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Meet Our 2010 Graduates

From HIV/AIDS education in India to teaching children to read in Harlem, TC's 2010 master's and doctoral graduates have been there and done it. Here are some of their stories, with links to videotaped interviews -- and more to come soon.
From HIV/AIDS education in India to teaching children to read in Harlem, TC's 2010 master's and doctoral graduates have been there and done it. Here are some of their stories, with links to videotaped interviews – and more to come soon.
 
 
Social Inequality:  “Something We Should All Be Concerned About” 
Melissa Barragan, Master of Arts, Sociology and Education
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Melissa Barragan is one of four graduate students who have worked with TC Professor Amy Stuart Wells on projects tied to migration, academic tracking and educational equity. She and fellow TC students Lauren Fox, Kathy Hill and Joe Luesse have been research assistants for Wells on the Building Knowledge for Social Justice Project. Funded by the Ford Foundation, this research is intended to form the basis for broadening Americans’ sense of responsibility for social inequality.  [read more]
 

 
Secure in His Many Roles
Dennis Chambers, Ed. D. Adult Learning and Leadership, and TC Security Officer
 
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During his many years at Teachers College, Dennis Chambers has seen TC in all its modes: the nighttime TC, the weekend TC, TC in summers and TC when students are on break.  But few at the College know Dennis Chambers equally well. [read more]
 

 
How to Educate the Children of China’s Migrant Workers?
Henan Cheng, Ed.D., International Educational Development
 
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Until five years ago, the law in China was that to attend public school, children had to be registered as locals in the school’s district. That left out China’s more than 140 million migrant workers -- a nomadic population that, if it were a nation, would be the tenth largest in the world.  [read more]
 

 
Analyzing the Policy That Shaped Her Education:  
Lauren Fox, Master’s of Arts in Sociology and Education
 

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As a child Lauren Fox experienced first-hand the court-ordered racial integration of public schools in Charlotte, North Carolina. At TC she studied the fallout of their subsequent return to de facto segregation.
 
As a white student bused across town to integrated magnet schools in Charlotte in the mid-to-late 1990s, Fox recalls that the “busing system was completely normal for us. I thought that was the way all school systems were, and I had a great experience.” [read more]
 

Lauren Johnson Will Take Her Master’s Degree Out Into the World
 
By her own account, Lauren Johnson grew up in a “very suburban, kind of closed neighborhood, where people were all very alike,” in Scottsdale, Arizona. She was eager to experience something different when she entered the University of Arizona in Tucson. There she met Dr. Judith Becker, professor of clinical psychology and a former faculty member at Columbia University’s College of Physicians and Surgeons. [read more]
 

 
Seeing Her Students’ Potential
Janice Kim, MA, Elementary Inclusive Pre-Service Education
 
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During her first field placement, in a first-grade classroom of English language learners in
Washington Heights, Janice Kim quickly realized that, in at least one respect, she did not want to emulate the teacher in charge. 
 
“He was one of those teachers who love to yell,” recalls Kim, who has completed her master’s degree in TC’s elementary inclusive pre-service education program. “Then one day he asked me to take over, and I thought, I’m going to do things differently. But it’s really easy, if you haven’t figured out who are you are and practiced standing in front of a classroom, to do things you never guessed you’d do. I ended up yelling myself. It wasn’t one of my proudest moments.”   [read more]


 
Engaged in the Pursuit of Equity
 
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Joe Rogers, Jr. is using his policy skills and community organizing talents to mobilize key stakeholders around improving New York’s public schools
 
As a eighth grader in Gray, Maine, Joe Rogers, Jr. wrote a speech, for an oratorical contest, about inequity in education. [read more]
 

  
 Technology as the Key to Math
Virginia L. Thompson, Ed. D., Math Education
 
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Numbers loom large in Virginia L. Thompson’s life.
 
Thompson is the youngest girl among 11 siblings -- the last to leave home and the first to complete a doctoral degree in higher education.  [read more]

  
 An Interdisciplinary Study of Gay Fathers
Justin Jones,  Doctor of Philosophy in Clinical Psychology
 
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Justin Jones believes his doctoral research, which focuses on aspects of psychology, spirituality and sexual orientation, could not have come together anywhere but under the big intellectual tent that is Teachers College. But then Jones, who received his PhD in clinical psychology this month, took a decidedly interdisciplinary path to TC.  [read more]

  
 Living and Studying Issues of Educational Equity
Kathy Hill,  Master of Arts, Sociology and Education 
 
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When she was in high school, Kathy Hill’s family moved from Los Angeles to Ventura County, one of the wealthiest in California, “so that my brother and I would have superior educational opportunities,” she says. They were right. Her friends in the city did not have access to Advanced Placement courses, whereas in the suburbs, Hill did, and she did well enough to get into Harvard. But it bothered her that, while her suburban town was “pretty diverse racially and socioeconomically, the schools were really tracked. I was one of the few students of color in the honors classes.”  [read more]

Published Thursday, May. 20, 2010

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