Penn GSE Spring/Summer 2024 Magazine

SPRING/ SUMMER 2024 SPRING 2024

MAGA ZINE MAGA ZINE

Cultivating Media Literacy

The Museum as a Classroom

English Learners to English Teachers

Beating Burnout

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C ONT E NTS

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The Critical Cultivation of Media Literacy

As teachers and researchers, Penn GSE alumni are at the forefront of the movement to educate savvy news readers who can parse fact from partisan fiction.

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The Museum as a Classroom

Penn GSE alumni use their passion for education to teach learners of all ages through exhibits, outreach, and special collections.

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Faces of Philanthropy: The Marcus Foster Scholarship

Named in honor of the alum who was the first Black superintendent of a major urban school district in the US, this scholarship was funded by more than 450 donors and has supported Penn GSE students for 40 years.

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From English Learners to English Teachers

The Practical English for Daily Living (PEDAL) program provides an opportunity for TESOL master's students to practice their teaching with language learners across the University, Philadelphia, and the world.

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Letter from the Dean Faculty Updates

News 4 6 7 16

News Briefs Policy Corner Alumni Profile River Coello, GED’15

Homeroom 8

Our Alums in Their Spaces Lauren Goodwin, GRD’22

Campus 10

View from Campus

Faculty Q & A 26 Protecting Against Burnout

Kandi Wiens’ latest book aims to help readers build resilience to stress and heal their relationship to work.

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Noteworthy 28 Alumni Notes

Recess 31

Advice from the Educator's Playbook Marsha Richardson offers six tips for explaining war to children.

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pu b l ic atio n s . gs e . u p e n n . e d u

Letter from the Dean MAGA ZINE Dear Alumni and Friends, I can hardly believe it’s been a year since I began my tenure as dean of Penn GSE. I am thankful for the warm welcome I received from our incredible community of students and alumni, faculty and staff, partners and supporters. I am also grateful for the time many of you have taken to share your hopes for the School, and for the work we’ve already accomplished together in a short time.

It would be pointless, however, to pretend that this year has been easy at Penn, or at any higher education institution. We have experienced deep unrest and pain among many members of our Penn community, and we have worked here at GSE to ensure that all feel welcome, included, and valued. Through it all, we recognized that the work we do— educating future teachers, counselors, leaders, researchers, and changemakers—is more important than ever.

Penn GSE has a more than 100-year legacy of excellence in producing inspirational educators and vanguard research. And when I think about how we can continue that tradition while tackling the most pressing challenges of our day, I keep coming back to these four key areas for action: 1. Expand our engagement with our local, regional, national, and global communities: We can start local. Philadelphia is more than just our home; it is our partner. While Penn GSE is already facilitating partnerships with hundreds of schools and communities across the city, I want to advance this work via collaborative research initiatives with the school district.

Similarly, we already work with and for communities throughout the Commonwealth, but I am eager to grow these collaborations that serve Pennsylvania’s students and educators.

2. Supercharge the educator pipeline: A cornerstone of our work has always been nurturing the next generation of teachers and school leaders, and that work has never been more crucial. Good teachers are one of the most critical components of student success, and they go on to become the next crop of effective principals and superintendents. By supporting and strengthening the pipeline of educators through scholarships, professional development, and more, we will invest in those who will invest in our children.

3. Embrace hard conversations: Education is the bedrock of informed citizenship, critical thinking, and civil discourse. Citizens of tomorrow need to know how to conduct discussions around difference. Our faculty are uniquely primed to help nurture these skills and champion education as foundational to democracy.

4. Spur education innovation: Technology is evolving at breakneck speed. We must embrace radical new ways of teaching and learning, developing pedagogy that harnesses the power of AI, virtual reality, and ed tech tools to unlock previously unimaginable experiences and redefine what’s possible for the future of education.

I am inspired by these possibilities, and I hope you are, too. They build off work Penn GSE is already doing and, I hope, will help us write the next chapter for our School, our communities, and our field. Your feedback is important to me, and I hope you’ll share your thoughts when I come to a city near you in the coming year.

All my best,

Dean, Penn Graduate School of Education George and Diane Weiss Professor of Education

GRADUATE SCHOOL OF EDUCATION UNIVERSITY OF PENNSYLVANIA The Penn GSE Magazine is produced by the University of Pennsylvania Graduate School of Education, 3700 Walnut Street, Philadelphia, PA 19104. Reproduction of these articles requires written permission from Penn GSE. ©2024 by the Trustees of the University of Pennsylvania. Please contact Penn GSE at (215) 573-6623 or alumni@gse.upenn.edu for references or to update your address.

Katharine Strunk Dean Laura Tepper Publisher Rebecca Raber Editor Editorial Board: Umar Aly, GED’24 Sylvia Davis, C’20 Amanda Ellis Melanie Hieronimus Jane L. Lindahl, GED’18 Jennifer Moore Alexa Pecunies, GED’24 Kat Stein Designed by Bold Type Creative Copyedited by Colleen Heavens Cover Art: Jane Puttanniah Board of Advisors Jeffrey S. McKibben, W’93, Chair Deborah L. Ancona, C’76, GED’77 Olumoroti G. Balogun, GED’19, GRD’20 Brett H. Barth, W’93 Allison J. Blitzer, C’91 Harlan B. Cherniak, W’01 Jolley Bruce Christman, GED’71, GR’87 Webster B. Chua, W’04 Samara E. Cohen, C’93, W’93 Beth S. Ertel, W’88, WG’92 Evan S. Feinberg, W’09 Jeffrey L. Goldberg, W’83, WG’89 Patricia Grant, GED’01, GRD’04 John A. Henry Heather Ibrahim-Leathers, W’95 Andrew H. Jacobson, WG’93 Douglas R. Korn, W’84 Gregory A. Milken, C’95 Andrea J. Pollack, C’83, L’87, GED’17 David N. Roberts, W’84 Francisco J. Rodriguez, W’93 Molly P. Rouse-Terlevich, C’90, GED’00 Michael J. Sorrell, GRD’15 Navin M. Valrani, W’93, GED’18, GED’22, GRD’23 Steven M. Wagshal, W’94 NONDISCRIMINATION STATEMENT

The University of Pennsylvania values diversity and seeks talented students, faculty and staff from diverse backgrounds. The University of Pennsylvania does not discriminate on the basis of race, color, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, religion, creed, national or ethnic origin, citizenship status, age, disability, veteran status or any other legally protected class status in the administration of its admissions, financial aid, educational or athletic programs, or other University-administered programs or in its employment practices.

Questions or complaints regarding this policy should be directed to the Executive Director of the Office of Affirmative Action and Equal Opportunity Programs, Franklin Building, Suite 421, 3451 Walnut Street, Philadelphia, PA 19104-6205; or 215-898-6993 (Voice).

Editor’s note: This issue of Penn GSE Magazine went to print on May 30, 2024.

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FACULTY BOOKSHELF FACULTY BOOKSHELF Methods for CommunityBased Research: Advancing Educational Justice and Epistemic Rights

Core Practices in Teacher Education: A Global Perspective Edited by Pam Grossman and Urban Fraefel Published March 2024 Harvard Education Press

By Gerald Campano and María Paula Ghiso, GRD’09 Published April 2024 Routledge

The Interprofessional Healthcare Team: Leadership and Development, Third Edition

Developing Expert Principals: Professional Learning That Matters

Burnout Immunity: How Emotional Intelligence Can Help You Build Resilience and Heal from Work

By Felice Tilin, Donna Weiss, and Marlene Morgan Published 2024 Jones & Bartlett Learning

By Stephanie Levin, Linda Darling-Hammond, Marjorie E. Wechsler, Melanie LeungGagné, Steven Tozer, and Ayana Kee Campoli Published October 2023 Routledge

By Kandi Wiens Published April 2024 Harper Collins

HONORS & AWARDS

GRANTS

Gerald Campano (1) was honored with the Steve Witte Lifetime Achievement

Michael Golden (7) and Tim Foxx (8) were awarded a

Award from the American Educational Research Association (AERA). The award recognizes a senior scholar who has made significant contributions to research in the area of writing and literacies through a particular academic work or body of work.

Peter Eckel’s (2) Inside Higher Ed article, “The Trouble with Strategy,” was one of

the publication’s most-read stories on higher education administration in 2023.

Linda M. Pheng (3) won the 2023 American Educational Studies Association’s

Taylor & Francis Educational Studies Award for the Best Paper of the Year for “What is Social Justice Research for Asian Americans? Critical Reflections on Cross-Racial and Cross-Ethnic Coalition Building in Community-Based Educational Spaces.”

Howard C. Stevenson (4) was invited to give the Walter N. Ridley Distinguished

Annual Lecture at the University of Virginia, held in March. The lecture is named for the first African American to receive a doctoral degree from a Southern, white college or university.

Dean Katharine Strunk (5) was named to Philadelphia Mayor Cherelle Parker’s

transition team subcommittee for education. The dean was also asked to co-chair the Penn Presidential Commission on Countering Hate and Building Community with Vijay Kumar, dean of Penn Engineering.

Susan Yoon (6) was named a 2024 American Educational Research Association

Fellow, a distinction that honors education researchers with substantial research accomplishments.

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$250,000 grant from the Wallace Foundation to continue their work on the Equity-Centered Pipeline Initiative to help eight large school districts build principal pipelines that produce school leaders who can advance educational equity and lift student learning.

Michael Gottfried (9) received a grant from the Department of

Education’s Institute of Education Sciences for his study “What Works to Reduce Student Absenteeism? A Systematic Review of the Literature,” which aims to bridge the research-to-practice gap by conducting a practitioner-oriented systematic review of absenteeism interventions.

Pam Grossman (10) and Sarah Kavanagh (11) received a

$500,000 grant from the Hewlett Foundation for a landscape analysis of the teaching profession through September 2025.

Sharon Wolf (12) received a grant from the Abdul Latif Jameel

Poverty Action Lab for her project “Evaluating the Impacts of the FastTrack Program in Nigerian IDP Camps.” A partnership with Aid for Rural Education Access Initiative (AREAi), a Nigerian organization that has developed a model to teach functional literacy and numeracy skills to out-of-school children in internally displaced people (IDP) camps, the project will evaluate the impacts of AREAi’s model on children’s academic and non-academic outcomes, as well as school enrollment and progress over the course of two years.

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NEWS BRIEFS Dean Visits China

McGraw Center Symposium Encourages Education Leaders to Embrace Politics The path of an education leader today is fraught with political potholes—but a leader’s best strategy for avoiding those potential dangers is to embrace politics. That was the theme of the Leading the Way Symposium, held by the McGraw Center for Educational Leadership on February 29.

Political issues dominate news coverage of education, and the career longevity of education leaders—especially school district superintendents—is dwindling, said Cheryl Logan, GRD’17, founding executive director of the Center and former superintendent of the Omaha Public Schools.

Cheryl Logan, GRD’17 Photo credit: Joe McFetridge

“It’s the politics that takes people out, and a lot of that is self-inflicted,” Logan said. “Our intent with this symposium is to give education leaders the tools to navigate the political challenges better and, ultimately, improve the education experience for students.”

For the symposium, she identified nine skills for strategic political leadership to help attendees traverse the challenges of the hyper-political landscape in education: 1. Know your organization’s political history and leverage it strategically.

2. Enhance your team’s political leadership skills.

3. Know when to decline an idea, project, initiative, or even a job.

4. Identify your allies and empower them effectively.

5. Stay focused on your “North Star” and minimize distractions.

6. Work closely with naysayers and get comfortable with opposing views.

7. Build political capital both inside and outside your organization.

8. Avoid unnecessary conflicts and don’t pick a fight with a porcupine.

9. Engage in effective communication management.

“I am keenly aware that, in my position, politics are always at play,” said Mwenyewe Dawan, assistant superintendent of the Wissahickon School District, who attended the symposium. “It’s important to know how to navigate politics and sharpen our skills as leaders.”

For Reginald Nash, assistant director for state advocacy and engagement for the Education Trust in Washington, DC, the most appealing aspect of the symposium was the opportunity to interact with and learn from experts.

“Being able to figure out who are the people who align with you and those who look at things differently is important,” Nash said. “Being a student of people is the biggest takeaway for me, especially in these polarizing political times.”

As part of a weeklong visit to China in January, Dean Katharine Strunk traveled to Beijing, Shanghai, and Hangzhou, meeting some of the 1,300-plus Penn GSE alumni who live there and exploring ways to expand the School’s global partnerships and foster meaningful connections for the Penn GSE community.

During her trip, Dean Strunk toured schools, participated in alumni events, met with ed tech leaders, and attended the Penn Global Forum, where she spoke on a (From left) Sunny Wang, GED’20, Dean deans panel and Katharine Strunk, and Hang Qin, GED’18, in front of West Lake in Hangzhou introduced US Ambassador to China Nicholas Burns for a talk on the importance of US-China educational partnerships and academic exchange.

“I was honored to meet with our many partners and spend time with our accomplished alumni in China,” said Dean Strunk. “Our students and faculty research, teach, and study all across the globe, and having a frontrow seat to our international educational exchange in China was incredibly meaningful.”

