Education Program

September 7, 2023

Tursday, September 7, 2023; 5:00 pm
Location: Rapaporte Treasure Hall, Brandeis University
Open to All.

A presentation of the Brandeis Education Program in collaboration with the Mandel Center for Studies in Jewish Education SCRoLL Lab and Brandeis Compact hosted by Ziva Hassenfeld (Brandeis University) and Tanishia Lavette Williams (Brandeis University) with panelists Katherine Frankel (Boston University Wheelock College of Education and Human Development), Christine Leighton (Emmanuel College), Ola Ozernov-Palchik (MIT and Boston University), and respondents Natasha Sarkisian (Whittemore Elementary School) and Marianne Duffy (Waltham Public Schools).

April 19, 2023

Wednesday, April 19, 2023
10:30 a.m.
Location: Mandel Forum
Open to all.

Forty years ago, the release of a "Nation at Risk" in conjunction with other federal reports created a crisis in education, critiqued liberal social spending and spearheaded a new era of reform focused on standards, accountability. This talk looks back on 1980s education politics to provide lessons for interpreting contemporary reforms related to race-based curriculum, school discipline and character-based education reforms. The conservative movement of the 1980s may offer insights into contemporary conservative attacks on school curriculum.

About the Speaker: Mahasan Chaney is an assistant professor of Education at Brown University. Her research and teaching focus on education policy, and the history of education and center on three related policy areas: the racial politics of education, school punishment, and the ideologies and discourses of education reform. Chaney received a National Academy of Education/Spencer Dissertation Fellowship in 2019 in support of her historical research on school discipline policies. She previously worked as a restorative justice coordinator at her alma mater Berkeley High School.

Wednesday, Feb. 1, 2023
10:30 a.m.
Location: Mandel Forum
Open to all.

Co-sponsored by The Sillerman Center for the Advancement of Philanthropy

About the Speaker: Dr. Ethan Ris is an assistant professor of educational leadership at the University of Nevada, Reno, where he directs the university's Higher Education Administration graduate programs. Ethan's scholarship includes an award-winning book and numerous journal articles. His research examines higher education policy, organization, and governance, with a focus on the interactions between philanthropic foundations, government, and colleges and universities in the 20th century United States. Ethan holds a PhD and an MA from Stanford University and a BA from Brown University. He was awarded a Research Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Humanities and was a 2020-21 Spencer Foundation/National Academy of Education Postdoctoral Fellow.

Wednesday, April 13
2 p.m.
Location: Golding Building, Room 110
Open to all.

About the Speaker: Tiffany J. Huang is Provost’s Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of Sociology at the University of Pennsylvania. Her research focuses on race and immigration, examining the outcomes and racialization of immigrants and the second generation, as well as intergroup relations and racial attitudes. Her work has appeared in the Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, RSF: The Russell Sage Foundation Journal of the Social Sciences, The ANNALS of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, and Ethnic and Racial Studies. Tiffany earned her PhD in Sociology from Columbia University in 2021.

Wednesday, April 6
2 p.m.
Sherman Hall, Hassenfeld Conference Center
Open to all.

About the Speaker: Natasha Warikoo is a Professor of Sociology at Tufts University. A former Guggenheim fellow, Warikoo studies racial and ethnic inquality in Education. Her forthcoming book, "Race at the Top: Asian Americans and Whites in Pursuit of the American Dream in Suburban Schools" (May 2022, University of Chicago Press), explores the growth of Asian Americans in suburban communities.

Monday, April 4
2 p.m.
Sherman Hall, Hassenfeld Conference Center
Open to all.

About the Speaker: Joanne W. Golann is an Assistant Professor of Public Policy and Education at Peabody College, Vanderbilt University and author of the new book "Scripting the Moves: Culture and Control in a No-Excuses Charter School" (Princeton University Press). As a sociologist and an ethnographer, she examines how schools and families transmit cultural skills, behaviors, and habits to children.

Speaker: Professor Victoria Cain, Associate Professor of History and Director of Graduate Studies at Northeastern University.

2-3:30 p.m. Nov. 1
This is an online event.

