Randolph professors granted tenure

Psychology professor Sara Beck, education professor Crystal Howell, and political science professor Aaron Shreve were recently granted tenure by the Randolph College Board of Trustees.

Beck, who came to Randolph in 2018, earned her undergraduate degree, masters, and PhD from Vanderbilt University.

Her research centers on how children’s active engagement with music and media can be leveraged to facilitate prosocial behavior and inclusion. A lifelong musician, she is interested in how making music with others can foster social bonding in both children and adults.

She teaches classes in development and social psychology, as well as research methods and the psychology of music. In the classroom, she focuses on applying what psychologists learn from research to our own experiences, as well as building transferable skills around reading and consuming scientific literature.

Howell majored in English and Spanish, with a minor in classical studies, at Marshall University, where she also earned her Master of Arts in Teaching and became certified to teach English and Spanish.

She spent six years teaching middle and high school Spanish while completing her master’s degree in English, also at Marshall. In her seventh year of teaching, she worked as an online Spanish teacher for the West Virginia Virtual School—a shift that has influenced her research into sojourner teachers, who move back and forth between teaching in-person and online.

She came to Randolph in 2018 after earning her PhD in curriculum and instruction at Indiana University. She also writes about teachers unions, embodiment, and qualitative research methodologies.

Shreve, who joined the Randolph faculty in 2019, earned his bachelor’s degree in political science from Minnesota State University Moorhead, followed by a master’s in security and intelligence studies at the Graduate School of Public and International Affairs at the University of Pittsburgh. He also holds a PhD in political science from the University of California, Davis, where his subfields were international relations and political methodology/applied statistics.

His research examines the relationship between status and prestige in relation to foreign aid and peacekeeping, arms and military build-ups, and conflict. In his teaching, he emphasizes the link, or often the lack thereof, between academic debates and theories with policymaking—all with the goal of preparing students to be active citizens in a global community.

His most recent publication, “Boys and Their Toys: Status Inconsistency in Non-democratic Regimes and the Import of Major Weapon Systems,” in the Journal of Conflict Resolution, examines the effect of regime type and status motivations on weapons imports.