Penn GSE Jackdaws Run Wharton 5K Professor Betsy Rymes and Classroom Technology Manager Charles Washington put together a team of Penn GSE staff, faculty, students, and their family members for the 12th Annual Wharton 5K to benefit Philabundance and the Fund for the School District of Philadelphia. They named their 10-person team the Jackdaws because, according to BBC Wildlife Magazine, those small crows “are highly intelligent and social, and easily pick up tricks and new skills in the wild as well as in captivity.”

“Charles and I both started working at GSE 17 years ago, and have swapped running stories for years,” said Rymes.

“We also both know there are many running enthusiasts among the GSE community, so we thought we’d form a GSE 5K team this year to spread some good running vibes, support a great cause, and bring together GSE faculty, staff, and students to do something fun and low-key together. The 5K also offers a perfect mental health break during one of busiest times of the year. We’re looking forward to bringing more people out in 2025. Go Jackdaws!”

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\ NEWS \

New Building Earns LEED Gold Certification The Penn GSE building expansion and renovation that was unveiled in August 2023 was recently awarded Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) Gold certification for its sustainable design and operation.

The project—the School’s first new construction in 50 years—connected the adjacent GSE building and Stiteler Hall while adding 16,200 square feet of new space.

Those additions are energy- and water-efficient. Green roofs on the lobby and courtyard additions aid with cooling, carbon dioxide absorption, and stormwater management. The mechanical system design recovers heat within the building, and the external terra cotta and aluminum shading elements reduce the need for cooling. The building was able to reduce its interior lighting energy use by 47 percent and its exterior lighting energy use by 52 percent. All of this combines to help the new building achieve a 40 percent annual energy-use savings.

“Sustainability was at the core of this project,” said Philip Chen, president of Annum Architects, “which transformed a 60-year-old site and buildings into a modern and vibrant home for the GSE, nourishing the community and serving their needs now and long into the future.”

The building’s design and construction were supported with a capital fundraising campaign that generated gifts from almost 100 donors across Penn’s community of alumni and friends.

“The new building is a culmination of a vision that had been years in the making—a symbol of progress, innovation, and community spirit,” said Penn GSE Dean New Penn GSE building at 37th and Walnut Streets Photo credit: Greg Benson Katharine Strunk. “That progress includes demonstrating our commitment to Penn’s Climate and Sustainability Action Plan, which moves the campus closer to becoming 100 percent carbon neutral by 2042.”

West Philly Collaborative History Project Chronicles a Community’s Past The West Philadelphia Collaborative History Project (WPCH) is a labor of love for John Puckett, a historian, emeritus professor at Penn GSE, and longtime West Philadelphia resident. Launched in 2018, the website is a repository for West Philly stories vividly illustrated with photographs and maps.

Those stories span the high school athletic field that hosted the 1934 championship series of the National Negro League, Dick Clark’s American Bandstand, MOVE, Philadelphia General Hospital, the fates of the Black Bottom neighborhood and University City High School, and much more.

As project director, Puckett oversees the website, contributes articles, and works closely with collaborators, including West Philadelphia residents and local graduate students.

John Puckett Photo credit: HKB Photo

“Penn’s Netter Center for Community Partnerships uses it as a foundational text for academically based community service courses,” said Puckett, who also co-wrote Becoming Penn, a history of the University’s post-World War II expansion in West Philadelphia. He worked with Penn Medicine students to adapt some of the project’s images and stories for a smartphone walking tour that is part of the School’s orientation for first-year medical students. And he is working on new research that will be added to the WPCH in the coming year.

“I am working with colleagues at the Netter Center and the Weitzman School of Design on a demographic survey of West Philadelphia’s social and economic conditions over the past 60 years,” he said. The goal is to create interactive maps and graphs that show changes to West Philadelphia neighborhoods over time. Learn more: collaborativehistory.gse.upenn.edu.

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What do you want to see in the pages of Penn GSE Magazine?

What could we be doing better? Please take our brief readers’ survey and help us improve this publication so it best serves and reflects your interests: penng.se/magsurvey

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POLICY CORNER Penn GSE experts on the educational headlines of the moment

By Rebecca Raber

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THE HEADLINE

Student Homelessness on the Rise THE STORY Across the country, the number of K–12 students experiencing homelessness is climbing. The National Center for Homeless Education (NCHE) found that in academic year 2021–2022 (the latest year for which national data is available), public schools identified more than 1.2 million students experiencing homelessness—2.4 percent of the entire student population. That’s a 10 percent increase over the previous year and a 79 percent increase since the 2004–2005 school year. And unfortunately, states that have more recent numbers don’t show that trend deescalating. According to data released late last year by Advocates for Children of New York (AFC), roughly one in nine students in New York City were without permanent housing during the 2022–2023 school year.

And Houston Independent School District, one of the ten biggest in the

nation, reported more than 7,200 unhoused students—more than during the year when Hurricane Harvey devastated the city in 2017–2018.

Student housing insecurity has acute consequences for school attendance, which itself has ramifications in academic and socioemotional outcomes. The latest NCHE numbers show that roughly 52 percent of students experiencing homelessness were chronically absent (defined as missing one out of every ten days of school), which has been shown to correlate with lower test scores, course grades, eagerness to learn, and social engagement, as well as higher drop-out rates.

HIS TAKE As an expert in absenteeism, Gottfried is worried about how already vulnerable populations, including those experiencing homelessness, are being further left behind. “Students who are missing school are missing both academic content and valuable time to interact with classmates, interact with adults. . . . They’re missing chances to grow and develop socially and emotionally,” he said. “If I don’t go to school, I miss out on all of these opportunities.” And it becomes a vicious cycle. Once a student returns to school, said Gottfried, they are behind in their classwork and feel alienated and disengaged from their peers, all of which conspires to make them want to go to school less in the future.

THE EXPERT Penn GSE Professor Michael Gottfried, GRW’10, an applied economist whose research explores the links between absenteeism and achievement, wants parents and caregivers to know that every day of instruction matters. “The research shows,” he said, “that even missing one day is linked to lower test scores.”

That is true for all students, but for those who are already starting from a place of precarity, it widens inequality. “If school is this lever to propel you academically, in life, in the economy, in the job market, and if you’re already behind, missing school is going to make it even harder to break out of cycles of poverty, to have housing stability, to raise families,” said Gottfried. “Absenteeism is doubling down on the disparities that we’ve seen previously.”

He is quick to add, however, that the vulnerable students don’t bear the blame for their missed days—which could have an emotional cause, like stress and anxiety, or a practical one, like lack of transportation or clean clothes—and that we should, instead, look to fix the system that is not doing enough to support those students coming to school. One easily scalable and replicable solution, he said, could be moving the free breakfast program from the cafeteria to the classroom, something that was the subject of one of his recent studies.

“It’s not just a location change, but it’s giving the food to everyone once it goes to the classroom,” he said. “Why that works, specifically for homeless youth, is that part of the problem with the cafeteria is you have to have your voucher, you have to be there on time or early.

You’re singled out for needing to eat the free food. But if everyone around me is eating breakfast at 8:30 together in the classroom?

These are the kinds of little things that make it okay for me to be at school. I feel [a similar lunch program] would double down on that.”

Photo credit: Lora Reehling Photography

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\ ALUM NI PROFILE \

The word hampi in Quechua means “medicine.” And Coello had both physical and spiritual wounds that needed healing. They did not grow up with a connection to their Indigenous culture. They said that the legacy of colonization had erased that connection not just from their family tree, but also from their regional history in coastal Ecuador, and even their education in school.

Reconnecting with Their Roots River Coello, GED’15

By Rebecca Raber

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n a world that so often sees things in a black-and-white binary, River Coello, GED’15, lives in the in between, an area defined by both/and instead of either/or. They are Ecuadorian and American. They are qhariwarmi, a word in the Indigenous Quechuan language of the Andes used to describe a third gender that embodies both male and female. They are an artist and a social scientist: a published poet and a researcher at nonpartisan data science organization NORC at the University of Chicago, straddling the line of the subjective and objective.

“When I first started this journey for myself, I felt really inadequate,” they said. “In this journey of reconnection to my roots and reconnection to my body, I didn’t know what was mine to explore versus not. I had a lot of fears and insecurities. But it was through conversations with Indigenous healers and leaders that I, slowly but surely, became more empowered.”

Though most of the poems in the new collection started life in English or Spanish, requiring Coello to painstakingly translate them into Quechua for publication, one particular work from the uturunku chapter sprung from their mind in their third language.

It was inspired by a discussion in their Quechua language class in which they were sharing the meaning of their name.

“That particular poem, it’s all about reckoning with the fact that my name, Mayu, means ‘river,’” they said. “But my name also means ‘the Milky Way.’ It’s the name that the Incas used to describe the Milky Way, because it looked like a river to them. I find that so special. And so, I was able to kind of expound on that in Quechua.”

“My creative work, I see it as a different type of research,” said Coello.

“Poetry, I see as internal research.”

They have published three poetry collections—2019’s self/ser, 2021’s faith/fe, and the latest, HAMPI— excavating different parts of their identity. The first two books presented their poems in both Spanish and English, but in their newest publication, they have also added Quechua, which they began learning only two years ago as part of their exploration of their Indigenous ancestry.

Coello’s creative output isn’t limited to poetry. They are also a performer and a sought-after public speaker and workshop facilitator. Though they wear a lot of hats, the one word that describes all their endeavors—unsurprisingly for someone who earned their master’s in Penn GSE’s higher education program—is educator.

“I think that is one of the words that I will always use to describe myself,” they said. “It’s just part of how I operate. … I see my training in higher education as very influential. I’m in adult education now, basically, creating different spaces and workshops and speeches for students and professionals about what it means to be queer and trans. All of that is very much influenced by my time at GSE.”

HAMPI was born of an intersecting set of questions about Coello’s health and their family. Researching their Indigeneity gave them answers about both, helping them to understand where they come from and where they are going.

“Personally, I was dealing with a lot of different health concerns, and modern medicine didn’t have a lot of answers. I think my soul was longing for a different type of medicine that would actually work—something that felt more holistic,” they said. “I was also so curious about my Indigenous roots, my connection to Ecuador, my family’s connection to our ancestry. … All of that converged into questions about the medicine of the past. What did it look like? And how has it changed? Why are we not in relationship to it anymore?

I wanted to embrace it again—for the book, but also for myself.”

However, in keeping with their both/and spirit, they are not just a teacher, but also a student, as evidenced by the new language skills and Indigenous culture they learned to create HAMPI. Even the way they talk about their creative endeavors is as if each project is a new topic to understand or subject to investigate.

“With my poetry, I set myself up to look for answers and start with some exploratory questions,” they said, illustrating how the very act of creation is an act of knowledge seeking. “Then, I go and explore and take my time putting something together based on what I’ve been learning.”

Photo credit: Courtesy of River Coello

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HOMEROOM Our A lums in Their Spaces

1.. Launch photos My children

have always been a part of my career. These pictures represent two of the launch vehicles we have seen together: one at SpaceX, where we saw a Falcon 9 launch at Vandenberg Air Force Base, and the other, NASA’s [Space Launch System rocket] from our Artemis program.

Lauren Goodwin, GRD’ 22 PROFESSOR • RESEARCHER • ENTREPRENEUR Lauren Goodwin has never fit the mold. Not as a first-generation college student from rural Pennsylvania who went on to earn advanced degrees at Columbia and Penn. Not as the only female in engineering, cybersecurity, and technology roles in high-hazard environments in the energy and space industries.

Not even as a member of her cohort in Penn GSE’s Executive Doctorate in Higher Education Management program, where, as the chief information officer for NASA, she stood out in a room full of longtime educators and administrators.

2.. South African mask

When I was 15, I left home by myself to live abroad as a youth ambassador for the US for Rotary International. I spent a transformative year living and traveling throughout Botswana and South Africa. . . . I came to understand that true growth comes from immersing oneself in new experiences and connecting with others on a deeper level. This realization became the cornerstone of my belief that learning and experience are essential components of understanding our own life’s purpose. Masks traditionally serve to conceal identities, but for me, this mask represents the transformative power of travel and exposure as catalysts for human connection and understanding. It serves as a reminder of the incredible journey that brought me to where I am today, and the boundless possibilities of life.

But that’s OK. It means she can identify issues and opportunities that other people more comfortably ensconced in those worlds might overlook. Plus, she likes to rise to a challenge.

“I always say to people, ‘Don’t ever let anyone tell you that you can’t do something,’” said Goodwin. “That has been the ethos of my career.”

She started out at NASA, straight out of American University, working as a systems engineer. It was part of her job to integrate systems on the International Space Station (ISS).

“I was able to use the role of technology and data to serve our astronauts better,” she said. “A cornerstone of my work was, ‘What could we do with the data to help the crew breathe and perform their spacewalks more efficiently?’ And then, ‘How could we launch the payload—the high-pressure gas systems—on the shuttle program?’ Technology was an enabler of the mission, and my purpose was using it to discover how we can serve people.”

