Mission
The mission of Penn GSE Perspectives on Urban Education is to provide an interactive forum to investigate critical issues in urban education. The purpose of an electronic journal format is to provide a vehicle for fostering conversations about the complexities of urban education among practitioners, researchers, policymakers and graduate students, groups who often work in isolation from each other. We imagine that the larger community interested in these issues will use the format to provide scholarship, commentary, and critique essential for investigating critical issues in urban education. We hope that the potential for dialogue through an electronic journal will lead to increased cooperation and understanding among all those concerned about urban education.
We encourage graduate students, practitioners, policy makers and researchers to publish studies in progress, as well as findings from completed research. We welcome submissions on a wide variety of topics related to urban schooling, and will also devote specific issues to single themes. In each issue, we plan to include feature-length articles, shorter reports of studies in progress, reviews, commentaries, and opportunities to share comments and questions on the publications. We welcome additional suggestions regarding the use of this electronic format.
Editorial Board
Rashmi Kumar (Co-Editor) is a fourth year doctoral student in the Teaching, Learning and Curriculum program in the Graduate School of Education at the University of Pennsylvania. She is interested in understanding how the dissemination of knowledge about science and technology takes place among teachers and students in urban schools. Another area of her interest lies in exploring parental involvement in the development of curricula and evaluation measures within the public school arena. Rashmi has published in several journals and conducted pilot studies for various research organizations. She can be reached at rashmik@dolphin.upenn.edu.
Sonia Rosen (Co-Editor) is a PhD candidate in the Teaching, Learning and Curriculum program in the University of Pennsylvania Graduate School of Education, where she also earned her M.S.Ed. With a background as a high school teacher and community organizer, her research interests are in youth civic engagement, youth organizing, and social movements. Her doctoral research explores how young people develop social identities as activists through youth organizing practices. She is also a member of the Board of Directors of the Philadelphia-based non-profit organization Playgrounds for Palestine and a singer in the music ensemble Tribe 1. She can be reached at soniar@dolphin.upenn.edu.
Laura Colket is a current doctoral student in Educational Leadership at the University of Pennsylvania Graduate School of Education. She also received her M.S.Ed from the University of Pennsylvania, and her B.S. from the University of Massachusetts. Prior to returning to school for her doctorate, Laura managed the Philadelphia office of a national nonprofit, Jumpstart, at Temple University. Her interests include urban teacher education, multicultural teacher education, and school-community partnerships. Laura can be reached at lcolket2@dolphin.upenn.edu.
Jeremy Cutler is an Ed.D. student in Educational Leadership at the University of Pennsylvania. Prior to joining the Urban Education Journal, Jeremy was a teacher, school counselor, and Dean of Students for over 10 years in Boston, MA and Washington, DC. During the summer, Jeremy also directs an 8-week residential program for boys in Vermont. Jeremy holds a masters in Urban Education from Harvard University. His research interests include the ways in which schools respond to and plan for students' social and emotional needs, as well as the ways in which schools are influenced by social and economic conditions in the urban environment.
Carolyn Chernoff is a joint PhD candidate in Sociology and Education, Culture, and Society at the University of Pennsylvania. An ethnographic and qualitative researcher, Chernoff's research interests center on cities, social change, and the arts as well as broadly-defined issues of difference, inclusion, and democracy. She can be reached at chernoff@dolphin.upenn.edu.
Katy Crawford-Garrett is a second year doctoral student in Reading/Writing/Literacy. Before coming to Penn, she taught for six years at a progressive charter school in Washington, DC and spent summers earning an M.A. in Literature and Writing at the Bread Loaf School of English. Her research interests include teacher narrative, literary theory, practitioner inquiry and critical pedagogy.
Emily Gasoi taught in grades 2-4 for eight years. She is currently a doctoral candidate in Educational Leadership at GSE. Her research interests include professional learning communities, alternative assessment, and the cultivation of internal accountability within schools.
Dorothea Lasky is a fourth year doctoral student in the Teaching, Learning, and Curriculum concentration. Her dissertation research interests deals with uncovering ideal ways that teachers foster creativity in their classrooms. At GSE, she has done research with the SPARK! program, the ITEST Nano program, and the Executive Program in Work-Based Learning Leadership. Before coming to GSE, she did research at Project Zero (an educational research group at Harvard's GSE) and the Harvard Museum of Natural History. She has taught poetry and art to students of many ages in various formal and informal learning environments. Her first book of poems, AWE, was published by Wave Books in 2007 and her second book, Black Life, is due out from Wave Books in 2010.
Katie McGinn is a second-year doctoral student in the Teaching, Learning, and Curriculum program at the Graduate School of Education at the University of Pennsylvania. Prior to coming to Penn, she taught high school English in Philadelphia for six years. Her current research interests include urban education, in particular urban school reform. She can be reached at kmcginn@dolphin.upenn.edu.
David Soo is a second-year PhD student at the University of Pennsylvania's Graduate School of Education studying Higher Education. His research interests include the diversity of university missions and civic engagement. David is originally from Boston and earned his bachelors and masters degrees from Boston College.
Katherine Schultz (Faculty Advisor) is an Associate Professor of Education and director of the new Center for Collaborative Research and Practice in Teacher Education. Her research focuses on the preparation and on-going support of new teachers in urban public schools. In addition her research addresses adolescent literacy practices, pathways into teaching, and international teacher education. Her recent book, Listening: A Framework for Teaching Across Differences suggests that teachers build their pedagogy and practice by listening closely to students. She traveled to Banda Aceh, Indonesia in the summers of 2005 and 2006 to work with mentor teachers as a part of Penn’s response to the tsunami.
Review Board
The review board reads and assesses all submissions and makes recommendations to authors for revisions.
Review Board Members include:
Shannon Andrus
Carolyn Sattin Bajaj
Tamika Barrow
Carolyn Chernoff
Laura Colket
Katy Crawford-Garrett
Heather Curl
Jeremy Cutler
Gabriel Dattatreyan
Charles H. F. Davis III
Chris Pupik Dean
Rachel Garver
Xu Jialu
Cedric Jones
Esther Kim
Dorothea Laskey
Tanya Maloney
Katie McGinn
Stacie Molnar-Main
Katrina Morrison
Tim Prol
Jamey Rorison
Arjun Shankar
David Soo
Celine Thompson
Rachel Throop
Joyce Wang
Aaron Weiss