Category: News

According to the 2019 National Center for Education Statistics report, “only 35% of students nationally develop proficient reading skills by fourth grade,” Hank Fien, the director of the National Center on Improving Literacy at Wheelock College of Education and Human Development, said at a panel on Feb. 23.

The panelists included Lillian Duran, associate professor and associate dean for academic affairs in the College of Education and Special Education Program at the University of Oregon, Kymyona Burk, a senior policy fellow at ExcelinEd and Lakeisha Johnson, assistant professor in the School of Communication and Information at Florida State University.

Malik Childs, 19, worked throughout high school to save as much money as he could for college.

Because he graduated in the top 10% of Mesquite High School’s graduating class in 2020, Childs was guaranteed automatic admission to nearly all state universities. But he still experienced a hesitation that many encounter when transitioning into college.

Too often, conversations about attracting diverse students don’t focus on what the universities lack, said Jerry Rosiek, an associate professor at the University of Oregon who researches patterns of racial and class inequality in schools. Higher education leaders need to reflect on how they can improve their own campuses, he stressed.

UO professor Michelle Jacob believes one of the keys to working toward better equity and justice is to turn to Indigenous values and cultural teachings to rethink the way organizations, institutions and individuals operate.

Settler colonialism left a damaging legacy that positioned Indigenous communities and the environment as “less than” and disposable, she said, and adopting Indigenous values could help address that harm. To help guide the effort, Jacob teamed up with researchers from other institutions to develop a tool that uses Indigenous values to offer different ways of thinking and being.

“The idea is to interrogate our core values and ask what it would look like to center Indigenous values in the way we do things,” said Jacob, a professor of education studies in the College of Education.

​

In fall 2021, a coalition of the nation’s leading experts in pediatric health—including the American Academy of Pediatrics, American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry, and Children’s Hospital Association—issued a joint declaration of national emergency in child and adolescent mental health.

Dr. Beth Stormshak is the Director of the Prevention Science Institute at the University of Oregon and the Philip H. Knight Chair and Department Head of the Counseling Psychology and Human Services department in the College of Education. Her research focuses on understanding risk factors in early and middle childhood associated with the development of problem behavior in late adolescence, including substance use and delinquency.

Teaching about climate change in K-12 classrooms takes a careful balance between discussions on potentially dire consequences and inspiring hope for the future, a group of future educators learned at a recent UO College of Education workshop.

The class, Teaching for Climate Activism, an elective offered in the Education Foundations program, included a mix of undergraduate and graduate students pursuing careers as educators. Sarah Stapleton, an assistant professor in the Department of Education Studies at the UO, taught the class and coached students through workshop development.

Maggie Osa, Prevention Science Doctoral Candidate, has been awarded the highly competitive Drs. Rosalee G. and Raymond A. Weiss Research Innovation Grant from the American Psychological Foundation. These funds will be used to investigate culturally-sensitive psychological and social factors, beyond appearance and weight concerns, that may be relevant to disordered eating behaviors among African American women. This grant opportunity supports research, education, and intervention projects that use psychology to solve social problems. Given that many deleterious health conditions that disproportionately impact African American women have been linked to disordered eating, the ultimate goal of this project is to help generate ethical and culturally responsive health promotion intervention efforts.

A nationally representative report on the experiences of Black educators released Thursday by the National Center for Education Statistics, the research arm of the U.S. Department of Education, shows a higher percentage of Black teachers had fewer years in the classroom than teachers overall. At the same time, Black teachers had a higher rate of attaining a post-master’s degree (13%) compared to all teachers (9%).

Teacher burnout during the pandemic has been well-noted, as has the benefit of both long-time teachers and Black educators on student outcomes.

“Years of teaching experience, advanced training, and sharing a cultural identity with students have all been demonstrated to improve student learning outcomes,” said Jerry Rosiek, an education professor at the University of Oregon, in an email. “We should not have to choose between them.”

Seven student deaths in the last eight months have left the Worcester Polytechnic Institute community grief-stricken. Compounding that tragedy is the fact that at least three of those lives were lost to suicide; two deaths are under investigation, according to the university.

WPI is hardly the only U.S. campus that has experienced an increase in student mental health issues as a result of the pandemic.

John Seeley, an education professor at the University of Oregon whose research includes school-based mental health interventions, said the issues that arose during the pandemic are unsurprising given the sudden changes, including social distancing and isolation.

Stephanie Wood was awarded the very prestigious Jay I. Kislak Chair for the Study of the History and Cultures of the Early Americas at the Library of Congress. In keeping with this award, Stephanie will receive support to work on her project, “Visual Lexicon of Aztec Hieroglyphs” while in residence at the Library of Congress during the 2022-2023 academic year.