Though she would later return to NASA as its CIO, in between she worked in the energy and healthcare industries, using her STEM background to undertake pioneering work with data analytics, cybersecurity, and artificial intelligence. But once she started graduate school, she became fascinated by a new frontier: the neuroscience of learning.

Her home office in Houston, Texas, is full of the souvenirs of a career spent working across the spectrum in science and technology, helping plot space exploration, data security, and even the human brain. We were lucky enough to get a tour.

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Photo credit: Ben Sassani

She developed research—which is still ongoing—that maps the neural patterns of the brain to best understand how to deliver the most engrossing models of learning. Now, in her current roles as both affiliated faculty at Columbia University and the founder of two startups, she leverages that work to help educators better serve students.

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3. Book by astronaut Eileen Collins and 4. photo with her Eileen Collins has left

an indelible mark on my life. Hailing from the same Northeastern region as myself, she served as a beacon of possibility, fostering a geographical connection that resonated deeply with me as I set out on my own feat of firsts.

My first encounter with her occurred during my college years, when I interned at NASA Headquarters and had the privilege of meeting her in person. It was a moment that filled me with awe, witnessing the groundbreaking achievements she had accomplished as both a pilot and commander of the International Space Station. . . . In a pivotal moment of my own journey at NASA, as captured in the photo, Eileen presented me with an award at the NASA Stellar Awards ceremony for my contributions to enhancing the highpressure oxygen and nitrogen systems on the ISS. . . . There was a poignant irony in being honored by someone I had admired since childhood. However, it was not the award itself but rather a moment during her speech that profoundly impacted me. She said the simple yet powerful statement: “Yes, I am an

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astronaut, but I am a mom first.” I did not have children at the time, but her message has stayed with me ever since.

Every decision I have made has always been for my two sons. I have been so fortunate to have the career I’ve had, but I am most proud to be their mom.

5.. Neuro-tech device This is the basis of my research and the essence of my second company, which is focused on the neuroscience of learning. We believe the research proves we can and should have a shift towards experiential learning in education to align our pedagogy to the biological way the brain is designed to learn. . . . The field of neuroscience can actually help reshape curriculum design and student-focused learning because we can use this to map the neural patterns in our brain. It’s also reshaping how I design future classes to be more interactive and more in line with the cognitive load in which the students can optimally learn best.

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A View from Campus SPOTLIGHT ON SCHOOL FUNDING In April, the Steven S. Goldberg & Jolley Bruce Christman Bi-Annual Lecture in Education Law unpacked the recent landmark Pennsylvania Commonwealth Court case that found the state’s formula for funding its schools to be unconstitutional. Dean Katharine Strunk moderated the panel, which featured School District of Philadelphia Superintendent Tony B. Watlington, Sr. and two advocates from the case—Deborah Gordon Klehr, executive director of the Education Law Center, and Dan Urevick-Ackelsberg, L’09, senior attorney at the Public Interest Law Center. (From left: Dean Strunk, Superintendent Watlington, Klehr, lecture founder and Penn GSE Board Member Jolley Bruce Christman, GED’71, GR’87, Urevick-Ackelsberg, and Penn Carey Law Dean Sophia Z. Lee.) Read more: penng.se/lawlecture24 Photo credit: HKB Photo

GRADUATING THE NEXT GENERATION On May 18, 740 Penn GSE master’s and doctoral students received diplomas at this year’s Commencement in the Palestra. In her remarks, Dean Strunk urged the graduates to stay connected with each other and the School. “Lean on each other. Call on each other. Support each other, and build each other up,” she said.

“Remember that together, as part of this Penn GSE community, you can take all that you’ve learned [here], and you can amplify it. In the words of anthropologist Margaret Mead, ‘Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, concerned citizens can change the world. Indeed, it’s the only thing that ever has.’”

Photo credit: Krista Patton Photography

LEADERS GUIDING LEADERS Philadelphia Mayor Cherelle Parker, LPS’16, gave the keynote address at this year’s Commencement. The former teacher (who is both the city’s 100th mayor and the first woman to hold the job) told the graduates that they give her hope for the future and encouraged them to use their Penn GSE education to be of service, especially to the City of Philadelphia. “You’ve been specifically prepared—each and every one of you—to meet this moment. The question is, will you rise? How will you use this great tool? Will you use it as the great equalizer for the people who may not ever get the opportunity to sit where you are sitting today?”

Photo credit: Krista Patton Photography

CELEBRATING OUR ALUMNI The 2024 Celebration of Educators, Penn GSE’s annual Alumni Weekend event, featured a panel discussion on “The Price of Knowledge: The Economics of Education” and a ceremony at which Dean Katharine Strunk (center) presented this year’s Education Alumni Awards to (from left) Nora D. S. Rodman, GED’20; Charlotte E. Jacobs, GRD’17; Jasmine L. Blanks Jones, GR’21; ArCasia D. James-Gallaway, GED’16; Christina Grant, GRD’21; Hang Qin, GED’18; and DeAngela Burns-Wallace, GRD’09 (not pictured). Learn more about the accomplishments of these outstanding alumni: penng.se/aw24.

Photo credit: HKB Photo

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t l u C l a c i t i r The C y c a r e t i L a i Med

As teachers and researchers, Penn GSE alumni are at the forefront of the movement to educate savvy news readers who can parse fact from partisan fiction.

By Paul Jablow

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he time was normally set aside for science class. But, “for the next 30 minutes,” teacher Mia Blitstein, GED’02, told the 18 middle school students at Global Leadership Academy, “this is going to be a newsroom.”

Students at the West Philadelphia charter school scrambled over notes and prepared for interviews for their publication, The Healthy Globe. Instead of a class with their regular teacher, they were going to have what they call “newspaper time.”

Blitstein, who got her master’s in elementary education from Penn GSE, works with Healthy NewsWorks, a nonprofit that that teaches health and media literacy to students as young as first grade.

The working definition of the term “media literacy,” established at a watershed 1992 conference at the Aspen Institute outside Washington, DC, is “the ability of a citizen to access, analyze, and produce information for specific outcomes.” But it was the 2016 presidential campaign that brought phrases such as “fake news” and “alternative facts” widely into the public sphere, Nichols said, accompanied by increased polarization among news consumers and a flood of dubious information online.

“We have the youngest reporters in the country,” said health journalist Marian Uhlman, who started the organization in 2003 along with a second-grade teacher.

Uhlman said that this school year, Healthy NewsWorks expects its newspapers will reach more than 6,000 students in underresourced public, private, and parochial schools. Blitstein and other teachers are currently working in 18 schools, helping students prepare newspapers that cover topics ranging from interviews with health professionals to public health issues and their own personal health experiences. And they are teaching research and journalistic skills in the process.

In a 2020 report on this polarization, the Pew Foundation found that “Republicans and Democrats place their trust in two nearly inverse news media environments. … Evidence suggests that partisan polarization in the use and trust of media sources has widened in the past five years.”

Some states (including New Jersey and Delaware) have passed some sort of legislation requiring that media literacy be part of school curriculums. Pennsylvania is currently considering such a bill, and Gov. Josh Shapiro voiced strong support for it in his February budget address. (More in the sidebar, p.15)

They are, for example, teaching students what a reliable source is, how to spot agendas behind an online post, and how algorithms can platform just one side of a story. They also hold workshops with teachers and prepare sample lesson plans, some of which are available for free on their website for anyone to use.

“Healthy NewsWorks believes that every child has the right and the need to acquire health knowledge and literacy skills,” said the organization’s statement of purpose. (Projects go beyond written work, too. Their students’ documentary film, How We Heal, won the media award at the San Diego International Kids Film Festival in 2022.)

Mia Blitstein, GED’02, program manager at Healthy NewsWorks

Blitstein and Healthy NewsWorks are part of a growing media literacy movement in schools and universities throughout the nation. Penn GSE graduates and faculty members have played a key role in the movement, including T. Philip Nichols, G’16, GR’18, who has chronicled its history, Alesha Gayle, GRD’12, who teaches it to graduate students, and Blitstein, who exposes young learners in elementary and middle schools to it.

Across this range of academic settings, practitioners try to help students and others navigate their way across an increasingly complicated media landscape. Thanks to the internet and social media, news consumers are now inundated with online information, much of it unsupported by evidence.

Illustrations from photos.

Photo credits: (Blitstein) Meg Cullar, (Gayle) Ryan Collerd, (Nichols) Lyla Duey

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THE CAMPUS CLASS “I’ve had graduate students who never set foot in a library,” said Gayle, a senior fellow in Penn GSE’s Learning, Teaching, and Literacy division who has taught the course “Critical Media Literacy in the Age of Trump.” “They’re just looking online.” She said that 86 percent of people under the age of 22 depend primarily on the internet for news.

Alesha Gayle, GRD’12, senior fellow in Penn GSE’s Learning, Teaching, and Literacy division

It’s a landscape of paradoxes. “The younger they are, the more likely they are to believe questionable information,” Gayle said. And while younger students are more sophisticated about using social media, she said, they can be very unsophisticated about what goes into what they’re watching, reading, or hearing.

“I’m teaching them to consider authorship,” she said. “Who’s paying for the message and what is their agenda? What about the author’s other work on the subject?”

According to a March 7, 2024, New York Times story, a handful of “news” websites had popped up in recent weeks with names like the “Chicago Chronicle” or the “Miami Chronicle.” “In fact,” the Times story stated, “they are not local news organizations at all … they are Russian creations, meant to mimic actual news organizations.” Could a student who had taken a good media literacy course be better able to spot them as fakes?

Gayle borrows a metaphor from The Wizard of Oz: “They don’t know who’s behind the curtain … whose voices are being highlighted.” Or “how people massage the truth … how the people who produced [an ad] wanted you to interpret it.”

Her course has included analyzing Kentucky Fried Chicken advertisements in different countries and exploring the different ways the same story was treated by The New York Times, The Washington Post, and other major media outlets.

“I would hope so,” Gayle said.

A screenshot from Healthy NewsWorks’ award-winning, student-made documentary How We Heal Photo credit: Courtesy of Healthy NewsWorks

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THE HISTORY OF THE FIELD

T. Philip Nichols, G’16, GR’18, media scholar and associate professor of education at Baylor University

Nichols, whose Penn GSE doctoral studies focused on literacy, culture, and international education, is now a media scholar and associate professor of education at Baylor University in Texas. He focuses his research on how science and technology shape the ways we practice, teach, and talk about literacy, and the implications for equitable public education.

common—search the term “media literacy” on Amazon and you get dozens of results—he hopes that it can be integrated into all academic subjects, not just English or language arts.

As one of the country’s leading scholars on the history and development of the media literacy movement, Nichols’ work cuts across almost a century of information and misinformation. In his 2016 publication “Media Education and the Limits of ‘Literacy,’” he provides historical context for how “media literacy” as a field came to focus on “strategies for identifying and critiquing media bias and misinformation,” and “equipping youth to produce media messages that challenge misinformation or represent marginalized perspectives.”

One sign of how public consciousness has embraced the concept of—or necessity for—media literacy? Oxford Dictionaries named “post-truth” its word of the year in 2016. Defined as “relating to or denoting circumstances in which objective facts are less influential in shaping public opinion than appeals to emotion and personal belief … the concept has been in existence for the past decade, but Oxford Dictionaries has seen a spike in frequency this year in the context of the EU referendum in the UK and the presidential election in the US.”

The media literacy field, said Nichols, was only firmly established in that 1992 Aspen Institute conference. But there were earlier versions of “media education” that went by different names and focused on different skills, that may offer valuable lessons for today.

“One lesson has to do with how misinformation becomes available in the first place,” he said. “Not just addressing misinformation, but the atmosphere that fosters it. We’re trying to teach students to be critical researchers of the media environment that surrounds them.”

There’s a tendency today, he said, to focus on vetting media messages, but this can overlook important details about the technologies and industries that also shape the information that circulates. “Understanding the media environment itself, not just isolated messages, is something that previous generations of media education have emphasized, but that we sometimes neglect today,” he said.

One example he gives is that rather than learning to analyze a particular news article’s message, students should be asked to explore the contexts in which people might encounter the article—the algorithmic rankings that boost its presence on a newsfeed, the forms of positive or negative engagement that drive or inhibit its spread on social media, and the profit motives of authors, publishers, and digital platforms involved in its circulation.

Around this time, Nichols said, the term “fake news,” which had been around for years, “takes off with a life of its own.” Whether it’s called media literacy or one of various names that media education has had over the years, he said, concerns about it are more likely to surface in times of political crisis.

HEALTHY HABITS START YOUNG Blitstein, from Healthy NewsWorks, seemed destined for her work as a media literacy educator. “I was practically born in the library,” she said. “My mom worked there,” in the central branch of the Free Library of Philadelphia.

She majored in children’s literature as an undergraduate at the University of Pittsburgh, and then worked in Philadelphia schools and at the nonprofit Children’s Literacy Initiative before coming to Healthy NewsWorks in 2018.

That task has become more difficult in the past few years, he said, thanks to the creation of websites that spread false information to generate “clicks,” and thus, revenue.

