Welcome to the McHugh Center!

Mission statement and purpose

Our basic mission is to support and enhance the mission and curricula of the College of Education & Allied Studies by providing educational materials and services consistent with the needs of its target clientele; namely, students, faculty, staff and alumni. The Center's primary concern is to support the wide range of instructional activities generated by the Teacher Education Department's credentialing programs.

History and development

David Hahn, Center
Director, with Dr. McHugh

The curriculum resource center was established early in the history of California State University East Bay by the late Professor Walter J. McHugh, an emerging young leader in the field of reading instruction. It began on the third floor of the Fine Arts Building (now the Art & Education Building). After outgrowing this facility, the Center was moved to its present location on the ground floor of the Art & Education Building (Rooms 143/153) and was formally dedicated to Dr. McHugh's memory in the Fall of 1977, shortly after Dr. McHugh's death. The Center's growth was profoundly influenced by two NDEA (National Defense Education Act) Institutes in the late 1960s which were concerned with improving and enhancing reading instruction in the schools. Dr. McHugh directed the Elementary Institute during the summer of 1966, and Dr. Pauline Brown guided the Secondary Institute during the 1968-1969 academic year. The institutes' budgets permitted the acquisition of many books and curriculum resources which subsequently remained in the Center. The institutes also made many publishers aware of the Center and its purposes. This resulted in voluntary contributions of instructional materials in the areas of reading and language arts.

Though the Center's collections have historically centered in reading, language arts, and children's literature, in more recent years the Center has expanded its holdings and services to include additional curriculum areas. In 1992-1993, a restructuring program was implemented in the College of Education and Allied Studies, a goal of which was the centralization of teaching resource collections and services. Prior to that time, there were three teaching resource collections in the Art & Education Building: the Student Teaching Center on the third floor, the Environmental Education Lab on the second floor, and the McHugh Reading Center on the ground floor. The educational resources on the upper floors included a major collection of environmental education curricula and small yet selective collections of social studies curricula. In 1993, the McHugh Reading Center reorganized its facilities and these resources were moved into the Center. All of these resources have been indexed and incorporated into the current collection.

Several years ago the Center began acquiring its first installment of State-adopted textbooks through a mutual plan between the Cal State East Bay Department of Teacher Education and the Alameda County Office of Education to improve service to local inservice teachers and Cal State's preservice candidates. The rationale was that if copies of required textbooks were made available at both the County Office and at Cal State, teaching personnel--particularly our preservice teacher candidates--would have fuller access to these required teaching resources.

Initially, the County Office made arrangements with publishers to have the textbooks forwarded to the McHugh Center. Subsequently the McHugh Center, through the encouragement of the County Office, began contacting publishers directly. During Winter Quarter 2003 a letter was sent to about 20 textbook publishers requesting complimentary copies of specified titles. The results: About one-half of the 20 publishers have responded with donations of complete, or near complete, sets of textbooks in these areas: mathematics, reading, language arts, art, history, health, and science.

In 2003 the Center also received nine large boxes of environmental education curricula from the California State Office of Environmental Education's resource collections as part of an effort to decentralize resources and to make materials accessible to users. (The McHugh Center has since 1992 housed a major collection of EE resources, most of which are interdisciplinary in approach.