Introducing the "Educating Harlem" Lecture Series
In collaboration with the Program in History and Education at Teachers College as well as the Center on History and Education, IUME is excited to announce its participation in the new "Educating Harlem" lecture series, which is part of a larger initiative to better explore the forces that shaped education in Harlem.
On March 27th, the first "Educating Harlem" lecture took place at Teachers College in front of a packed room in Russell Hall, where Dr. Martha Biondi -- Professor of Education at Northwestern University -- spoke about her research on youth revolutions at City College in the 1960s. Our next speaker will be Dr. Khalil Muhammad, who is currently the Director of the Schomburg Center for Research and Black Culture. For more information about the Education Harlem initiative,
click here.
IUME Partners with the NCAA for the Final Four NCAA Youth Day
The NCAA Championships Community Programs and Youth Clinics, in partnership with YES Inc., and the Institute for Urban and Minority Education (IUME) at Teachers College, Columbia University will present "A Healthy Mind, Body, and Community" Youth Day Program to approximately 400 middle-school students during the 2013 Men's Final Four
® Basketball Youth Day program on Friday, April 5, 2013 in Atlanta.
The program will take place at the Georgia World Congress Center, and will provide students from the Fulton County School System with an opportunity to gain a stronger understanding of the benefits of community service and maintaining a healthy mind and body. To read the full Press Release,
please click here.
Recapping "Beyond Bullying" Summit with IUME Director Morrell
On January 14th, 2013, at Teachers College, Columbia University, experts from all over the country gathered to discuss the issue of bullying in K-12 schools. In a one day national summit sponsored by IUME and education publisher Zaner-Bloser, much critical dialogue occurred in an effort to promote this important issue to the forefront of education. The event was a resounding success! In addition, IUME Director Dr. Ernest Morrell and Dr. Jodene Morrell, Director of IUME's Literacy Teachers Initiative (LTI), along with Teacher Fellows Rachael Cooper and Danielle Del Gatto, each presented their work and ideas for advancing students' literacy skills and creating positive school environments. (This is available for viewing on our YouTube channel.)
Click
here to read about this ground-breaking event via BeyondBullying.com and click
here to read the official recap via the TC Media Press Release.
Learn More About IUME's Literacy Teachers Initiative
Last year, IUME was excited to announce the launch of the Literacy Teachers Initiative (LTI), which partners with dynamic teachers from the community in an effort to collaboratively work toward finding increased pedagogical methods for students. LTI is led by Dr. Jodene Morrell of Teachers College and in partnership with Community School District 5 of the New York City Department of Education. The nine inaugural Teacher Fellows conducted their research and will present their findings this fall, and with the addition of three new Teachers Fellows, the program has successfully expanded in its second year.
Check out our
LTI page for more information and check out the biographies of the Teacher Fellows
here! (In addition,
click here for details of the fall presentations by the teachers.)
Learn More about the Youth Historians in Harlem Program!
The Youth Historians in Harlem (YHH) project, sponsored by IUME, is a new critical approach to teaching history in urban schools in Harlem, focusing on empowering minority youth through their own cultural experiences, involving students in the practice of "doing" history through guided projects, programs, and participatory action research. YHH seeks to increase students' interest in history through innovative and engaging pedagogical approaches that help them become historians, researching the rich historical past of ‘their’ Harlem community. While YHIH seeks to advance the historical knowledge of education in Harlem, above all, our project seeks to make history relevant to urban students and help increase academic achievement. To learn more about this exciting project, visit the official website here.
Recapping the IUME Colloquia on "The Future of U.S. Latino/a Education"
The first IUME Colloquium of 2013 took place on February 8th, at the Gordon Campus in Harlem (at 12pm), here Doctoral student Catí de los Ríos and M.A. Candidate Cyndi Bendezu discussed their research. Their colloquium was collectively titled "The Future of U.S. Latino/a Secondary and Postsecondary Education: Transversing and Achieving in the K-12 Multi-Dimensional Borderlands and Undocumented Students Persisting in Higher Education."
Specifically, Cati presented her most recent paper, "A Curriculum of the Borderlands: High School Chicana/o-Latina/o Studies as Sitios y Lenguas," while Cyndi presented her most recent work entitled "Undocumented Students Post-DACA: Supporting Undocumented Latina/o Students in Higher Education."
