During the past year I’ve served as the writer and project manager for all of the content of the Temple University College of Education’s alumni publications, which are available both in print and online. Beginning with early last fall, the publications have included:
The 24-page Educator magazine, which included both the introductory message from Dean Gregory M. Anderson, the college’s new dean, and a feature on alum Kent Paredes Scribner, MEd ’92, PhD. He is the superintendent of the Phoenix Union High School District, the largest such district in Arizona—and a district whose students are 94 percent minorities, with more than 80 percent living at or below the poverty line. The story highlighted how this national figure regarding Hispanic education is successfully tackling the “deficit mindset” that used to plague his district. The story developed, as many of them have, out of a brief alumni note about Scribner’s appointment to the President Obama’s Advisory Commission on Educational Excellence for Hispanics.
To complete the story, I met with Scribner in Washington, D.C., during one of his commission meetings. I also spent hours on the phone interviewing him and others familiar with his work in Phoenix—administrators, teachers, students and educational experts. I also spoke with both of his parents: Jay Scribner, the former dean of Temple’s College of Education and his Mexican-born mother, Alicia Paredes Scribner, BS ’77, MEd ’82 & ’87, PhD ’89, who earned four Temple education degrees.
Click here to see a full PDF of the Educator magazine.
During the past year I also wrote and project managed the publication of two issues of the EdBulletin, which are eight-page supplements to the Educator. The Fall 2013 edition included stories about: several new leadership positions created by the new dean; a 2013 graduate who was spending the 2013-14 academic year teaching English in Spain as a prestigious Fulbright grantee; and an alumna-funded exchange program that annually brings together education students from Temple’s urban campus and rural Iowa’s Simpson College.
Click here to see a full PDF of the Fall 2013 edition of the EdBulletin.
The Spring 2014 EdBulletin highlighted four alums who are award-winning teachers, including a third-grade teacher at a charter school in Philadelphia’s Chinatown; a third-grade teacher in the Hatboro-Horsham School District who was a finalist for the state teacher of the year award; and two participants in the college’s Career & Technical Education Program—one a plumbing instructor, the other a baking and pastry chef instructor—who won national awards for technical education. The issue also profiled the college’s two new department chairs and a graduate who now is an associate professor of education at the University of Delaware whose research focuses on the education experiences of Puerto Rican students.
Click here to see a full PDF of the Spring 2014 edition of the EdBulletin.