About the Scholarship

The Ruff Scholarship is a generous annual donation from Jim and Walta Ruff. This scholarship supports current and prospective teachers studying in the CSU English Education program. Multiple awards for up to six credits of tuition may be made annually. Applicants must demonstrate how they will use the funds toward professional development or their degree.

Eligible applicants include individuals in any one of the three following categories:

1.) Employed, full- or part-time, as an English language arts teacher in a public school or
2.) Current undergraduate or graduate students who are within 30 credits of completing their degree and have financial need or
3.) Undergraduate or graduate students who will be student teaching in the spring and in need of financial assistance to reduce the number of hours outside of student teaching that they would work to pay tuition.

We seek applicants with the desire to achieve any or all of the following goals:

• deepen and broaden their knowledge in areas relevant to their teaching
• critically engage with literacy studies, literary scholarship, academic and creative writing, and/or teacher inquiry
• revitalize their work with students, especially those from historically marginalized or underserved populations
• connect to a professional community with shared interests
• begin or continue a graduate degree in English

Because we seek to increase the diversity of our program, applicants who self-identify as members of marginalized populations are strongly encouraged to apply. The application deadline is Friday, November 4.

We offer several graduate-level English courses in the late afternoons (starting at 4pm or later) once per week. Some of these course offerings include:

Spring 2023

E632: Critical Content Analysis of Children’s and Young Adult Literature

Mondays, 5:00-7:50pm

Course Instructor: Rosa Nam

This course is open to students from all programs and interests. Local teachers are also welcome and encouraged to join. We will explore the foundations of critical content analysis as a research method. This approach moves beyond traditional content analyses and uses a critical lens to explore the dynamics of power in texts. Using mentor texts, students will work collaboratively in groups to conduct their own critical content analysis of contemporary diverse children’s or young adult literature for a topic of their choosing and write a journal article that they can choose to submit for publication.

E630A.002 – Special Topics in Literature: Area Studies – Multiethnic US Modernisms

Fridays, 4:00-6:50pm

Course Instructor: Leif Sorensen 

This course asks what US modernism looks like when the work of African American, Afro-Caribbean, Indigenous, Asian American, and Latinx writers is at the center and not the periphery. After a brief orientation in critical approaches to modernism in the US and discussion of a couple of canonical landmarks we will turn our attention to works by Claude McKay, Nella Larsen, Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, Younghill Kang, Sui Sin Far, Jose Garcia Villa, D’Arcy McNickle, John Joseph Mathews, Ella Deloria, Américo Paredes, and Jovita Gonzalez. Students will write a series of short analytical essays, facilitate discussion, and develop a final project by completing a scaffolded series of assignments (project proposal, annotated bibliography, final draft).