Click here for the original full details and click here for the video of the Colloquium on our YouTube channel.
IUME Partnering with the "I Have a Dream Foundation"
IUME is excited to share that we have partnered with the “I Have a Dream” Foundation - DeHostos Chapter in an effort to promote literacy, cultivate voice and increase agency among their urban and minority high school students. The "I Have a Dream Foundation" works to ensure that all children have the opportunity to pursue higher education--a goal that resemples our IUME mission of equity in education. Our partnership commenced earlier this year as we work with IHADF to strengthen the future of youth.
For more information about our partnership and to get involved, click here.
Now Accepting Proposals for the 4th Annual DiRP Conference!
IUME, in sponsorship with Teachers College's Black Student Network (BSN) is now seeking proposals for the 4th Annual Diversity in Research & Practice Conference (DiRP). DiRP seeks to influence the progression of diversity in education research and practice by assembling students, scholars, and community leaders concerned with critical issues in education. The 2013 conference theme “Changing the Game: Expanding Discourses in Research” is representative of the changing landscape in education research and practice.
Click
here to submit a proposal and contact the Black Student Network (BSN)
here for more information.
Getting Real III Public Videoconference Series Recap
This past fall over the span of 16 weeks, IUME partnered with the University of Wisconsin-Madison and New York University Hip-Hop Education Center to launch an innovative online seminar series called Getting Real III. Seminal scholars and leaders in the growing field of Hip-Hop studies focused their attention on how Hip-Hop culture, culturally relevant pedagogy and youth participatory action research can successfully be used to close the education gap in America's public schools.
This online public videoconference series was highly successful. The final four lectures were at Teachers College, and can be viewed in full
HERE -- so check them out! The TC speakers featured Professor Chris Emdin, Professor Ernest Morrell, Jen Johnson, and Sam Seidel with Dave "TC" Ellis. (Original lineup
here.)
Recapping the Final IUME Colloquia of 2012 on "Ill Literacies"
IUME's last Colloquia at the Gordon Campus was spearheaded by two dynamic scholars--Crystal Belle and Jamila Lyiscott--who are both Research Fellows at IUME and Ph.D. students in English Education. Both Crystal and Jamila, versed in spoken word and literacy experts in the making, discussed critical issues in literacy as it applies to democracy and freedom inside schools. We had a full house at the Gordon Campus, and it was a wonderful way to reflect on 2012 with critical discussion and passionate performances from both Crystal and Jamila.
The Colloquium is viewable in full on our Y
ouTube channel and also don't forget to view our photo gallery, too! (For original information and details,
click here.)
Recapping IUME 2011-2012 -- A Heartfelt Thank You!
Thank you everyone who made the 2012-2013 a wonderful year for IUME! We look forward to working with community and continuing our quest to pursuing community-oriented and student-centered educational research but involving the people in the middle of this work--the community and the students.
We have a lot of exciting and stimulating lectures, seminars, and events in the upcoming year, but, in the meantime, make sure to read our recap of the past year
HERE. In addition, click
HERE for a PDF document of all our major events this past year.
Subscribe to our IUME YouTube Channel!
Have you visited the official IUME YouTube page recently? Want to learn more about IUME? Make sure to stop by our YouTube page
here and watch a few of our videos and subscribe!. Not only do we keep a collection of IUME events and Colloquia, but our video team prepares short clips on critical research. The most recent Beyond Bullying presentation is now available, as is our December Colloquium and other great clips that should be shared!
In our increasingly digital and mutlimodal era, we believe strongly in collaborative educational content, so make sure to check back often and subscribe to your channel.
Announcements > Dr. Ernest Morrell Appointed New IUME Director
Dr. Ernest Morrell Appointed New IUME Director
A New Leader at IUME
Ernest Morrell will lead TC's signature urban institute into a new era
Teachers College has appointed Ernest Morrell as the new director of its Institute for Urban and Minority Education (IUME). Morrell previously was on the faculty in the Urban Schooling Division of the Graduate School of Education and Information Studies at the University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA). He has assumed a tenured full professorship at TC and the directorship of IUME offices, succeeding the Institute's founding director, Edmund W. Gordon.
"His appointment is an important event for TC, and we are fortunate to be bringing such a talented leader to our academic community," said Provost and Dean Thomas James.
