Fall 2019 Magazine

CAMPUS
NEWS
ALTERNATIVE
SPRING BREAK
YABUCOA, P.R.
MMC CELEBRATES
WORLD PRIDE 2019
Marymount Manhattan was honored to be included in the annual NYC Pride
festivities again last June. An excited contingent of MMC students and staff
marched down Fifth Avenue and through the West Village of Manhattan
among thousands of other revelers for the annual New York City Pride Parade.
This summer marked 50 years since the Stonewall Uprising, often considered
the catalyst for the gay rights movement.
Last April, ten MMC students traveled to Yabucoa, Puerto Rico, for a series of
volunteer projects focused on hurricane relief. The projects were a part of the
College’s annual Alternative Spring Break (ASB) trip, an immersive service experience
that challenges students to reflect critically on their roles in the community through
service, activism, and leadership. Accompanied by staff members Fanny He, Assistant
Director of Student Activities and Inclusivity Programming, and Zakkiyya Taylor,
Associate Director for Student and Community Engagement, students provided
assistance to hurricane survivors, helping with scraping, painting, and debris clean-up
at homes in critical need of repair.
“The ASB trip to Puerto Rico was especially memorable due to the connections each
of us made,” says Devan Zingler ’19, an International Studies major. “We were able
to bond as a team and build friendships, but we were also able to connect with the
Puerto Ricans we met throughout the trip. Being able to build relationships and learn
about the culture, while also providing services, was an incredible experience.”
STUDENTS PUBLISH RESEARCH ON SPELLING
History, Philosophy, and
Religious Studies Conference
In March, students, faculty, and guests gathered in the Regina Peruggi Room in MMC's
Carson Hall for the 11 th annual History, Philosophy, and Religious Studies conference,
showcasing research by a variety of students from MMC and beyond. The conference
began with a Defining Religion panel featuring MMC students Allie McInerney ’20,
Molly Null ’20, and Michaela Williams ’19. In another session, Daniel Driscoll, a Philosophy
major at Columbia University, presented his research, “On Nature, Economy, and Ethics in
Thirteenth-Century Scholarship.”
MMC Communication and Media Arts students presented their research from
Introduction to Philosophy—a spring course taught by Brad Herling, Ph.D., Associate
Professor of Religious Studies and Chair of the Division of Humanities and Social
Sciences. In the course, students wrote essays relating Plato’s famous Allegory of the
Cave to contemporary television or film pieces, including examples like Keeping Up with
the Kardashians, The Matrix, and The Hunger Games.
To conclude the afternoon, MMC’s Philosophy Club, headed by Molly Null ’20,
Agata Krapa ’19, Alex Tavarez ’20, and Sabrina Sooknanan ’19, led an entertaining
interactive panel on the philosophy of hit television show It’s Always Sunny
in Philadelphia.
18 | Marymount Manhattan College
The research of recently graduated students Jessica Krimgold ’19 and
Ailyn Gomez ’19, both Speech-Language Pathology and Audiology (SLP-A)
majors and Language Science minors, will be published in the peer-reviewed journal
Research and Teaching in Developmental Education this year in an article titled
“Spelling Counts: The Educational Gatekeeping Role of Grading Rubrics and Spell
Check Programs.”
Working with Sue Behrens, Ph.D., Professor and Chair of the Department of
Communication Sciences and Disorders, Krimgold and Gomez investigated how
adherence to traditional English spelling has an impact on mastery of academic
writing and explored the ways in which over-reliance on grammar- and spell-check
technology leads to a loss of sensitivity to multilingual and multicultural aspects of
language. They examined grading rubrics across colleges and departments, finding
that both the quality and quantity of spelling errors were prone to subjective
judgment and that the top five most commonly used spell-check programs were
inconsistent in their recommendations.
As seniors last May, Krimgold and Gomez presented this research at the New York State Speech-Language-Hearing Association (NYSSLHA) Annual
Convention and were selected as finalists in the student research category. Of their project, Krimgold and Gomez said, “We presented data that
question the validity of this technology in the speech-language pathology world, and we illustrated how, as student clinicians, we have benefited from
developing language awareness through the study of linguistics.”
This work on spelling was a companion project to a 2016 study in which Dr. Behrens and three SLP-A majors tested common grammar checkers.
That technology also proved to be unreliable and fostered a prescriptive sense of right vs. wrong grammatical constructions, with no room for
discussion of grammatical variation.
Fall 2019 | 19