At Penn GSE, Blitstein said, “Kathy Schultz was the literacy professor who I remember fondly, and Janine Remillard was my math professor who opened my eyes to the beauty of different problem-solving methods. Sadly, I cannot come up with the name of the social studies professor who I remember messaging to us to make sure to think about who is outside of the photos we use as historical documents, and invited us to ask questions such as, ‘Who is behind the camera? Who is just outside the frame?’”

Nichols said that, historically, research on the subject of media literacy “wasn’t always immediately relevant to practicing teachers.” Now, as textbooks on the subject become more

She was drawn to Healthy NewsWorks by its combination of coaching and curriculum. (She was also inspired by its focus on health education, as a survivor of non-Hodgkin lymphoma.)

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MEDIA LITERACY THROUGH LEGISLATION People on both sides of the aisle complain about bias and misinformation in the media, but Congress hasn’t passed any national media literacy education legislation to help citizens become better informed information consumers. Individual states have had more success. New Jersey became the first state to mandate K–12 media literacy education in public schools last year.

(The law went into effect immediately.) Twenty other states—from Texas to California—have taken legislative steps of their own, from requiring media literacy instruction in classrooms to directing state agencies to create standards or frameworks.

The basic lesson plans are aligned with Common Core State Standards and the students start out with a two-week “boot camp” to learn basic journalism concepts, such as “What is a reliable source?”

Students at each school prepare a newspaper three or four times a year that is printed for every student and staff member in their school. Healthy NewsWorks hopes this helps spread health knowledge in the community and increase the students’ sense of pride in their work, in addition to helping them grow their literacy skills and become better news consumers.

Here in Pennsylvania, State Rep. Tim Briggs introduced a bill in 2017 calling on the state Department of Education to “incorporate into the curriculum a component regarding media literacy.”

Suggested topics included identifying targetmarketing strategies, “discovering parts of a story that are not being told,” “understanding how media messages shape culture,” and naming techniques of persuasion used.

Blitstein might get to any given school once a week throughout the year, but the goal is that eventually the teachers in those schools master media literacy concepts enough to integrate them into their own lesson plans.

Across the Delaware River in Camden, New Jersey, at the Saint Joseph Pro-Cathedral School, the students are engaged with Blitstein and Healthy NewsWorks’ curriculum. Julian, a 13-year-old eighth grader, said he had learned a lot about asking questions and interviewing sources. Holly, another 13-year-old eighth grader, said that one of the biggest things she learned is “how we can give back” to the community with the newspaper.

She also said she had been surprised to learn how complicated the news-gathering process is and the time it takes.

The bill went nowhere. “It was seen as a partisan effort,” said Briggs (a Democrat).

But supporters of teaching media literacy got a boost from Gov. Shapiro in his February 2024 budget address. “Our children are being fed halftruths, prejudices, and propaganda nearly every day on their phones and social media,” Shapiro said. “I also heard from teachers about how they’re confronting the misinformation kids are finding online and bringing it into the classroom. We give them devices with access to the entire world at a young age, but never teach them how to use them.

That is what Blitstein is hoping Healthy NewsWorks can do— not just teach young learners the work that goes into crafting news stories, but also help them understand the value of that work.

“The kids are excited about writing,” Blitstein said. “They’re more able to advocate for themselves and for their communities.

And they won’t be easily swayed by what is deceptive. Being a reporter puts them in the driver’s seat.” ■

“I don’t care whether our kids take a position on the left or on the right . . . but I do care that they’re able to discern fact from fiction.”

Without waiting for action on Briggs’ bill, or a similar bill introduced by Pennsylvania State Sen. Katie Muth, Shapiro ordered the state Department of Education to develop a toolkit for teachers and parents on digital literacy and critical thinking.

The Spring 2024 issue of By Kids, For Kids produced by Healthy NewsWorks

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of Philanthropy

The Marcus Foster Scholarship

By Rebecca Raber

T

here is an old Quaker saying: “Let your life speak.” It means that the way you live should be exemplary of your deepest held beliefs. Though most members of the Penn community are Quakers in name but not religion, they let their lives speak in many ways: by living their values, working towards a more just and equitable world, and supporting the students coming up behind them.

Marcus Foster, GED’49, GRD’72, is one such alum whose life has spoken across generations, reverberating well beyond his own too-brief lifetime. The Penn GSE alum and former University Trustee was a dedicated educator, transformative leader, and the first Black superintendent of a major urban school district in the US whose life was tragically cut short by bullets from an extremist’s gun in 1973. [More on far right.]

In life, his impact could be felt in the improvements he made in some of Philadelphia’s most overlooked, under-resourced— and, not coincidentally, Black—schools, in the lives of the students he changed and the educators he inspired, and in his innovative school fundraising concepts. (He created America’s first education foundation, a model that now exists across 2,500 districts nationwide, according to EdSource.)

In death, he inspired an outpouring of gifts from more than 450 donors, including those across Penn GSE, the wider University, and the School District of Philadelphia, to enable students from underserved communities “to work full-time toward obtaining the tools of educational administration and research needed for the exercise of leadership in public education.”

Launched in 1984 with an initial goal of $150,000, the Marcus Foster Scholarship Fund eventually raised over $192,000 for doctoral scholarships at Penn GSE. Unlike most other endowed scholarship funds, which are often donated by a single person or family, Foster’s memorial fund was the result of hundreds of individual gifts, many as small as $10 or $20, in tribute to the lasting influence he had on the people and schools in his community—even those he never knew personally.

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Oakland Unified School District (OUSD) Superintendant Marcus Foster reading to children in an OUSD elementary school

“When I first started donating to the fund, it was because of a family friend who was like a big sister to me. She had taught in an elementary school in Philadelphia where Dr. Foster was principal, and she thought so highly of him,” said Mary LaVerne Wright Miner, ED’61, whose own Penn education was made possible by scholarship.

“I thought she would be glad to see what had happened at Penn in honor of him. … I know he was interested in improvement, empowerment, and encouragement, so I think he’d be very pleased to know that there have been decades of students’ lives that have been helped by his scholarship.”

The Marcus Foster Scholarship Fund is currently worth over a million dollars. That is the magic of an endowed scholarship—over time, the funds can grow and become a permanent source of support for deserving students.

“Simply put, endowed scholarships help ensure that Penn GSE can continue to prepare the kinds of passionate educators and leaders able to tackle the most pressing challenges in education—today and in perpetuity,” said

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Fostering Equity

By Umar Aly, GED’24

When Marcus Foster, GED’49, GRD’72, became superintendent of Oakland Unified School District in California in 1970, he became the first Black leader of a big-city school district in the United States. But he wasn’t just a trailblazer, he was a visionary whose progressive ideas about education, as laid out in his 1971 book Making Schools Work, are still relevant today: ideas rooted in excellence, equity, and empathy.

Born in Athens, Georgia, in 1923 and raised in Philadelphia, Foster was a gifted student, earning a bachelor’s degree from Cheyney University of Pennsylvania and graduate degrees from Penn GSE. He began his teaching career in Philadelphia public schools in 1949 at E.M. Stanton Elementary, eventually becoming assistant principal at James Rhoads Elementary, and later, principal at Paul L. Dunbar Elementary, O.V. Catto Disciplinary School, and Simon Gratz High School. By 1969, he was associate superintendent of schools in Philadelphia.

Marcus Foster was known for his passionate oration

He was known for his “turnaround” of underperforming schools and the high expectations he had for his students, who came from under-resourced and minoritized backgrounds. In 1966, when he became the first Black principal of a Philadelphia senior high school, Gratz was infamous for its high levels of absenteeism and low graduation rates. Only 18 of the graduating seniors from the year before his arrival pursued higher education. By 1968—after expanding extracurricular programming, creating a night school for career development, establishing a nursing training program, and launching campaigns to re-enroll dropouts—180 graduates were college-bound.

Above: Marcus Foster was recognized for his accomplishments in transforming Simon Gratz High School during his tenure as principal

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The Marcus Foster Scholarship has been changing lives for Penn GSE students for 40 years. Rhonda Jeter, GR’95, now dean of the College of Education at Bowie State University, the oldest HBCU in Maryland, was the inaugural recipient of the funding in the fall of 1984.

Keri Davenport, a third-year PhD student in Learning, Teaching, and Teacher Education, is the latest.

“I was so happy to be selected to receive this fellowship in honor of such a great man,” said inaugural scholar Jeter. “I applied to the University of Pennsylvania to work on a doctoral degree in professional and scientific psychology. I was accepted into the program . . . but had not figured out how to pay for being in a full-time doctoral program. This fellowship changed my life.”

Marcus Foster (center) among colleagues and students

That success led him to the superintendent job in Oakland, where he focused on improving academic standards, promoting inclusion, and fostering community engagement. As a superintendent, he implemented innovative initiatives aimed at reducing racial disparities in education and ensuring that all students had access to quality schooling.

“The Marcus Foster Scholarship has made it possible for me to attend a selective university while focusing on research that I am passionate about without worrying about financial ability,” said Davenport, who studies how school personnel support the development of civic skills in high schoolers. “This scholarship allows me to do what I enjoy without financial stress.”

“Foster focused on educating all children with rigorous curriculum and child-centered classrooms, making sure that we educators believed in every child’s ability and potential,” said Gary Yee, who began his teaching career in Oakland during Foster’s tenure as superintendent. “[He also] opened district doors for a significant cohort of administrators of color. As a young Asian American teacher, I gained role models who came from backgrounds like my own. Ten years later, I walked through those doors to become a site and district leader. I have humbly carried his message and encouragement for the 50 years I served in Oakland schools.”

Though Foster’s life has been over for half a century, it is still speaking loudly—through the recipients of his scholarship, their work, and the many students’ lives they are impacting.

“Not only does the Marcus Foster Scholarship honor Dr. Foster’s legacy,” said Tepper, “but by awarding it to exceptional students year after year, it serves as an inspiration and recognizes the important work of educators.”

Tragically, Foster was murdered leaving a school board meeting on November 6, 1973, by members of extremist group the Symbionese Liberation Army. His legacy lives on, however, through the continued efforts to advance his vision of inclusive and equitable education and in the many scholarships—including one at Penn GSE—in his name.

As the current recipient, Davenport wasn’t born until decades after Foster’s death, but she still thinks about what she would say to the man who has been such an influence on her career: “Thank you for your bravery and dedication to educational justice. I cannot imagine the internal pressure you felt as you forged a path for the next generation of minority educators. There is still work to do. Inequity remains in America’s education system, and social challenges persist. Yet, because of your sacrifice and the sacrifice of others, things are easier for me. Because you did, I can.” ■

Learn more about endowed scholarships by contacting Vice Dean of Development and Alumni Relations Laura Tepper at ltepper@upenn.edu.

Photo credits: Courtesy of the Marcus Foster Education Institute

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The Museum as a Classroom Penn GSE alumni use their passion for education to teach learners of all ages through exhibits, outreach, and special collections.

By Lini S. Kadaba

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hile at a flea market more than three decades ago, Randy Hayward, GRD’11, came upon a Black ragdoll. It was handmade, thought to be from the ’30s or ’40s.

“I thought, ‘Wow,’” he recalled, still with a hint of excitement. “Back then, not a lot of toys represented Black children.”

Fascinated, he bought it. And so began his dedicated pursuit of Black Americana. Two thousand artifacts later, the Detroit native is curator of the Traveling Black History Museum he founded in 2019 when he left the Detroit-based Marvin L. Winans Academy of Performing Arts, where he was superintendent and lead principal. But his passion for education is never far. Hayward spends his time researching historical pieces and sharing his discoveries with schoolchildren, college students, and others.

“I bring in these artifacts, and for the first time you’re holding a piece of history,” he said— with “proper gloves, of course,” he added.

“You’re transported to that place, and then I get to tell a story that’s inviting to hear.”

The collection, spanning the antebellum era to the present, includes shackles that once bound enslaved people; a rare medallion from the National Ex-Slave Mutual Relief, Bounty, and Pension Association; a boxing robe signed by Muhammad Ali; and signed tennis rackets from Serena and Venus Williams. His trove also pays homage to Black motorcycle racers and Hayward’s own enthusiasm for the sport—he has a bevy of antique bikes. “My artifacts,” he said, “really speak to the American experience.”

Randy Hayward, GRD’11, sharing a boxing robe signed by Muhammed Ali from his collection of more than 2,000 artifacts in the Traveling Black History Museum

Like Hayward, other Penn GSE alumni who work in a variety of roles at museums are bringing a range of knowledge to people of all ages—teaching not in traditional classrooms but through exhibits, outreach, and special programs.

One such alum works at the National Museum of African American Music (NMAAM) in Nashville, Tennessee, sharing the marginalized histories spotlighted at the museum to garner support among potential donors. Another, the founder of the National Museum of American Illustration (NMAI) in Newport, Rhode Island, is on a mission to enlighten the public about the artistic talent of once-overlooked illustrators. At Baltimore’s Port Discovery Children’s Museum, an alum spearheads imaginative programs that teach parents the importance of play, while a museum educator at the University of Pennsylvania’s Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology is building bridges between the past and present.