Morrell has made his mark in higher and secondary education in Los Angeles and beyond. At UCLA, he has done research and teaching in the fields of literacy, critical pedagogy, cultural studies, urban education and ethnic studies. As Associate Director of UCLA's Institute for Democracy, Education, and Access (IDEA), he has worked with high school students in Los Angeles on in-school and out-of-school literacy instruction, cultural studies, and civic involvement. Through IDEA he has taken busloads of teenage students to the state capital, Sacramento, to lobby for more state support of education.
Morrell's interest in urban minority education was a natural progression from a childhood spent mostly in Oakland, California, where his mother taught school and his father was a preacher. Morrell earned his bachelor's degree in English at the University of California at Santa Barbara, and returned to Oakland to teach high school English and coach. While earning a doctorate in language, literacy and culture at neighboring Berkeley, he developed a scholarly interest in school reform and community engagement in education. Since then, he has worked to discover what teaching methods work for urban and minority students -- and, he said in a recent interview, "what would this effective pedagogy look like in context? What would make it more possible, what do teachers, schools of education, and policymakers need to do?"
These are questions that IUME has been asking since its creation in 1973. The Institute's founding premise was that, in order to succeed on par with their wealthier peers, urban minority children need excellent teaching and extra, out-of-school supports to compensate for deficiencies in their environment. An important mandate at IUME was to research how race, gender, language, and social and economic class affected learners, and then use the research to powerfully influence curriculum, pedagogy and student assessment. During the 1980s, IUME was the largest research and development unit of Teachers College, taking in substantial federal and private dollars. More important, it was TC's face in Harlem.
Professor Edmund W. Gordon, Founder and Director Emeritus of IUME expressed enthusiasm for the appointment.
"Professor Ernest Morrell is an excellent choice for appointment as the next Director of IUME," Dr. Gordon said. "I have known Dr. Morrell since he served as a post- doctoral fellow in a program that I directed some ten years ago. Ernest showed great promise at that time. He has gone on to distinguish himself as a teacher, as a scholar and as an activist. His research interests complement the IUME mission. Morrell is a smart, gentle and powerful presence. Teachers College is fortunate to be able to attract him from UCLA."
Gordon moved to Yale in 1979, opening the director's seat to a series of scholars including Dorothy Strickland, Joseph Grannis, Francisco Rivera-Batiz and Erwin Flaxman. As the institute grew, it began offering technical assistance to schools and districts that were responding to legal desegregation mandates, or helping them reduce bias in the curriculum, testing, classroom and school organization, and interpersonal relations. As a TC-based institute, IUME also prepared TC students to teach in urban settings.
Gordon returned as director in 2001 having established himself as one of the first academics to focus on the achievement gap between students of color and immigrants, and their higher-achieving European or Asian-American peers, and on the impact of out-of-school, supplementary instruction and learning.
With offices on 125th Street in Harlem, the institute to this day has the same central goal: to understand and uncouple the relationship between a person's assigned social group and education outcomes. IUME continues to conduct scholarly research into identifying the characteristics and life conditions of high academic achievers among ethnic and minority students. It also provides direct school and community service such as after-school programs as well as technical assistance to schools -- support which is still badly needed in Harlem and in poor neighborhoods across the country.
"We are in a moment where we are battling for control of the discourse of education," Morrell said, "where many different people are speaking about education from many standpoints, many using the language of failure of students, families, teachers and schools, and it's dispiriting. Education research has the opportunity to speak back, he said, but it needs to speak more powerfully and spotlight examples of classroom or school-wide practices that are working or show promise.
"We have tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands, of teachers in America who are highly effective every day, and we don't go inside their classrooms and figure out what they're doing. I think we need to do that."
Morrell hopes to put his own stamp on IUME by taking it beyond Harlem, and by assembling a national organization of young people who will "storm Washington" and advocate for themselves and their own education.
Morrell said his philosophy, developed while he worked with Jeannie Oakes, director of education and scholarship at the Ford Foundation and a former director of IDEA, fits well at UCLA, at TC, and at universities and education schools in between.
"How does a university research institution fulfill its mission of conducting research while also engaging the community in the process of advocating for social change?" he asked rhetorically.
As in the past, IUME seems likely to point the way.
To hear Professor Morrell speak out his future plans for IUME,
click here.
To read more about Professor Morrell from the Teachers College Department of Arts & Humanities blog,
click here.
