Full-Time Faculty

Sheldon Helfing, MA, MSW
Professor
sheldon.helfing@canyons.edu
661/362-5884

Mr. Helfing earned his BA in Psychology with a minor in Sociology from California State University, Northridge.  His MA is also from CSUN, in Education, Educational Psychology, Counseling and Guidance.  His Master of Social Work is from the University of Washington, Seattle.

Mr. Helfing's professional interests include marriage and the family, criminology, culture and socialization, and social psychology.

Dr. Marenco has a BS in Family and Consumer Sciences with an emphasis in Teaching and an MS in Family and Consumer Sciences with an emphasis in Family Relations/Child Development from CSUN and an MA and Ph.D. in Sociology with emphases in Aging and Family from USC.

Dr. Marenco's sociological interests include relationships, aging, social psychology, and research methods.  Her professional interests include service-learning, assessment, and distance education.

Anne is married and has two college student children.  She spends her spare time camping, quilting, traveling, and caring for her parents.  Along with Professor Tracie Gardner, Anne organizes vacation tours to foreign countries.

Professor Valentine earned her BA and MA in sociology at CSUN.  She also has a Mediation Certificate from the Center for Dispute Resolution. 

Ms. Valentine's professional interests include conflict resolution, gender issues, social movements, educational quality, and immigration. 

Mary has spent more than a decade studying the Women's Institute, England's oldest and largest women's organization, made up of more than 250,000 women in over 5,000 villages throughout England.   In the process she has become friends with the WI's most famous members, the Calendar Girls, who raised more than $2 million for Leukemia research by posing for a nude calendar.  Here Mary is surrounded by the Calendar Girls at a press conference in London.

Her personal interests include travel, especially in England, and photography www.maryvalentinephotography.com.

Pamela Williams-Páez, MA

Ms. Williams-Páez's research interests include stratification, social life in public spaces, and globalization.  Her teaching interests include gender, race, and class; and deviance. 

Writers who have influenced Ms. Williams-Páez include Howard Becker, June Jordan, James Baldwin, and Sherman Alexie.

Part-Time Faculty

Kim Bonfiglio, MSW
kimberly.bonfiglio@canyons.edu
626/840-0374

Professor Bonfiglio earned her BA in Psychology at Carroll College in Montana and her Master's of Social Work degree at CSU Long Beach.

Her professional interests include child abuse, foster care, adolescence, child welfare, gangs, social services, homelessness, domestic violence, psychotherapy, criminology, and  aging/gerontology.

In her spare time, Professor Bonfiglio spends time with her family camping and traveling.

Mariana Branda, MA
mariana.branda@canyons.edu

Ms. Branda earned her BA and MA in Sociology with an emphasis in social psychology from CSUN

Professor Branda's professional interests include distance learning development, qualitative methods, culture, gender/class/race relations, social psychology, and, globalization.  She teaches online courses for College of the Canyons from Argentina. 

She spends her spare time with her family, reading, and traveling.

Kathryn Coleman earned her BA in Sociology from UC Santa Barbara and is currently completing her MA in Sociology at CSUN.

Ms. Coleman’s sociological interests include sex and gender, race, and class. At UCSB she focused on the American prison system for her research in race and class, and at CSUN she is researching how the ever-increasing amount of celebrity media and the growing trend of celebrityism are affecting gender ideals for young adult females in America.

In her spare time, Ms. Coleman travels and has recently taken up golf.

Katharine Diemert, MA

Ms. Diemert also has a private practice providing mediation, parent education, and guidance services.  Her community involvement includes victim/offender and parent/child mediation, teen court, domestic violence, juvenile delinquency, and child abuse prevention programs.

Tracie Gardner, MA

Ms. Gardner earned her BA in Sociology with a minor in Religious Studies and her MA in Sociology from East Carolina University.

Ms. Gardner's teaching interests include social problems, deviance, research methods, and religion.

In here spare time, she organizes vacation travel tours to foreign countries, most commonly Egypt.

Tyler Haugen, MA
tyler.Haugen@canyons.edu
www.canyons.edu/faculty/haugent

Mr. Haugen earned his BA and his MA in sociology from California State University, Northridge.  His areas of interest include sex and gender, the sociology of work, and medical sociology.  Mr. Haugen was named the top graduate student in sociology for California by the California Sociological Association in 2004.  Mr. Haugen was also awarded "Outstanding Graduate Student" for his scholarship at CSUN.

In his spare time, Mr. Haugen is an avid theater-goer and loves to travel all over California and the world.

Jaye Houston, Ph.D.
jayehouston@juno.com

In 1995, Dr. Houston earned her BA degree in Religion with a minor in Global Peace and Security at UCSB.  In 1998, she was awarded a certificate in Women’s Studies and a MA degree from The Florida State University.  She recently completed a doctoral degree at Claremont Graduate University in Women Studies in Religion.  Her dissertation research is on Women and the Holocaust.  

Dr. Houston's overall academic foci are religion, self and society, women’s studies, and field research.

Joseph Roberson, MS
joseph.roberson@canyons.edu

Mr. Roberson earned his BA in Sociology and MS in Counseling from California State University, Northridge. Joseph’s sociological interests include social psychology, race-relations, and deviance and he is currently working on a paper that addresses the need for redefining cultural values in the African American community.   

Joseph is married and has three children. He enjoys writing and being an agent for social change.

Bob Turley, MA
boturl@sbcglobal.net

Bob Turley is back in the game after retiring from 34 years of teaching sociology in community colleges in the Inland Empire. Among many other activities during a two-year, post-retirement hiatus, he moved to Santa Clarita in response to his wife's transfer to Van Nuys.

He has a BA and an MA from Mich. State University and a near ABD in Sociology from Arizona State University. He served a two year term in the US Peace Corps in Tanzania E. Africa. He has three adult children. He is a volunteer counselor at a family counseling center and president of a new neighborhood's Home Owners' Association, which is tempting ground for a participant observation study.

His lifelong interests include travel and all forms of media with a special emphasis on foreign and independent film. Although he strongly touts the infinite possibilities inherent in the social construction of reality, his stereotypical current choice is to take up golf.

robert.wonser@canyons.edu

Professor Wonser earned his B.S. in Business Administration with an option in Marketing and his M.A. in Sociology from CSUN.  His research interests include culture, mass media, subcultures, popular culture, youth culture, consumerism, social stratification, criminology, and social psychology.