Barnard
Education Program Celebrates 50 Years
By
Merri Rosenberg
When
Barnard College—under the leadership of then-president Millicent
McIntosh— launched its education program in 1952 in response to
what was that era’s acute teacher shortage, a dozen seniors were
certified.
Today, there are some 1500 graduates—including students from Columbia
College, the School of General Studies and the Engineering School,
as well as Barnard College—who have remained connected with the
teaching profession, with many of them continuing to share their
skills and talents with students in New York City’s most challenging
schools and districts.
On April 19 and 20, many of these alumnae returned to the Morningside
Heights campus to celebrate Barnard Education Program’s 50th anniversary,
through a mix of social events, panel discussions and other festivities,
with a stellar group of distinguished educators.
Jacqueline Jordan Irvine, the Charles Howard Candler Professor
of Urban Education at Emory University in Atlanta, delivered the
college’s Gildersleeve Lecture. An expert in studying why African-American
students fail in school, Prof. Irvine shared her beliefs that
teachers need to apply what she termed the three Cs–Care, Concern
and Connection–as much as the three Rs in their classrooms to
end the cycle of academic failure.
Prof. Irvine contended that successful teachers need to be involved
with their students as spiritual mentors, to provide compassionate
discipline and to be willing to maintain high expectations for
all students, no matter what the circumstances or apparent obstacles.
“We
must become the dream-keepers for the children,” she urged her
attentive audience.
Similar themes were echoed in panel discussions on “Teaching in
a Diverse and Changing World” and “The Politics of Public School
Education.”
Barnard President Judith Shapiro said, “There is an intellectuality
in a diverse classroom. Diversity complements the things we learn,
as well as making us truly sophisticated human beings.”
The panel members for diversity – all graduates of the Barnard
Education Program, including Augusta Souza Kappner, president
of the Bank Street College of Education; Ogechi Iwuoha, a teacher
at the Mott Hall School; Richard Levine, assistant principal of
the Monroe Academy, and Maria Rosado, director of field experiences
for CCNY’s School of Education – discussed how they managed to
redefine diversity in their schools and classrooms, and maintain
awareness of their students’ backgrounds as they worked through
curriculum.
In the discussion of the influence and impact of politics in public
education, whose panel members included Merryl H. Tisch, a New
York State Regent; Alisa Berger, principal of Mott Hall School
II; Laura Marquez Rodriguez, deputy superintendent of Bronx High
Schools, and Ron Scapp, director of the graduate program in Urban
and Multi-Cultural Education at the College of Mt. St. Vincent,
topics ranged from funding, mayoral attempts to control the public
schools, the potential benefit of the Soros/Gates/Carnegie $6.5
million grant to develop 19 small high schools in the Bronx, and
how standards can be used to help those students at the lowest
end of the skills spectrum.
Prof. Maxine Greene, the William F. Russell Professor in the Foundations
of Education, Emerita, at Teachers College, said “I am obsessive
about the arts and social justice. It’s important to teach children
to be open-minded, be critical, to live with contradictions, and
to live in the gray area. As Dewey said, ‘a democracy is a community
in the making through participation, through dialogue; it is always
in the making.’ Possibility and imagination are constructs that
I think about often, and that Dewey often wrote about. I like
to talk about the possibility that isn’t realized yet.”#
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