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"Night Mare" / "Hound Dog" Published by Peacock Records, Inc., Recorded

by Big Mama Thornton, American, 1926–1984 Photo credit: Courtesy of National Museum of African American History and Culture

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At Penn, Evans pursued a certificate in Africana studies with a focus on ethnomusicology in addition to his master’s in higher education, never expecting to land at an African American music museum. Initially, he returned to administration at Paul Quinn College in Dallas, Texas, and then joined a magnet school, where he focused on philanthropy, Dexter D. Evans, GED’18 Photo credit: Karen L. Richard before landing at NMAAM in 2022. His first year, Evans raised $2 million, he said, before assuming his current role, where he is overseeing a $12-million campaign.

“Museums are learning institutions,” said Dexter D. Evans, GED’18, NMAAM's director of development. “We preserve documents and artifacts and legacies for the education of the public.”

The three-year-old, 56,000-square-foot music museum celebrates African American contributions to the American soundtrack. Touch panels in the Rivers of Rhythms Pathway, the museum’s backbone, immerse its 250,000 annual visitors in the sounds of spirituals and blues, contemporary R&B, and hip-hop, while tying historical events to “iconic music moments,” as its website says. In other exhibits, guests can dance with Beyoncé and Michael Jackson, produce their own songs, and explore artifacts from music legends.

“The purpose of NMAAM is to educate the world on undiscovered and often hidden talents and treasures within the African American music community,” Evans said. “More than 50 genres of music are related to and influenced by African Americans. We’re really uncovering that and highlighting so many artists, even artists historically misrepresented in the ’40s and ’50s.” One exhibit, he said, illustrates the history of Elvis Presley’s hit “Hound Dog,” rightfully placing original recording artist Big Mama Thornton at its center.

Even though not in academics, Evans sees himself as an educator first, using his GSE-developed skills to communicate the museum’s mission—and why it’s a worthy cause to support—and helping colleagues “convey messages in a compelling way.” He’s also involved with the museum’s Black music industry certification program, an eight-week virtual exploration of the music industry that exposes college students to industry leaders and the music business.

“I was a learner at Penn GSE, but I also was gaining knowledge to be a teacher among my peers and community,” said Evans, who is also currently pursuing a doctorate in philanthropic leadership at Indiana University. “I spend a lot of time getting people right.”

ILLUSTRATING KNOWLEDGE NMAI’s founder and executive director Judy (Alpert) Goffman Cutler, CW’63, GED’64, also focuses on education, teaching visitors about the artists who used their illustrations to sell products in the late-19th through the mid-20th centuries—the “Golden Age of Illustration.”

“It was considered commercial,” said Goffman Cutler, “so it was dismissed by the art establishment. I turned that around by showing the underlying artwork first, teaching everybody about the original painting. It is a completely different experience to look at paintings in their original form, as opposed to their printed form—like tasting a meal instead of looking at a picture of it.”

The National Museum of American Illustration, currently closed for renovation but open by appointment, houses about 2,000 pieces by Norman Rockwell, Maxfield Parrish, Howard Pyle (“the father of American illustration”), J.C Leyendecker, James Montgomery Flagg (creator of the iconic Uncle Sam poster, “I Want You!”), N.C. Wyeth, John Falter, Jessie Willcox Smith, Violet Oakley, and more than 150 others in a Gilded Age

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PLAY WITH A PURPOSE Certainly, Rachel Demma, GRD’18, would agree. As vice president of learning, visitor experience, and community engagement at Baltimore’s Port Discovery Children’s Museum since 2021, her mantra is: “Play is always learning, and learning— particularly for young children—is always best activated through play.”

Port Discovery offers a multitude of experiences that foster exactly that, what the website calls “purposeful play.” The museum’s four-story winding slide, the SkyClimber, builds confidence and motor skills. At a pretend convenience store, children act as cashiers, shoppers, and stockers, fostering imagination while also learning about food groups and how to take turns. Other play areas include a recreation of an archeological excavation of ancient Egypt, complete with artifacts; a two-story, life-size cargo ship that explores the Port of Baltimore and its many jobs; and Wonders of Water, where visitors can create fountains and learn about cause and effect.

Judy (Alpert) Goffman Cutler, CW’63, GED’64, in front of a J.C. Leyendecker illustration Photo credit: © 2010 by the National Museum of American Illustration

“Part of our work,” she said, “is to build the understanding that play is developmentally essential. It’s how we learn about ourselves and our peers and other people—and about the world around us.”

mansion. Works by these artists were originally commissioned for magazines, newspapers, books, posters, advertisements, greeting cards, or calendars, Goffman Cutler explained.

Over nearly two decades, Demma has gone from carrying out bigpicture education policy at the federal and state government levels to developing early childhood parent education on the frontlines.

The Parents at Play program, for one, brings together caregivers for workshops that culminate in a play session at the museum.

One pride point is the Children’s Library of Things, a partnership with the local library system that loans out backpacks stuffed with books, activities, and toys to support key milestones. Demma also is designing the newly launched At Play Early Learning Institute to strengthen the pipeline of high-quality early childhood educators.

“At the end of the day,” she quipped, “the only difference between a fine artist and an illustrator is that an illustrator can pay for his lunch and the artist is usually starving.”

After earning an undergraduate degree in American studies, with a minor in art, and then a master’s in education, Goffman Cutler became a high school teacher—she didn’t care for the other two career options, nurse or secretary, available to women at the time, she said. Unable to buy the paintings of popular modern artists on a teacher’s wage, the art aficionado purchased more affordable illustrations. When she managed to sell her Louis Icart works for several thousand dollars, her personal collection turned into a business. So began her career as an art dealer in the original works by American illustrators.

Her doctorate in educational and organizational leadership, she said, has given context to her work and fostered a strong professional network that she often taps. “I use what I learned in the GSE program every day in my professional life,” Demma said.

“For me, there was a throughline from understanding policy and early childhood systems to the role children’s museums play in communities.” Her dissertation on the origins of socioeconomic diversity in early childhood programs and the benefits to children resulted in a 2022 Journal of Early Childhood Research publication.

In 2000, Goffman Cutler opened the NMAI. The collection, she said, records the history of America and “American values, who we were, what we came from, and how we evolved.” She also has authored numerous books and catalogues, primarily on Rockwell, Leyendecker, and Parrish, and the museum has developed several traveling shows, including the recent Rockwell/Wyeth: Icons of Americana at the Polk Museum of Art at Florida Southern College in Lakeland, Florida, and Under Cover: J.C. Leyendecker and American Masculinity at the New York Historical Society Museum and Library.

Rachel Demma, GRD’18, on-site at Port Discovery Children's Museum

All along, Goffman Cutler said, she has most enjoyed learning about the illustrators and, ever the teacher, then sharing that knowledge. “The museum gave me the opportunity,” she said. “Learning should be fun, not a chore, and so too is the teaching.”

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HANDS-ON HISTORY For older students, learning through exposure to museums takes more complex forms, of course, but still involves captivating hands-on interactions—at least that’s the philosophy of Camden Copeland, C’16, GED’21. The senior museum educator, who joined the Penn Museum in 2022 after leaving the classroom, manages the museum’s teen programming.

Camden Copeland, C’16, GED’21 Photo credit: Paul D. Best

Unpacking the Past, a Penn Museum program begun in 2014, brings the ancient world to life for 6,000 sixth and seventh graders each year who are studying those cultures by providing interactions with archaeological artifacts and hands-on activities at all Title I Philadelphia schools. The program also organizes no-cost field trips to the museum.

As the students tour the collection, they are challenged to think critically about commonalities between past and present communities.

“One of the goals is to expand and help students have increased empathy for other cultures and for other people who may be different,” Copeland said. In one activity, students look for a present-day artifact—say, tweezers—also used in ancient times. (Romans had tweezers.) Students “can start to make connections between ancient people and themselves.”

Copeland also runs Hands-on History, which targets high schoolers with Saturday workshops focused on museum studies and archaeological science through experiential activities such as papermaking, botanical dying, and ancient bread-making.

The urban studies major returned to Penn for her teaching certificate in secondary education through GSE’s Urban Teaching Residency program after working at a boarding school in South Africa. The post-pandemic classroom environment at the Philadelphia public school where she taught English, however, pushed her to look for another way to work with youth. The self-described “museum nerd” jumped at the chance to join the Penn Museum, where she had taken classes as an undergraduate.

Philadelphia middle schoolers on a field trip to the Penn Museum as part of the Unpacking the Past program Photo credit: Courtesy of Penn Museum

Now, Copeland’s playing a role in creating the next generation of, well, museum nerds.

“Museums can feel inaccessible,” she said. “Unpacking the Past gets kids out of the classroom, experiencing a new place. It’s not just stuff in a textbook. It’s real.”

EYE-OPENING EXPERIENCES Back in Detroit, Hayward talks about Soviet psychologist Lev Vygotsky’s zone of proximal development (ZPD) theory—a topic he delved into as part of his dissertation in Penn GSE's Mid-Career Doctoral Program in Educational and Organizational Leadership.

ZPD posits that people develop, for better or worse, based on their environment.

To that end, Hayward fills well-worn steamer trunks with his goods and goes around the country, presenting programs on Jim Crow, Black music, and "Souls on Wheels," among others, even as he continues to build his collection.

“I’m practicing the theory every day,” Hayward said, adding that exposing children to new experiences helps them “see beyond what I call the ‘five-block radius.’”

“We have to stop limiting Black history solely to the trials and tribulations,” he said of his intentional inclusion of memorabilia that celebrates African American accomplishments in sports, music, politics, and even motorcycling. “This history is so rich in so many different ways.

And isn’t that the goal of any educator, to open students up to the vastness of the world?

“You can go down the rabbit hole of discovery. It’s invigorating, daunting, enlightening, sometimes shocking, but rarely boring.” ■

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\ F E ATURE \

FROM

English Learners TO

A Penn GSE initiative provides an opportunity for TESOL students to practice their teaching with language learners across the University and around the world.

English Teachers

By Rebecca Raber Ha

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GSE students practice real-world teaching with real learners. But … also to offer dependents of Penn community members a place to find a community of friends while they are in the US and to practice their English.”

“When I first came here, I was truly afraid to step out. I was afraid to pick up the phone, to talk to people in person,” said Cheng. “I would doubt myself when people would ask me, ‘Can you say that again?’ or ‘What did you say?’ It made me think my English was awful.”

’1 Because Penn GSE’s TESOL program is 5, an preparing its students to teach English d I ryna Kozlova in classrooms and other instructional settings where English is a foreign language, all TESOL students must conduct field-based practice at local schools, cultural centers, and other organizations that serve immigrants and refugees in Philadelphia. PEDAL is one sought-after placement.

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hen Chih-Hung “Gordon” Cheng moved to Philadelphia in 2022 so his wife could pursue her graduate studies in organizational dynamics at Penn, he had been learning English for years—in Taiwan, where he grew up, instruction started in seventh grade. But the Mandarin speaker still found himself nervous using his English among native speakers.

ah Brennem

an

,G E

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But a class he’s been taking since January has given him newfound confidence in his proficiency. That course is part of the Practical English for Daily Living (PEDAL) program at Penn GSE, which offers free English classes to adult language learners of all levels taught by students in GSE’s Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages (TESOL) master’s program.

This year, 14 Penn GSE students have acted as teachers for PEDAL students from 55 countries and territories around the world who speak 28 different first languages.

“PEDAL is also a lab, it’s not just [a fieldwork] site,” said Iryna Kozlova, a lecturer of educational practice and the PEDAL faculty advisor. “We teach life, because we teach English as it is used in real-life settings—how to make a doctor’s appointment, how to do grocery shopping, how to make polite requests.

I emphasize this when working with our graduate students that they are responsible for helping [English language] learners to adjust to living in a new country and using new language in everyday life.”

Begun in 2012 by Senior Lecturer and Associate Director of TESOL Santoi Wagner, the program was initially designed to offer language instruction to international friends and family of Penn staff, students, and faculty, but via a partnership with the Free Library of Philadelphia, it expanded to offer classes to any adult language r e Sa n t o i W a g n learners in the city in 2014. During the pandemic, the program went online, and ever since it has offered its free classes to anyone with a laptop or smartphone, anywhere around the world. (In-person classes are still taught in the Penn GSE building for locals.)

“We teach communicative language teaching—that’s our framework,” said Brenneman. “It’s real English, real contexts, real life, not focusing on perfect

“PEDAL was started with two missions,” said Hannah Brenneman, GED’15, who is not only the current PEDAL program coordinator but was also one of the early TESOL students who taught in the program. “One is to help current

Photo credits: HKB Photo (PEDAL classroom and faculty), Stuart Goldenberg (Santoi Wagner)

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grammar, but communicative competence. Can you get the gist of what your conversation partner is trying to say to you? It doesn’t matter if they mispronounce something. This idea of ‘unaccented English,’ throw it out the window. Can you negotiate meaning with someone based on the skills that you have?”

Because the majority of the master’s candidates in the TESOL program learned English as a second (or third or fourth) language, they have deep Hail y Cho e empathy for the learners they are now leading in their PEDAL classrooms. They understand how people learn English and what some of the setbacks can be.

It’s real English, real contexts, real life, not focusing on perfect grammar, but communicative competence.

