English Professor Directs NYU Center to Make Education More Equitable

Teaching and Equity

David E. Kirkland, an associate professor of English and urban education at New York University, used to teach at high schools in Michigan, where he was bothered by what he saw.

“I noticed that black men experienced education in different ways from other students,” he says. “From the very beginning, school wasn’t a hospitable place.”

That observation drove him to enroll in graduate school to study the literacy of urban youth and eventually to join NYU’s Metropolitan Center for Research on Equity and the Transformation of Schools. He became director this July, after serving as deputy director for a year.

The center, which opened in 1976, works with school districts throughout the country, sharing research on equity in classrooms. Mr. Kirkland plans to expand upon this work by developing a continuing-education program for teachers. He expects to start a pilot version next academic year to bring elements of the center’s research directly to instructors.

Teachers talk about students as “disengaged,” he says, but that’s only part of the story. “If we follow them out of the classroom, we see them reading and writing — texting, reading magazines, looking up statistics on their favorite NBA players. They’re always engaged. The thing is, we’ve created classrooms that are disengaging.”

Reducing dropout, suspension, and expulsion rates among students from minority communities, Mr. Kirkland says, will require changing more than what goes on in classrooms. Current policies “are responding to symptoms and ignoring deeper systemic problems,” such as child poverty, he says.

He’s waiting to hear what education reforms the presidential candidates will propose, as well as whether efforts to reauthorize the No Child Left Behind law will take into account research on its effects on equity in the classroom.

Mr. Kirkland, who as a child attended Detroit schools, wants to hear more success stories all around.

“We can do education well,” he says, “but we certainly don’t do education well for all students.” — Jenny Rogers

New Leader for AAU

Mary Sue Coleman, a former president of the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor and the University of Iowa, will become president of the Association of American Universities in June.

She will succeed Hunter R. Rawlings III, who has led the association since 2011. This is the second time that Ms. Coleman will assume a top post held by Mr. Rawlings, who also preceded her as Iowa’s chief.

Amy Gutmann, president of the University of Pennsylvania and the association’s board chair, said in a news release that Ms. Coleman, a biochemist, “was universally regarded as one of the very best presidents in the country” during her tenures at Iowa, from 1995 to 2002, and at Michigan, from 2002 to 2014.

The association represents the interests of 62 top public and private research universities in the United States and Canada. — Andy Thomason

Guide for New Faculty

For new hires at the University of Texas, reading just some of The Little Orange Book: Short Lessons in Excellent Teaching may yield far more instruction in how to teach than they have yet encountered. The book is being given to all incoming faculty members on the system’s academic campuses, which enroll about 200,000 students.

“Depending on which discipline you come from, you may or may not have had a lot of teaching experience,” says Beth L. Brunk-Chavez, who helped to compile the 147-page digest of advice from “expert teachers” in the Texas system.

The authors of the guide are 16 of the now-21 members of the system’s Academy of Distinguished Teachers. Ms. Brunk-Chavez, interim dean of Extended University on the El Paso campus, is publications chair of the academy.

“Teach Doubt” and “Containing the Classroom Hijacker” are among the chapter titles. The Little Orange Book describes techniques for learning students’ names, like having them write distinctive notes about themselves on index cards. A chapter on patience cautions against the vanity of thinking that what is easy for a professor should be easy for a student.

In 2009 the Texas system began giving out its Regents’ Outstanding Teaching Awards. In each of the past three academic years, awardees have been able to apply to join the Academy of Distinguished Teachers to serve as advocates of improving learning, says Ms. Brunk-Chavez.

The Little Orange Book came about when members decided that they wanted to have something they could “give back to the system, and specifically for new faculty,” she says.

Their model was The Little Red Book. Not Mao’s, but rather the classic Harvey Penick’s Little Red Book: Lessons and Teachings From a Lifetime in Golf.

The choice of orange for the cover of Texas’ little book was obvious: Each of the system’s universities has a shade of orange in its emblem, and similarly each of the entries in The Little Orange Book, says Ms. Brunk-Chavez, is “of a certain tone.” — Peter Monaghan

Shift to a For-Profit

Two people instrumental in turning Southern New Hampshire University into a powerhouse in online education are taking their talents to a company in Indiana.

Steve Hodownes, who was chief executive of the university’s College of Online and Continuing Education, and Johnson Au-Yeung, who was chief information officer, are joining Orbis Education. The company helps colleges build online degree programs in health care. Mr. Hodownes will become Orbis’s chief executive this month, and Mr. Au-Yeung will be chief information officer.

Mr. Hodownes joined Southern New Hampshire six years ago, after serving as president of Embanet, a provider of online learning services that Pearson bought in 2012. He has helped the university grow from what he describes as a “tiny little school” into one of the largest nonprofit providers of online degrees, with more than 70,000 full- and part-time students enrolled annually.

Paul J. LeBlanc, Southern New Hampshire’s president, says the move was a “long-planned-for transition.” Mr. Hodownes approached him about seeking a new post two years ago but was persuaded to stay on for a while because the university needed more time to build its online team. Amelia Manning, who became executive vice president of the university’s online college this summer, will succeed him.

Mr. Hodownes says the team at Southern New Hampshire “absolutely wasn’t an organization of one, so I don’t believe that our leaving will impact anything.”

“I’m more of a builder, and though SNHU is still growing, I feel like I’d grown it as much as I possibly could and contributed all I had to offer.” — Angela Chen

Apace With Change

Shortly after he began as architecture dean at Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art, Nader Tehrani says, he realized that to lead well he had to become a student again. “Part of the education process is not merely to give solutions,” he says, “but to pose intelligent questions.”

Openness to change has, in fact, shaped much of his career, as well as his teaching philosophy.

Architectural-design practices emerging today “will be obsolete within five years,” he says. “It isn’t sufficient to prepare students for practice. The question is, How do you prepare them to strategize and innovate under the dynamic and uncertain conditions of practice?”

Mr. Tehrani joined Cooper’s Irwin S. Chanin School of Architecture from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he was head of the architecture department from 2010 to 2014. He was drawn to Cooper Union, despite the financial strain it is under, he says, in part because of its small size and its openness to interdisciplinary education.

He plans to develop courses and collaborations with Cooper Union’s School of Art, Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, and Albert Nerken School of Engineering.

“There is a close connection between architecture and the arts physically,” he says, “but not enough of a connection between architecture and engineering. And architecture has a great deal to gain from its cohesion with engineering.”

Mr. Tehrani, who is also principal of the architecture-and-urban-design firm Nadaaa, will teach as well as lead. His vision, he says, is to turn out graduates who are innovative, creative, versatile, and multidisciplinary.

Among his designs are three buildings for architectural schools, at the Georgia Institute of Technology; the University of Melbourne, in Australia; and the University of Toronto. The latter project is nearing completion.

The buildings were created to be sustainable, but also serve another purpose, Mr. Tehrani says. “We were very conscious that a School of Architecture has to teach a lesson, because it will function as a pedagogical tool just by virtue of its audience.” — Mary Bowerman

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