Barnard Education Program Celebrates 50 Years
By Merri Rosenberg

When Barnard College—under the leadership of then-president Millicent McIntosh— launched its education program in 1952 in response to what was that era’s acute teacher shortage, a dozen seniors were certified.

Today, there are some 1500 graduates—including students from Columbia College, the School of General Studies and the Engineering School, as well as Barnard College—who have remained connected with the teaching profession, with many of them continuing to share their skills and talents with students in New York City’s most challenging schools and districts.

On April 19 and 20, many of these alumnae returned to the Morningside Heights campus to celebrate Barnard Education Program’s 50th anniversary, through a mix of social events, panel discussions and other festivities, with a stellar group of distinguished educators.

Jacqueline Jordan Irvine, the Charles Howard Candler Professor of Urban Education at Emory University in Atlanta, delivered the college’s Gildersleeve Lecture. An expert in studying why African-American students fail in school, Prof. Irvine shared her beliefs that teachers need to apply what she termed the three Cs–Care, Concern and Connection–as much as the three Rs in their classrooms to end the cycle of academic failure.

Prof. Irvine contended that successful teachers need to be involved with their students as spiritual mentors, to provide compassionate discipline and to be willing to maintain high expectations for all students, no matter what the circumstances or apparent obstacles.

“We must become the dream-keepers for the children,” she urged her attentive audience.

Similar themes were echoed in panel discussions on “Teaching in a Diverse and Changing World” and “The Politics of Public School Education.”

Barnard President Judith Shapiro said, “There is an intellectuality in a diverse classroom. Diversity complements the things we learn, as well as making us truly sophisticated human beings.”

The panel members for diversity – all graduates of the Barnard Education Program, including Augusta Souza Kappner, president of the Bank Street College of Education; Ogechi Iwuoha, a teacher at the Mott Hall School; Richard Levine, assistant principal of the Monroe Academy, and Maria Rosado, director of field experiences for CCNY’s School of Education – discussed how they managed to redefine diversity in their schools and classrooms, and maintain awareness of their students’ backgrounds as they worked through curriculum.

In the discussion of the influence and impact of politics in public education, whose panel members included Merryl H. Tisch, a New York State Regent; Alisa Berger, principal of Mott Hall School II; Laura Marquez Rodriguez, deputy superintendent of Bronx High Schools, and Ron Scapp, director of the graduate program in Urban and Multi-Cultural Education at the College of Mt. St. Vincent, topics ranged from funding, mayoral attempts to control the public schools, the potential benefit of the Soros/Gates/Carnegie $6.5 million grant to develop 19 small high schools in the Bronx, and how standards can be used to help those students at the lowest end of the skills spectrum.

Prof. Maxine Greene, the William F. Russell Professor in the Foundations of Education, Emerita, at Teachers College, said “I am obsessive about the arts and social justice. It’s important to teach children to be open-minded, be critical, to live with contradictions, and to live in the gray area. As Dewey said, ‘a democracy is a community in the making through participation, through dialogue; it is always in the making.’ Possibility and imagination are constructs that I think about often, and that Dewey often wrote about. I like to talk about the possibility that isn’t realized yet.”#

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