– Hannah Brenneman, GED’15 “I’ve been learning English for my whole life, so I know what’s going to be easy for [my students] and what is going to be a common error that I would make,” said Hailey Cho, a TESOL master’s candidate from Korea who has been co-teaching the most advanced “level four” PEDAL class this spring.

“We are preparing them to live in the United States, not just to learn a language,” said Di, who is, herself, a native Mandarin speaker.

For these student-teachers, the PEDAL classes give them the opportunity to think about creative ways people learn languages. Kozlova said that in their home countries many of them were taught English through memorization and repetition, but that isn’t the best way to create engaged English speakers. So when they run classes of their own, those student teachers put into practice a more discussion-based framework where the purpose is competency, not perfection.

“Our goal for PEDAL teachers is that they’re able to analyze and develop the critical-thinking skills about the decisions that they’re making in their teaching,” said Brenneman. “They haven’t been asked to do that before—until they get here, they had not thought about why their classrooms were set up the way they were.”

“I totally understand them being anxious when speaking English, especially with native speakers, because they might feel like they are not fluent enough and it makes them feel insecure. I can totally relate to that because I’ve been there,” said Cho. “So, in our class we’re talking a lot about, ‘Don’t focus on your non-native status, but instead think of yourself as a very legitimate speaker of English—not as learners but as English speakers.’”

“Our students are truly amazing,” said Cho. “They are so ready to learn, even though they’re already very successful English learners. They are already professionally achieved individuals, and we are just pre-service teachers. But they are so respectful, always telling us, ‘You guys are the best teachers,’ and that really makes me happy.”

For Cheng, who has taken other English classes—at the library, via Penn’s Family Center—while his wife pursues her master’s, the PEDAL program has offered not just a chance to improve his language skills, but a regular, ongoing social opportunity and a way to build community while he’s living far from home.

Of course, the classes aren’t just sites of learning for the students, but for the student-teachers as well.

“We have a lot of freedom in the class, because there is no designated curriculum or tests that we have to do in the class,” said Cho. “We can just focus on our students’ needs and our community’s needs.”

inequality in the US. Classes for newer language learners can focus on skills such as shopping at the supermarket or navigating public transit and the accompanying vocabulary they might need.

Qian u Di y

So, what does class look like? The student-teachers lead discussions of almost anything related to life in America, depending on their students’ interests and language mastery. Because Cho and her co-teacher, fellow MSEd candidate Qianyu Di, teach the most proficient English speakers, they have spent their class discussions this semester exploring complicated topics, such as income

“I'm so glad that everyone is so committed and that we attend class regularly,” he said. “We can easily treat each other as a friend.”

That sense of community extends to the student teachers as well.

“Working at PEDAL has given me a sense of connectedness with the whole University of Pennsylvania,” said Di, whose students have family connections across Penn. “We are teaching at GSE. That gives me a sense of pride.” ■

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\ Q & A \

Protecting Against Burnout Kandi Wiens’ latest book aims to help readers build resilience to stress and heal their relationship to work.

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health scare led Kandi Wiens, GRD’16, to her life’s work. Almost a decade ago, while working a highstress consulting job, earning her doctorate from Penn GSE’s Chief Learning Officer (CLO) program, and juggling her responsibilities as a mom to three young children, she had a hypertensive emergency during a routine check-up. While she was tapping away at her phone, still conducting work from inside her doctor’s office, a nurse was checking and rechecking her blood pressure, not believing the numbers she was seeing in a seemingly healthy young woman.

“I could have had a stroke. I could have had a heart attack,” said Wiens. “I could have died right then and there.”

Instead, she had a wake-up call. Stress was literally killing her, and she needed to find a way to manage it better. In the week that followed, during her doctor-mandated rest, one of the things she pondered was why the stress had impacted her so profoundly.

Many of her Penn GSE classmates were also busy working parents with high-stress jobs, but their blood pressure readings hadn’t made medical professionals do a double take. What were they doing differently? She decided to make that question the heart of her doctoral dissertation, exploring stress and burnout.

That research became the basis for her new professional path—one that could not be more timely given the rise of postpandemic burnout. Wiens is now a senior fellow, director of Penn GSE’s Medical Education (Med Ed) master’s program, and academic director of the Penn CLO master’s program, as well as an executive coach and sought-after speaker. Her new book, Burnout Immunity: How Emotional Intelligence Can Help You Build Resilience and Heal Your Relationship to Work, which synthesizes all her research, was released by HarperCollins in April.

Do you think that people are more burned out now than they have been in the past or are we just talking about it more?

There is definitely more scholarly research coming out around burnout. We’re measuring it more, and we’re definitely hearing about it more because it’s being measured more. The thing I worry about a little bit is a lot of people throw the word “burnout” around, and I feel like it’s getting overused and misused—to the point where I started asking myself, “If everybody’s burned out, is anybody really burned out?”. . . The way to think about it is that the difference between stress and burnout is like the difference between a really bad headache and a migraine. Burnout is the migraine that won’t go away. It’s excruciating. No matter what you do, you just can’t get rid of it and it just feels hopeless. Whereas a lot of chronic stress for a long period of time might feel like a bad headache, but there are things we can do to regulate that. So, the goal is to help people manage their headache before it turns into a migraine.

Is burnout different for people in different industries? Does it look different in teachers than it does for management consultants or doctors?

That’s a really good question. How people experience or feel burnout—and in terms of the consequences for their health, their work, their relationships, and their overall wellbeing—is pretty similar, regardless of their role or industry. I’ve interviewed a lot of law enforcement leaders, educators, bartenders, baristas, lots of leaders in different types of organizations. People who are burned out often experience three common symptoms. One is they’re just incredibly emotionally exhausted. And educators

“I’ve been so fortunate and blessed and lucky to be able to research something that has been personally helpful for me,” she said, “and that it’s turned into this whole passion where I get to teach people about how to protect ourselves from burnout.”

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Photo credit: Robbie Quinn

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\ Q & A \ are particularly prone to feeling this symptom the most, because they give so much emotional energy to the kids and to parents. They can deplete their emotional reserves much more quickly than, say, a bartender or a barista or a leader in a corporation, who has a different type of stress.

With other types of people who experience burnout, they might feel the second symptom, which is cynicism— just feeling really negative about other people who you work with. Sometimes educators feel that way as well— especially towards problematic parents, or if the culture is not one that that invites a sense of wellbeing that can make educators feel cynical towards the people that they work with as well. And then the third symptom of burnout, which educators don’t feel as much, is a lack of professional efficacy. What I mean by that is, the feeling that they’re not effective in their job. For example, a teacher or a counselor who has been doing their work for many years, they often feel very effective in what they do. And that can actually protect them from burnout.

The way to think about it is that the difference between stress and burnout is like the difference between a really bad headache and a migraine.

If you are already burned out, how can you heal from it?

The last chapter of my book is what I call the “3Rx prescription” for healing from burnout. The first of the three Rs is “recover.” The second is “reconnect.” And the third one is “reimagine.” I get chills when I think about this, but one of my study participants—an ER physician—told me when she was incredibly burned out during COVID, she realized that she could not heal in the same place that was making her sick. Her form of recovery meant that she had to leave the health system that she was working in to recover—get herself out of that environment because it was so unhealthy for her. Then she was able to progress into what I call the “reconnect phase,” which is reconnecting with what’s most important to you—your family or friends or things you love to do outside of work—and also connecting with your identity beyond your work identity. Then, she could eventually move on to that third R, which is reimagining your relationship with work. How do you want work to fit into your life so that you don’t go back to an environment that is likely going to burn you out again?

But aren’t some people just naturally glass-half-empty folks? Is that something they could or should change?

Your book’s thesis is that people who are immune to burnout have high levels of emotional intelligence— what does that actually mean?

In its most basic sense, emotional intelligence has four main competency domains. The first two sets of skills have to do with an awareness of yourself and your ability to manage yourself. That’s what we call self-awareness and self-management. It includes understanding your strengths, your personality, your temperament, what you want and need in a work environment, understanding what you really value, and what type of recognition you need. Then, that self-awareness piece helps us regulate ourselves, regulate our emotions, our thoughts, and our behaviors. And my research shows it also helps us regulate our stress response and our nervous system. The next two sets of skills have to do with your awareness of your social environment and your ability to develop and manage strong relationships in your work and social environment. Those skills include empathy, the ability to manage conflict in a productive way, and the ability to have a positive outlook, even when your environment feels like chaos.

Generally, yes. Optimism is something that can be learned.

Dr. Martin Seligman, who’s at the University of Pennsylvania’s Positive Psychology Center, wrote a book called Learned Optimism, and his research with Dr. Karen Reivich is all about how people who profile naturally as pessimistic or cynical can learn to be more optimistic. So, yes, it can be learned. And should we learn it? Yes, absolutely! Especially if it’s if one of your goals to learn how to manage stress better and protect yourself from burnout. I write a lot about how having a positive outlook protects us. Think of it this way: Let’s say you and I are faced with the same stressor—we have the same boss who throws us a big project when we’re both already up to our eyeballs with other projects, and our boss tells us that it’s due in a week. If I have a more cynical outlook, I’ll look at this like, “I can’t do this. There’s no way.” But if you take a different attitude that, “Yes, this is going to be really hard, but I will also have the opportunity to learn something here. I’m going to grow from this, and I might also get some bonus points from my boss for putting in a little extra effort.” Then, you are taking a more positive approach to dealing with that stressor, and your level of stress is going to be subjectively lower than mine.

What is next for you?

Number one, I’m on a mission to help people protect themselves from burnout. So, I’ll continue this research. But what I’m really passionate about right now is research I’m doing with one of my friends who was in the Penn CLO doctoral program with me, Darin Rowell, GRD’15. He and I have been researching how to create a burnout-immunity culture. It’s about organizational resilience. And we hope to write a book together focused on it. People can, and should, try to work on their individual resilience. But that’s not what's causing burnout.

What’s causing burnout is the work environment—often the high pressure, the culture, and the demands of the job. So, the root cause of the issue needs to be assessed, and there needs to be interventions at the organizational and/or systemic levels.

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Alumni Notes

Find The Penn GSE Magazine Online!

Visit penng.se/GSEmag to find our issue archive.

At Penn, all alumni have an affiliation—a series of letters and numbers following their name to indicate their degree, school, and year of graduation. A master’s degree from Penn GSE is represented as GED and an education doctorate is GRD. A philosophy doctorate from any school at Penn is represented as GR. An undergraduate degree offered by the School of Education until 1961 is represented as ED. The two numbers following the letters represent the year in which that degree was completed. & Denotes alumni authors whose latest book is featured on the alumni bookshelf on p. 29.

1960s & Katie Barney, GED’69, published her sixth cookbook, The

Enchanting World of Food (Conduit Press), which covers the history of the cuisines, dining etiquette, and recipes from more than 200 countries.

& James Fritts, GED’63, wrote the tenth edition of Essentials

of Illinois School Finance (Illinois Association of School Boards).

& Eric White, GED’67, GRD’75, is emeritus executive director

of the division of undergraduate studies and emeritus associate dean of advising at Penn State. He is the first author of the academic advising chapter in the recently published sixth edition of Rentz’s Student Affairs Practice in Higher Education (Charles C. Thomas Publisher). His academic career is highlighted in an article, “A Place for Academic Advising Scholars: Dr. Eric White at the Division of Undergraduate Studies,” in The Mentor: Innovative Scholarship in Academic Advising.

1970s

Eric Scoblionko, C’76, GED’76, taught AP American history at Metairie Park Country Day School for two years before returning to Penn to work in annual giving. He then bought a run-down camp in Maine and spent the next 25 years building Camp Wekeela into a premiere institution. He writes, “Hung up my lanyard and returned to the classroom in Boca Raton, where I substitute teach at three area private schools.”

religious barriers by building up understanding, empathy, and human dignity. phillyup.org

Hermine Stein, C’77, GED’77, has her own medical practice and mentors future primary care physicians as part of her role as core faculty at Einstein Montgomery Family Medicine Residency.

2000s

Shelley Wepner, GED’73, GRD’80, dean emeritus and professor at Manhattanville University, published the paper, “A conceptual framework for understanding presidential longevity,” in the Journal of Research on the College President.

1980s Lois Kohn-Claar, C’88, GED’88, became the board president of The Jewish Education Project, a national nonprofit that focuses on innovative programs and thought leadership to meet the need for relevant and meaningful Jewish education.

Albert Giovenella, GR’87, is retired but a contributing member of the division of geriatric medicine at Penn. He is currently researching “What Knowledge is Most Important in Health Care and Biotechnology” by studying more than 500 biotech and pharmaceutical companies from 2008 to the present day to determine how their knowledge and research techniques drive their success.

Bonnie Botel-Sheppard, CGS’74, GED’76, GRD’81, writes, “I am so fortunate to have a loving family, dear friends, and Penn Literacy Network colleagues who are the centerpiece of my life.” & Kathleen Lydon Varley, GED’77, GR’82, worked as

a psychologist, adjunct faculty at Delaware County Community College, in private practice, and as a storyteller. She is currently teaching autobiographical writing at Main Line School Night. She is following up her mystery novel, Off Center, with a new memoir about her grandfather and his wife, Papa and Eva and Me. Hilary Walmsley, GED’84, created a coaching program to help people make desired changes in their diet and is attending a course on existential wellness coaching.