Talk Abstract: In this talk, Victoria Cain provides a brief overview of some of the themes of her new book, "Schools and Screens: A Watchful History, and a deeper dive into a few defining experiments with educational media in twentieth century US schools. Her talk will focus on the struggle of successive generations of education reformers who attempted to meet massive social and economic crises through careful instruction in media viewing and collective discussion. Cain will consider how and why these reformers came to conclude that “civic spectatorship” was essential to modern education and democratic participation, and reflect on the significance of their experiments for schools today.

Short Bio: Victoria Cain teaches in the Department of History at Northeastern University. She is the author of "Schools and Screens: A Watchful History" (MIT, 2021), as well as numerous articles and chapters on media, technology and education, and the co-author, with Karen Rader, of " Life on Display: Revolutionizing U.S. Museums of Science and Natural History" (Chicago, 2014). Her newest project explores the history and politics of adolescent privacy.

Oct. 4, 2021
2-3:30 p.m.
Location: International Lounge

Speaker: Professor Joseph Reimer, Associate Professor of Jewish Education in the Education Program and the Hornstein Program for Jewish Professional Leadership.

Think of a 1- or 2-year-old child at their birthday party. Often the child is lost, having little understanding of what a birthday is or why all these people have come on this day to the house. There is a lot of cultural learning that goes into celebrating, even when it is you the others have come to celebrate.

Jewish summer camps are organized to help children learn how to celebrate special occasions. In particular these camps focus on the weekly celebration of Shabbat, the Jewish Sabbath. My research focuses on how campers -age 8-16 learn to celebrate Shabbat in joyous ways. I am particularly interested in the relationship between shared joy and cultural learning. How does shared joy promote certain types of learning that perhaps could never happen in the more arid climate of everyday life?

Professor Joseph Reimer is completing this year his 36-year career teaching at Brandeis University. He directed the Institute of Informal Jewish Education at Brandeis for 11 years, served for seven years as lead faculty for training Jewish camp directors and is soon to publish a book on Jewish summer camps for Brandeis University Press.

This event is co-sponsored by the Education Program and the Marya Levenson '64 Fund for Education.

Monday, March 1
4 p.m.

Speaker: Travis Bristol, Assistant Professor, Berkeley Graduate School of Education

Travis J. Bristol is an assistant professor at the University of California, Berkeley’s Graduate School of Education. Before joining Berkeley's faculty, he was a Peter Paul Assistant Professor at Boston University. Dr. Bristol's research is situated at the intersection of educational policy and teacher education. Using qualitative methods, he explores three related research strands: (1) the role of educational policies in shaping teacher workplace experiences and retention; (2) district and school-based professional learning communities; (3) the role of race and gender in educational settings.

Dr. Bristol's research has appeared in peer-reviewed journals including Urban Education, the American Educational Research Journal, the Journal of Teacher Education, Teachers College Record, and Harvard Educational Review. He is currently co-editing (with Conra Gist) "The Handbook of Research on Teachers of Color," which will be published by the American Educational Research Association (AERA). The National Academy of Education/Spencer Foundation, Ford Foundation, and AERA awarded Dr. Bristol dissertation fellowships in 2013.

In 2016, he received the inaugural teacher diversity research award from the American Association of Colleges for Teacher Education. In 2019, Dr. Bristol received a Ford Foundation Postdoctoral Fellowship and an emerging scholar award from the Comparative and International Education Society, African Diaspora SIG. In 2020, he received a National Academy of Education/Spencer Postdoctoral Fellowship. Dr. Bristol is on the Board of Directors of Teach Plus; the National Center for Teacher Residencies; and the East Bay School for Boys. ator with the Boston Teacher Residency program. Dr. Bristol received his AB from Amherst College; an MA from Stanford University; and a PhD from Teachers College, Columbia University.

This talk is co-sponsored by the Education Program; the Marya Levenson Fund for Education; Equity, and Racial Justice; the Sillerman Center for the Advancement of Philanthropy; the Office of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion; and the School of Arts and Sciences Co-curricular Fund.

Monday, March 15
4 p.m.

