hope: African Americans and School Choice after Brown (Teachers College Press, 2008) and the co-editor (with Eric Rofes) of The Emancipator Promise of Charter Schools: Toward a Progressive Politics of School Choice (SUNY Press, 2004). She is also co-editor (with Sharon L. Weinberg) of the forthcoming Diversity in American Higher Education: Toward a More Comprehensive Approach (Routledge, 2011).

Promotion to Professor

Ricki Goldman  (Department of Administration, Leadership, and Technology) is a media in learning theorist, a postmodern video ethnographer, software inventor, and co-director of the CREATE Lab. During her doctorate at the MIT Media Lab, Goldman created a tool and a method for exploring the nature of children’s learning in technology cultures. The ethnographic tool for digital video analysis, Learning Constellations™ (circa 1988), is currently being redesigned under the name, Orion™. The method, the Perspectivity Framework, addresses the epistemology, ethnography, evaluation and ethics of conducting digital video research. Goldman is the author of Points of Viewing Children’s Thinking: A Digital Ethnographer’s Journey (Erlbaum, 1998), co-editor of Learning Together Online: Research in Asynchronous Learning Networks (Erlbaum, 2005), and the lead co-editor of Video Research in the Learning Sciences (Erlbaum, 2007). She is a founding editorial board member of the International Journal of Computer-Supported Collaborative Learning, and has served as the associate editor of the Journal for Interactive Learning Research and as board member of the Journal of the Learning Sciences. Grants supporting her research were awarded by the National Science Foundation and the Sloan Foundation, as well as Canada’s Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC), Natural Science and Engineering Research Council (NSERC), Canada Innovation Fund, and the National Centers of Excellence in Telelearning Consortium where her software took first prize at its annual conference. Goldman has presented over a hundred papers nationally and internationally.

C. Cybele Raver (Department of Applied Psychology) directs NYU's Institute of Human Development and Social Change. Her research focuses on young children and families facing economic hardship, and examines the mechanisms that support children's positive outcomes in the policy contexts of welfare reform and early intervention. Raver and her research team currently conduct the Chicago School Readiness Project (CSRP), a federally funded RCT intervention. The Chicago School Readiness Project tests the impact of comprehensive teacher training and mental health consultation services on Head Start classroom processes, on young children's self-regulation, and on their academic achievement later on in kindergarten and first grade. Raver has received a William T. Grant Faculty Scholar award as well as support from the Spencer Foundation, the MacArthur Foundation, the National Institutes of Health, and the National Science Foundation.