Lawson Bowling, GED’77, retired from teaching history at Manhattanville College last July after 39 years, though he is still teaching part-time. Both the male and female ScholarAthlete of the Year awards have been named in his honor.

& Joyce Warner, GRD’84, has taught and worked with

Jim Coe, GED’74, retired after a 44-year career as a high school teacher and administrator in both the private and public sectors in San Mateo, CA. Anne Flick, CW’74, GED’76, earned her doctorate in clinical psychology, finished a postdoctoral program in psychoanalysis, and is now in private practice in New York City, seeing children, adolescents, and parents.

Michael Kirsch, C’68, GED’72, GRD’74, is enjoying retirement. He is a docent, leading second-graders through Horace Greeley’s home; active in two historical societies; and supervises the ongoing activities at a local schoolhouse, which has existed since the 1850s. & Robert London, C’69, GED’71, published his fourth book,

Introducing Nonroutine Math Problems to Secondary Learners: 60+ Engaging Examples and Strategies to Improve Higher-order Problem-Solving Skills (Routledge).

Carol Parlett, GED’78, owned and operated Key Lime Cafe in Saint Michaels, MD, for 20 years. Now back in Philly, she serves on the board of Mid-Shore Council on Family Violence and is writing a psychological thriller.

students from kindergarten through PhD in several states and Germany. She writes, “The years flew by as I learned how to actually teach someone to read, developed and implemented programs and courses within states and schools, and marveled at the impact on students and in the field. It has been a blast!” She retired in 2016 and recently co-authored a book, Reading Strategies Across Content Areas, with her daughter.

1990s Carolyn Wilson-Albright, GED’91, successfully defended her dissertation and earned an EdD. Her research explores the need for trauma-informed professional development for educational professionals. She also received her Irish citizenship.

Carladenise Edwards, C’92, GED’93, is now the chief administrative officer in the Office of the Mayor for Miami-Dade County, after 12 years as an executive in nonprofit healthcare. & Sarah Gregorian, GED’98, published her third novel,

Appearances, under her pen name, T. H. Forest.

Larry Kaplan, GED’97, co-founded the nonprofit Philly Unity Project (Philly UP) with a former student with a mission of breaking down racial, cultural, and

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Annette Anderson, GED’97, GR’06, was invited to the inaugural “Elevating the Teaching Profession: A National Convening on the Future of Teaching” at the Hopkins Bloomberg Center in Washington, DC, sponsored by Johns Hopkins School of Education, Dean Christopher Morphew, and former Penn GSE Dean Pam Grossman. & Richard Carreño, GED’04, is releasing his latest

Michael Bentley, GED’72, delivered a series of programs on climate change, biodiversity loss, green burial, and connecting children to nature through Virginia Interfaith Power & Light.

Judy Buxton, GED’71, D’81, is in private practice as a dentist and teaches at Penn Dental Medicine.

Janet Wolfe, C’91, GED’93, has been head of school at The IDEAL School of Manhattan, the only inclusive independent school in New York, for the past eight years and was recently selected as a 2024 Power Women of Manhattan by Schneps Media.

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book, The Inventive Life of George H. McFadden: Archaeologist, Poet, Scholar, Spy (Camino). The biographical mystery that spans the mid-20th century, from the Penn Museum to the Middle East, will be released in early September.

Natasha Charles, CGS’06, GED’09, WEV’09, WEV’10, is the founder of Intuitive Coaching with Natasha Charles. She wrote 29 features and two articles for Forbes.com as a member of the Forbes Coaches Council, and a chapter for the globally released Amazon No. 1 best-selling anthology Sacred Promise, a compilation by Tererai Trent. She recently raised a fund to invest in an AI company, and with a partner is now raising a fund to invest in women- and minority-led startups.

Brian Cohen, C’07, GED’09, moved back to West Philadelphia last summer and is expanding his new business, Award Magic, helping folks learn how to use points to book business class flights for less than an economy ticket. awardmagic.com David Grossman, GR’04, is an adjunct faculty member at Penn GSE in the higher education division and recently stepped down from his role as founding director for Penn Civic House after a quarter century.

Amy Hecht Macchio, GED’03, GRD’12, Florida State University vice president for student affairs, was recently recognized with the Scott Goodnight Award for Outstanding Performance as a Dean by the Student Affairs Administrators in Higher Education (NASPA).

Emily Jakacki, C’06, GED’08, is currently the vice president of operations for Advocate Health in Chicago, leading a team of managers and directors covering 90-plus ambulatory clinics, physician practices, and health care locations across the greater Chicagoland area. & Jim Johnsen, GRD’06, edited the collection Public

University Systems: Leveraging Scale for Higher Education (Johns Hopkins University Press), which will be out in September. He recently published a primer in UC Berkeley’s Center for Studies in Higher Education Research & Occasional Paper Series.

Patrick Joyce, GRD’05, is serving on the board of the Chimbote (Peru) Foundation, a medical mission service of the Catholic Diocese of Pittsburgh that offers pre- and post-natal maternal and childcare, clinical services, and an orphanage for underserved and marginalized individuals.

Aviva Legatt, GED’07, WEV’13, GRD’15, cofounded Cognitive Command to transform higher education preparation and life skills development.

Leveraging her expertise in higher education and her partner’s experience as a high school teacher and executive-functioning coach, they address the growing need for executive-function and socialskills training. cognitivecommand.net Eddie Lopez, GED’09, writes, “I’m a highly caffeinated and happy school counselor!”

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Yvette Mayhan, OT’80, GR’00, has been working with Grady Health in Atlanta, GA, for the past seven years on “Talk With Me Baby @Grady,” an impactful collaboration between the medical and education industries to train perinatal health care professionals to educate and coach families on the importance of language and responsive interactions in early brain development, learning, and literacy.

Mark Reed, GRD’08, became president of Loyola University Chicago in October 2022, after more than seven years as president of Saint Joseph’s University.

Oswald Richards, GR’01, retired in 2023 after 23 years in higher education as professor of business, associate dean of faculty, and director of graduate business programs at Lincoln University of Pennsylvania. He had previously retired as a senior executive in the financial services industry after 22 years of service. & Adam Parrott-Sheffer, GED’06, published System

Wise: Continuous Instructional Improvement at Scale (Harvard Education Press) in April.

Manami Suzuki, GED’01, published her collaborative work about oral and literacy skills for multinational corporation employees with her Hosei University colleagues, Naoki Ando and Hidehiko Nishikawa, in International Business Review. She will make a presentation at the Association of Japanese Business Studies in Seoul, Korea, in July.

Mitchell Tepper, GR’01, directed and produced an award-winning documentary on injured veterans and intimate relationships. Love After War: Saving Love, Saving Lives offers realistic hope for servicemembers and veterans who have returned home with physical and/or psychological health challenges that are creating difficulties in their closest relationships.

Gregory Vincent, GRD’04, was appointed president of Talladega College and started his tenure in July 2022.

2010s Alejandra Abusada, GED’19, moved to Miami to take a new role as director of development at Miami Dade College Foundation after three-and-a-half years in international development, managing projects in Mexico and Colombia. She has continued her work in Peru with Mami Linda, her mental health-oriented nonprofit.

Theo Baldwin, GED’14, earned his MBA from University of Texas at Austin, and a Master of Clinical Service Operations from Harvard Medical School. He is now general manager at Strive Health, a Denverheadquartered, value-based care company focused on serving those with chronic kidney conditions across 34 states. He oversees operations, growth, and care delivery for thousands of patients and a profit and loss statement of over $230 million. “I proudly attribute my memorable time at Penn to lighting the path to my current work in value-based care today.”

Todd Bates, GED’10, was honored with two awards: the M. Brownell Anderson Award for early career medical educators by the Northeast Group on Educational Affairs of the Association of American Medical Colleges and the Martha A. Hooven Award for Excellence by the Columbia University Vagelos College of Physicians and Surgeons.

Menty Bayleyen, GED’12, senior associate director of admissions at Penn Dental Medicine, was chosen for a Fulbright International Education Administrators (IEA) Seminar in Taiwan in March. These seminars are highly selective, fully funded opportunities for US higher education administrators to participate in intensive twoweek seminars abroad to learn about other countries’ higher education systems.

Alexis Rylander Bennett, GED’18, is senior director of academics at Boys’ Latin of Philadelphia. She was honored with the Educator Award from Black Lives Matter of Philadelphia in 2020 and selected as Alpha Kappa Alpha’s North Atlantic Region’s Educator of the Year. She is involved with Delayed Gratification,

which collaborated with educators and community stakeholders to expand access to "Algebra I" in eighth grade for students at Philadelphia’s public charter schools. She was selected to participate in the Deloitte Courageous Principals Institute in Westlake, TX, and was accepted into Penn’s Research Experience for Teachers program. She holds certifications as a National Geographic Certified Educator and a Centers for Disease Control Science Ambassador.

year as an educator, no matter what district I work for or the community I serve, students want adults who will listen to them, support them, hold them accountable, and meet them where they are. When these responsive practices are done right and consistently, no matter where you are, whether the school is deemed a ‘losing school’ or ‘leading school,’ you can transform lives, heal a community, and bolster the next generation of disruptors, leaders, and change agents.”

Sylvie Bogui, GED’22, is pursuing a PhD in innovation in global development at Arizona State University.

Sarah Fears, GED’18, recently started as director of annual giving programs at DePauw University.

Beverly Brooks, GED’16, received the Southern Association for College Admission Counseling (SACAC) Larry West Award for Leadership, which honors longevity of service and dedication to SACAC, outstanding contributions to the admission counseling profession, leadership within that profession, and dedication to students.

LaToya Floyd, GED’17, is executive director of admissions at Fayetteville State University.

Christian Bronk, C’00, GED’10, was appointed as the 11th head of the Hun School of Princeton, NJ, in July 2023. He previously spent 10 years, including six as head of school, at University Liggett School in Grosse Pointe Woods, MI. Tariem Burroughs, GED’15, graduated from Temple University with a PhD in sociology in summer 2023 with a focus in medical sociology and urban health. He then started a public health summer institute for high school students.

Nesime Can, GED’14, is in her fifth year of teaching in the counseling and guidance program at Ankara University. She became an associate professor in 2024 and has been focusing on preventive mental health research. She also works on developing short digital interventions in the mental health field.

Hewen Chen, GED’19, a teaching director, writes, “It’s really a pleasure to apply what I learned and practiced in UPenn GSE into my career.” & Mahesh Daas, GRD’13, president and ACSA

distinguished professor at Boston Architectural College, co-authored I, Nobot (ORO Editions), with Andrew John Wit, harnessing generative AI tools to co-create the graphic novella’s illustrations.

Kimberly Dalius, GED’12, is the CEO and founder of the educational technology company Pauseitive Tech. pauseitive.tech Matthew Davidoff, GED’17, GED’19, is a teacher at Mastery Charter Schools in Philadelphia.

Rui Du, GED’11, recently accepted an offer from University of North Carolina Greensboro as an assistant professor of marketing. She works on how language changes consumer cognition, emotion, and behavior.

Samuel C. Evans, GED’18, is assistant principal at Chester Upland School District. He writes, “In my 15th

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Edward Glassman, GED’16, executive director of the Center for Entrepreneurial Leadership at Springside Chestnut Hill Academy, was named to Philly’s “40 Under 40” list by the Philadelphia Business Journal.

João Gomes, GED’19, served as director of diversity, equity, inclusion, and belonging at the Agnes Irwin School before starting a new position as dean of studies and instruction at Mount Saint Joseph Academy, a Catholic school for girls outside Philadelphia.

Miles Goodloe, GED’12, is a program manager for virtual literacy tutoring programs across the nation. He also teaches African American studies at California State University, Fullerton. He writes, “Penn GSE has set me up for success as a lecturer and a tech professional.”

Khalilah Harris, GRD’18, was appointed by Maryland Governor Wes Moore to serve on the Maryland Police Training and Standards Commission, which sets policy for police standards and reform.

Christine Hernandez, GED’10, was recently appointed as a commissioner to the City of Westminster’s Parks and Recreation Commission.

Kalyn Higgins, GED’14, is a proposal writer at GoGuardian and Pear Deck Learning, which offer software solutions that function as safety, productivity, curriculum, and instruction tools for K–12 schools and higher education institutions.

Peter Horn, GRD’14, is the host of the Point of Learning podcast. A recent episode features rare audio of one of the last public speeches by visionary educator Marcus Foster, GED’49, GRD’72. (More about Foster on p.17.)

Brandy R. Jackson, GED’13, graduated from the Howard University School of Education with a PhD in higher education on May 9, 2024.

Ashley Johnson, GED’17, joined ExpandED Schools, the largest afterschool intermediary organization in New York City, as director of STEM. In this role, she supports the NYC STEM Education Network and STEM Educators Academy, catalyzing new ideas and partnerships to expand and enhance STEM learning in New York.

