Supporting students is the number one goal of TC's Campaign, and we are counting on each and every one of you to contribute right now. You can:
The need has never been more urgent, nor the potential reward so great. So please consider a gift of scholarship — today.
Progress occurs when institutions bring great minds together. Decade after decade, Teachers College has changed the world by attracting exceptionally talented students who have built upon the innovative work and ideas of our faculty.
Our best young minds reflect an intellectual lineage that extends back over generations — or, as we like to put it, the legacy of our luminaries is in the promise of our rising stars. As our historic Campaign, Where the Future Comes First, approaches its $300 million target, we want to thank you — our extended TC community — for your incredible support. We also want to affirm that our number one priority is to ensure the success of our current and future students and free them as much as possible from the burden of debt. All of our scholarships at Teachers College provide vitally important support — but our endowed and named scholarships, often created in tribute to our very greatest thinkers, attract and support students committed to extending our most important work.
Take doctoral student Deidre Flowers, recipient of our Lawrence A. Cremin History of Education Scholarship. Deidre came here to shed new light on historically black colleges and universities (HBCUs), which have been under-researched and undervalued. At TC, Cremin, a Pulitzer Prize-winning historian, argued that all societal institutions can improve people’s minds and create equal opportunities for learning. And at TC, internationally known black scholars such as Edmund Gordon and the late George Bond have left a lasting imprint.
Deidre, who graduated from Virginia’s historically black Hampton University, is interested in the role women have played at HBCUs — and, in particular, their importance in the Civil Rights movement. She is writing her dissertation on Bennett College for Women in Greensboro, North Carolina, where students fought segregation in movie theaters during the 1930s and helped to lead the famed lunch-counter sit-ins in 1960. Deidre hopes her research will help to set a larger historical context for the rich tradition of black student protest, with women center stage. Meanwhile, she is hopeful that, thanks to the Cremin scholarship, she will be able to complete her doctorate by 2017.
“HBCUs have played such an important role in African-American identity,” she says. “I’m honored to hold a scholarship named for someone who believed so strongly in the power of education.”
Though second-year master’s student Michael Palmieri does not hold TC’s Professor Jack & Edee Mezirow Endowed Scholarship, he did choose TC for its top-ranked program in Adult Learning & Leadership, created by Jack Mezirow, the father of transformative learning theory.
An entertainment industry veteran who has written and produced for film and television and served as a coach and consultant, Michael wanted to expand his knowledge in emotional intelligence, executive coaching and the latest theories of how adults learn. As the College’s first LGBTQ Scholar, funded through a partnership with the Tyler Clementi Foundation, he has developed an hour-long training module for adults to neutralize bullying behavior in the workplace. The module, which raises money for the Clementi Foundation, has been distributed to companies nationwide. “No one is born a bully — bullying is a learned behavior,” Michael says. “By creating empathy for everyone involved — the so-called ‘bullied,’ the ‘bullier’ and the ‘witness’ — we’ve created an entry point for all three.
“Jack Mezirow believed that grownups grow by questioning their most deeply held assumptions,” he adds. “Thanks to Teachers College’s LGBTQ scholarship, I’ve been able to apply that idea to my own career.”
Katie Leonard and Carrie Russo speak passionately about getting their hands dirty growing food when they were kids. Carrie learned about the superiority of organically-grown tomatoes in her grandmother’s garden in Ohio. Katie discovered composting and built raised garden beds as a volunteer on a small urban farm in Brooklyn. Both were 2014-15 Nutrition Ecology Scholarship students at Teachers College, where Professor Emerita Joan Gussow — whom their scholarship honors — has long championed the idea that healthy eating starts with hands-on experience growing and preparing healthy food.
Acknowledging that enlightening the next generation will require more than cultivating home-grown vegetables, Katie and Carrie echo ideas that Gussow advanced in her 1978 book, The Feeding Web: Issues in Nutritional Ecology. “Everything is connected to food,” says Carrie, who is earning an interdisciplinary Ed.D. in Nutrition and Family/Community Education. “It’s important to develop a nutritional-ecology mindset that imagines new possibilities.”
Katie and Carrie are promoting just that kind of thinking through their work at TC’s Laurie M. Tisch Center for Food, Education & Policy, which views schools as critical levers for learning and social change.
“We’re counting on kids to make the right decisions to slow or reverse what we’re doing to our food system, our environment and our own bodies,” says Katie, who is pursuing an M.S. in Nutrition Education. “If kids grow up aware of the connections, they’re likelier to make choices that help.”
Deidre, Michael, Katie and Carrie are doing truly amazing things that are benefiting people in New York City and beyond. What is most amazing of all, though, is that — year after year, decade after decade — TC is filled with equally talented students in every field who aren’t just planning to change the world but already are hard at work doing precisely that.
So as you think about supporting Where the Future Comes First, I sincerely hope you will consider supporting our endowed and named “tribute” scholarships. By investing in our remarkable students who are working to create a brighter future, you, too, can help to change the world. That’s a legacy that will pay tribute to us all.
Published Thursday, Dec 31, 2015
