Jane Dickinson, faculty member and Director of Teachers College’s Master of Science Program in Diabetes Education and Management, has been elected to the Board of the American Association of Diabetes Educators (AADE). The Association is an interdisciplinary professional membership organization dedicated to improving prediabetes, diabetes and cardio-metabolic care through innovative education, management, and support.
Dickinson, whom AADE named its Diabetes Educator of the Year for 2019, launched TC’s program, which was created by Kathleen O’Connell, the College’s Isabel Maitland Stewart Professor of Nursing Education, in 2011. Her research and publications focus on the language of diabetes and the impact health care messages have on people living with the disease. She earned her Ph.D. in Nursing at the University of Connecticut and her Master of Science in Nursing from Yale University.
Dickinson and her colleagues currently are working toward “person-centered, strengths-based, and empowering language” in collaboration with AADE, the American Diabetes Association (ADA), and other organizations – part of a broader paradigm of empowering and motivating people with diabetes to function as “the central members of their care teams, experts on their experiences, and integral to the management of their disease.”
Teachers College’s program in Diabetes Education and Management, housed within the College’s Department of Health & Behavioral Studies, is the nation’s first academic degree program for diabetes professionals. (The prevailing approach has been an apprenticeship model which, in essence, requires someone interested in the field to work as a diabetes educator in order to become one.) Offered completely online to accommodate working professionals, TC’s program has drawn people from the fields of nursing, nutrition, medicine, optometry, physical therapy, clinical psychology, occupational therapy, podiatry, health education, exercise physiology and dentistry. Students have represented 16 states, as well as Canada and Hong Kong. The program offers both a master of science degree and a post-master’s certificate in advanced diabetes topics.