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Tiffany Gayle Chenault

Professor and Chair of the Sociology Department, and Coordinator of African-American Studies Minor, Salem State University

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About Tiffany

Chenault’s teaching, research and community work focuses on how to reduce racial, class, and gender inequalities to help build communities of equity and social justice. She has nearly 20 years of experience working for nonprofits and communities in the areas of public and affordable housing, voting rights, and education. In addition she is a board member of ACE (Alternatives for Communities and Environments) in Roxbury, MA. Her current research is focused on inequalities around health access, gender, race, and running.

Contributions

Publications

"The Unseen Politics of Public Housing: Resident Councils, Communities, and Change" (Lexington Book, forthcoming).
Investigates “resident councils” within the context of critical race theory and scholar activist methodology to understand the disjunctions between housing policies, race, class, and the lived experiences of the Rivertown Resident Council and HUD officials and what can be done to eliminate those disjunctions.
"Bringing Organizations Back In: Perspectives on Service Learning, Community Partnership and Democratic Thinking in a Voter Engagement Project" (with Jennifer Jackson and Joy Winkler). Partnerships: A Journal of Service Learning and Civic Engagement 6, no. 1 (2015): 77-79.
Examines the ways in which a year-long, interdisciplinary voter engagement service-learning partnership between a community-based organization and a public university promoted democratic thinking and democratic action. Argues that partnerships with advocacy groups to support political change constitute an important aspect of educating for democracy, challenging the views of politics that negate the importance of government, political participation and collective action.
"An Act of Translation: The Need to Understand Students' Understanding of Critical Thinking in the Undergraduate Classroom" (with Elizabeth Duclos-Orsello). Journal of Effective Teaching 8, no. 2 (2008): 5-20.
Expands the existing literature on critical thinking (CT) by arguing the need for more student-centered research on the topic and reporting on the findings of a CT research project with two central, related goals: 1) to record and analyze undergraduate students’ definition of CT and 2) to create an easy-to-use instrument that can assist faculty members across many disciplines identify and understand their students’ use of the term so as to improve both teaching and learning.
"Black Women's Colleges" in Women in Higher Education: An Encyclopedia, edited by Ana M. Martinez Aleman and Kristen A. Renn (ABC- CLIO Inc., 2002), 15-17.
Provides a brief background and description for the two African American Female Colleges in the United States.
"Black Sororities" in Women in Higher Education: An Encyclopedia, edited by Ana M. Martinez Aleman and Kristen A. Renn (ABC- CLIO Inc., 2002), 279-282.
Provides a brief background and description for the historic black sororities.