Speaker: Crystal Sanders, Associate Professor of History and African American Studies at Penn State

Crystal R. Sanders is an award-winning historian of the United States in the twentieth century. Her research and teaching interests include African American History, Black Women's History, and the History of Black Education. She received her BA (cum laude) in History and Public Policy from Duke University and a PhD in History from Northwestern University. She is an associate professor of History and the former director of the Africana Research Center at Pennsylvania State University. During the 2020-21 academic year, she is a fellow at the National Humanities Center

Dr. Sanders is the author of "A Chance for Change: Head Start and Mississippi's Black Freedom Struggle" published by the University of North Carolina Press in 2016 as part of the John Hope Franklin Series in African American History and Culture. The book won the 2017 Critics Choice Award from the American Educational Research Association and the 2017 New Scholar’s Book Award from Division F of the American Educational Research Association. The book was also a finalist for the 2016 Hooks National Book Award. Sanders’ work can also be found in many of the leading history journals including the Journal of Southern History, the North Carolina Historical Review, and the Journal of African American History. She is currently writing a book on Black southerners' efforts to secure graduate education during the age of Jim Crow.

Dr. Sanders is the recipient of a host of fellowships and prizes. These honors include the C. Vann Woodward Prize from the Southern Historical Association, the Huggins-Quarles Award from the Organization of American Historians, a Andrew Mellon Graduate Fellowship in Humanistic Studies, a Ford Foundation Dissertation Fellowship, a National Academy of Education/Spencer Foundation Dissertation Fellowship, a National Academy of Education/Spencer Foundation Postdoctoral Fellowship, and a Visiting Scholars Fellowship at the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

This talk is co-sponsored by the Education Program; the History Department; the Marya Levenson Fund for Education, Equity, and Racial Justice; the Sillerman Center for the Advancement of Philanthropy; the Office of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion; and the School of Arts and Sciences Co-curricular Fund.

Monday, April 12
4:30 p.m.

Speaker: Stefan Bradley, Coordinator for Diversity and Inclusion Initiatives in the Bellarmine College of Liberal Arts and Professor of African American Studies at Loyola Marymount University

Reared in Yakima, Washington, Stefan M. Bradley is currently the coordinator for Diversity and Inclusion Initiatives in the Bellarmine College of Liberal Arts and Professor of African American Studies at Loyola Marymount University. Bradley received his PhD in 20th-century U.S. history with an emphasis on the Black experience from the University of Missouri-Columbia; an MA in the same from Washington State University; and, a BA in History from Gonzaga University. An educator at heart, Bradley’s life ambition is to personally teach/mentor/inspire the young people who change the world for the better.

Some of Bradley’s publications include his newest book, "Upending the Ivory Tower: Civil Rights, Black Power, and the Ivy League," which won the History of Education Society Outstanding Book Award as well as the Anna Julia Cooper & CLR James Book Award from the National Council of Black Studies; "Harlem vs. Columbia University: Black Student Power in the Late 1960s," which won the Phillis Wheatley Book Prize; and, "Alpha Phi Alpha: A Legacy of Greatness, The Demands of Transcendence." His articles have been featured in the Journal of African American History, the Journal of Civil and Human Rights, and American Studies. To discuss his research, he has appeared on C-Span BookTV; NPR; PRI, as well as at universities and colleges throughout the nation.

He has received numerous honors and awards including the Don Brennan Humanitarian Award; the Better Family Life Excellence in Educational Leadership Award; the SLU Faculty Excellence Award; the Ernest A. Calloway, Jr. Teaching Excellence Award; and, the St. Louis American’s Salute to Excellence Young Leaders Award. He was selected as one of Delux Magazine’s Power 100.

Generous with his time, Bradley frequently volunteers on and off campus. In the wake of the tragic events in Ferguson and St. Louis, he engaged in discussions with representatives from the U.S. Department of Justice, Civil Rights Commission, and Department of Education. As a voice from the community, Bradley has appeared on BET, MSNBC, CNN, BBC, Al Jazeera, and in the New York Times.

This talk is co-sponsored by the Education Program; the History Department; the Marya Levenson Fund for Education, Equity, and Racial Justice; the Sillerman Center for the Advancement of Philanthropy; the Office of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion; and the School of Arts and Sciences Co-curricular Fund.