Michael Kokozos, GR’17, is the associate director of Penn GSE’s Independent School Teaching Residency

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program. He is co-authoring a book, Teaching Storytelling in Classrooms and Communities, and is a proud recipient of a Highlights Foundation scholarship.

Matthew Lambert, GRD’12, was promoted to senior vice president for university advancement at William & Mary and chief executive officer of the W&M Foundation.

Kate Lang, GED’16, is a therapist who celebrated her fifth year in private practice and tenth year as a clinician in March. She is expanding into teaching, supervising, and mentorship for the next generation of clinicians.

Anubha Tyagi, GED’19, joined the Center for Health and Happiness at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, providing oversight for the center’s operations and core programs and leading strategic partnerships with community and organizational partners. She also works with project teams at the Teaching and Learning Lab at the Harvard Graduate School of Education on testing a new online learning platform to promote learner engagement in online courses at the university. She is also co-developing a “Happiness Curriculum” for teachers and students in the Global South and supporting efforts to design an online course.

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& Bolgen Vargas, GRD’10, wrote a book, Let Our Children

on the life and times of Shakespeare, as well as ten of his most famous plays broken down by themes.

His second book, Classic Echoes: 25 Novels that Speak Across the Ages, will follow. He also recently finished writing a picture book that will be published in English and Chinese.

Koeun Lee, GED’12, joined SK bioscience as an HR manager a year ago, liaising between the headquarters in Korea and the US office.

Soar: The Complexity and Possibilities of Education the English Language Student (John Catt Educational), about helping immigrant children succeed in school.

Danielle Levine, GED’16, recently started working as a knowledge-base writer at monday.com after working in online content, marketing, and education technology companies for the past eight years.

Luke Zeller, GED’12, became principal of Joseph H. Brown School in the Holmesburg section of Northeast Philadelphia.

& Roseann Liu, GR’16, published Designed to Fail:

Why Racial Equity in School Funding Is So Hard to Achieve (University of Chicago Press) in April. The book provides an inside look at the Pennsylvania state legislature and campaigns for fair funding to show how those responsible for the distribution of school funding work to maintain the privileges of majoritywhite school districts.

& David E. Low, GR’15, published a scholarly

monograph, Transgressive Humor in Classrooms: Punching Up, Punching Down, and Critical Literacy Practices (Routledge), earlier this year. He was also a 2023 recipient of the Arthur Applebee Award for Excellence in Research on Literacy, conferred by the Literacy Research Association.

Shaun McAlmont, GRD’18, is president and CEO of Ninjio Cybersecurity Awareness Training, providing corporate training services to a global customer base.

He was voted one of the top 25 cybersecurity CEOs in 2023 by The Software Report.

Qianqian Zhang-Wu, GED’14, assistant professor of English and director of multilingual writing at Northeastern University, won the 2024 University Excellence in Teaching Award, a highly prestigious institutional award given annually to professors who demonstrate deep expertise in their fields, offer rigorous course content, and who inspire students through their teaching and mentoring.

2020s Leyla Abbasli, GED’22, is a freelancer, researcher, and adjunct instructor at several universities, and a trainer in the educational assessment field in Baku, Azerbaijan.

She writes, “As I am learning something new every day because I am a teacher, I feel refreshed, alive. I owe the last two years’ progress of my life to my US education to a great extent.”

Tina Arrington, GRD’20, founded Ruby Mae House, a nonprofit that supports displaced LGBTQI adolescents and young adults, in December. rubymaehouse.com

Monique McKenny, GED’16, started a new role as pediatric psychologist and associate director of Pediatric Primary Care Behavioral Health Integration at Wellstar Health System, which increases access to mental health services for Georgia youth by embedding behavioral health clinicians within pediatric primary care offices.

Rutvi Ashar, GED’22, worked at Penn Medicine after graduation and then returned home to India, where she became director of strategic development at Anant National University. She writes, “The best thing about GSE was the interdisciplinary academic offerings. From governance to policy and beyond, the dots only start to connect after you leave.”

Crystal Norton, GED’12, is a doctoral candidate at Gwynedd Mercy University and a member of their National Honor Society for first-generation college students, Alpha Alpha Alpha. She oversees the Anchor Program, which serves special education children in grades K–8 with social-emotional needs and other health impairments at Grover Cleveland Mastery Charter School. Her dissertation focuses on the lived experiences of school leaders serving underserved populations and marginalized communities.

William D. Carter, III, GED’23, GRD’24, defended his dissertation and graduated with his doctorate this spring. He writes, “I am grateful for this intense journey that has challenged and pushed me to this place of equanimity and success. Finishing this program has been far from an easy task, having lost my grandmother along the way; however, it is a demonstration that all things are possible to those who believe!”

Maytee Pakdiponpong, GED’13, became the director of the Language Institute at Bangkok University in August 2023 after leading the English department at Stamford International University in Bangkok for almost a decade. He leads a team of over 150 English instructors at the Language Institute, which offers over 300 sections of ESL, EAP, and ESP courses for undergraduate and graduate students each year.

Carlina Perna, GED’19, graduated with an MFA in creative writing and writing for the performing arts from the University of California, Riverside.

Derrius Quarles, GED’17, built a company, BREAUX Capital, as a component of his master’s thesis, and it continues to grow and improve the financial health of Black men and their families. The marketing and communications firm he founded shortly after his Penn graduation, DQ and Partners, continues to serve clients across the education, public interest, and impact fields. In 2022, he released FOSTERED CHILD, a seven-track EP that fuses hip-hop, R&B, spoken word, house, and Afrobeat.

K. Grady Hackett, GED’22, GED’23, writes, “Since graduating from Penn, I took my skills to North Philadelphia, where I meet with high school students in school and at their home for therapy.”

Joseph F. Harryhill, GED’22, is on the clinical faculty at Penn Medicine and received an academic promotion last July to clinical professor of urology at the Perelman School of Medicine at Penn Presbyterian Medical Center.

Kamaljit Kaur, GED’23, is senior associate director of MBA Career Management at Wharton, serving as a career advisor to students interested in jobs in consulting. She is also a strategic advisor for the Career Fellow Program. & Keith Keating, GRD’22, published his first book, The

Trusted Learning Advisor (Kogan Page), which received the Good Business Book Award. Keating has also joined BDO as their first chief learning and development officer.

Neil Larocque, GED’23, signed two publishing deals for several books to be published in Chinese. The first, due to be published in the next few months focuses

PE N N G S E M AGAZ IN E | SPR I N G/SUMMER 2024

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Fill out our Alumni Notes form at penng.se/alumni to tell us your updates and news.

Kristin Larsen, GRD’22, is a curriculum specialist in the School District of Philadelphia’s Office of Multilingual Curriculum and Programs, providing district-wide leadership for multilingual learners.

She also serves as an elected member of the School District of Haverford Township school board, and as an appointed member of the Delaware County Intermediate Unit board of directors, where she chairs the education committee.

Jiyuan Liu, GED’21, founded Mapleway Education in Canada, a startup dedicated to democratizing research access and enhancing the academic journey of international students, offering programs that guide them in developing and publishing their first research papers.

Bethany Monea, GR’22, assistant professor at the University of the District of Columbia, received an honorable mention for the 2024 CCCC James Berlin Memorial Outstanding Dissertation Awards for “Composing Borderlands: The Lives and Literacies of First-Generation, Latinx Youth Transitioning to College Writing.”

Valerie Quirk, GED’23, serves as the executive director of Post Pigeon EDU, a nonprofit she founded during her GSE Education Entrepreneurship program. The organization connects classrooms to National Park Service rangers across the country for free, through personalized video postcards answering student questions.

Sheila Salaneck, GED’21, joined the family and community engagement team at the School District of Philadelphia Central Office after seven years in the classroom.

Matthias Schmidt, GED’23, GRD’24, transitioned from his role as lead learning architecture and strategy at Swisscom to become the head of education design at the AO Foundation, where he leads a diverse team of 30 individuals in building innovative learning programs and ecosystems for orthopedic surgeons worldwide. “The CLO program at Penn GSE has been instrumental in preparing me for this broader global leadership role.”

Chayan Singh, GED’23, is the founder of Raise the Bar, which partners with schools in India to build teacher capacity. She writes, “We also build easyto-consume, free, online content that teachers can access and adopt in their classrooms to make their teaching more effective. Raise the Bar took shape during my time at Penn GSE and was particularly influenced by a course that I took in educational entrepreneurship and my capstone project.”

Dachao “Tony” Sun, GED’22, is pursuing a master’s in mathematics at Yeshiva University.

Jingyi Zhang, GED’23, received PhD offers for mental health and psychology and intends to study at the University of Auckland School of Medicine.

Submissions have been edited due to space constraints and magazine style guidelines.

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Advice from the Educator's Playbook

6 Tips FOR EXPLAINING WAR TO CHILDREN

I

n an ever-changing world, parents and educators are too often faced with explaining complex and challenging events to children. And perhaps nothing is more difficult to explain than violence, particularly war and armed conflict.

Navigating those conversations is hard—but not impossible, says clinical psychologist Marsha Richardson, senior lecturer and director of Penn GSE’s School and Mental Health Counseling Program.

Illustration: Mira, age 9

An expert in child and adolescent development who has been instrumental in developing and overseeing school-based mental health programs, Richardson explains that adults must help bridge the gap, offering support and understanding as school-age children navigate and process world events in a healthy and constructive way.

“When it comes to issues like [war], sometimes we can find it hard to connect the dots between a child’s behavior and the events unfolding in the world around them,” she said. “This is about being in tune with and understanding, developmentally, the ways in which these stressful situations might manifest for children.”

To help you prepare, Richardson offered the following tips:

1.

Do some self-reflection.

Before trying to talk a child through this, take the time to self-reflect on your emotional state and your political, moral, and religious views. Consider that these will influence how you respond to the situation, conversation, and questions a child might have. Doing this ahead of time helps you avoid figuring it out for yourself in front of them, which is very important to younger children. Parents, in particular, should strive to remember they are the model for their child’s emotional regulation.

2.

Marsha Richardson, clinical psychologist, senior lecturer, and director of Penn GSE’s School and Mental Health Counseling Program, working with children in a group

Keep the child’s age in mind.

When dealing with conversations around such complex situations, it’s easy to forget the age of your audience. As you approach talking about war with a child, consider their age and developmental stage and respond to their questions and comments accordingly. To use an ongoing conflict example, an ageappropriate response for elementary school students about why Russia and Ukraine are fighting could be, “They are fighting to figure out who’s in charge of the country.” The response to that question for an older child could be, “They are fighting to gain power over a country that has a unique position in world politics.”

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Advice from the Educator's Playbook continued

Remember, too, that the child’s age could determine the nature of their concerns. For example, younger children may focus more on safety and security issues, primarily for themselves and their loved ones. At the same time, middle schoolers may be more focused on factual information, and high schoolers will have begun assimilating the values of their caregivers, school, peers, and media.

With a younger child, you may need to reassure them that you and their country are ensuring their safety. With a middle schooler, you can provide accurate information and engage in further research alongside them.

With high schoolers, you can help them think critically about what they know, how they obtained that information, and how they might consider the broader context of their role in current or future influence on these issues.

3.

for some of their schoolmates who may be Russian or Ukrainian. Those students, some of whom may still have close family in Russia or Ukraine, may be experiencing heightened anxiety, isolation, or even bullying.

5.

Caregivers should also pay attention to any regressive behaviors that might manifest, as some children won’t be able to articulate their stress over what’s happening. Things to look for include thumb-sucking, requesting to sleep in your bed, increased tearfulness, a drop in grades, or somatic complaints like headaches, stomachaches, and sleeplessness.

Maintain an open line of communication with your child’s school, teachers, and counselors if you suspect behavioral changes are impacting your child’s learning and interpersonal relationships. Teachers should similarly be on the lookout for behavioral changes and keep parents apprised of any that might come up.

Consider limiting news consumption.

Parents of younger children should limit their child’s Illustration: Ari, age 6 access to news coverage of war. We might not think twice about leaving CNN or another news channel on all day when such significant world events are occurring, but the constant stream of wartime stories, images, and sounds can be very overwhelming for a small child. Traumatic videos and photographs of dead bodies and bombings frequently make it to air in these situations. While older children might be better equipped to deal with the shocking imagery of televised war coverage, you should still sit down with them and help them process what they hear and see.

4.

6.

Don’t be afraid to reach out.

Finally, seek support within your personal and professional spheres to help you manage your distress. If you’re having trouble processing things emotionally, it’s more than likely your children or students will be impacted.

LISTEN UP

(We have a podcast!)

Learn more from Penn GSE experts in our companion podcast to the Educator’s Playbook. Find all the episodes at penng.se/podcast or on your preferred podcasting platform.

Get out in front of misinformation or biases.

For children of all ages, be sure to ask them what they know. Correct any misinformation or negative generalizations they may have— such as “all Russians are bad” in the example cited above—and provide them with the truth and context they need. Convey that those generalizations are particularly hurtful

PE N N G S E M AGAZ IN E | SPR I N G/SUMMER 2024

Look for changes in behavior.

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