Community Outreach
Good teaching comes from both the head and the heart. When you’re shaping the world views of hundreds of elementary students – or facing the skepticism of a room full of adolescents – you have to know what you’re talking about. And to keep coming back to that classroom, you have to care, and care deeply.
Our faculty scholars have their roots in public schools and public service. Before entering the professoriate, most of our faculty worked directly with young people as PreK-12 teachers, principals, school psychologists, counselors or early-learning specialists. They have taken the mission of public schools and public service to heart. They know that knowledge is useful only when it is shared, that education is the best cure for many of our social ills.
This same philosophy is at the core the “scholarship of engagement” philosophy of esteemed educator Ernest Boyer, which is why we have adopted “engaged scholarship” as the standard for our own research and practice. In everything we do – from preparing new PreK-12 teachers and higher-education administrators to conducting research in educational psychology – we keep the needs of the community in mind.
Below are just a few of the numerous special efforts the College of Education is pursuing to make the local community, and the world, a better place.
Managing Anger in the Classroom
Anger has always been a problem in schools. Combine the turmoil of adolescence with the close quarters of the classroom and the pressure to perform academically, and you have a pressure cooker where tempers can, and sometimes do, flare out of control.
In the wake of recent episodes of brutal school violence, America has come to realize that classroom anger and bullying have an impact that reaches well beyond the schoolhouse. Special education researchers Stephen Smith and Ann Daunic have been working for several years to develop a curriculum that will help students deal with anger management issues, and to develop skills in social problem solving.
Working under a $1.6 million grant from the U.S. Department of Education, Daunic and Smith have developed an experimental, 26-lesson curriculum, called Tools for Getting along, that offers opportunities for students to develop non-violent problem-solving skills through role-playing. Throughout the course of study, more than 2,000 students in more than 60 classrooms will be instructed in Tools for Getting Along.
Smith and Daunic are actively conducting research in public schools to measure the effects of this and other approaches to curbing school violence – in hopes of finding ways every school can stop classroom anger before it goes too far.
The university is supposed to be the ultimate meritocracy, where intelligence, patience and hard work always pay off in the end. Unfortunately, many urban, poor and minority students never even get a real chance to get their foot in the door.
The University of Florida Alliance, headquartered at the College of Education, is a partnership between UF and several high-poverty urban schools. The Alliance aims to increase first-generation student enrollment by bringing underrepresented high school students to campus, conducting college outreach, providing professional development for teachers, and fostering school reform. In its seven years of operation, the Alliance has touched the lives of more than 5,000 students through scholarship opportunities, mentoring, assistance in transition from middle to high school and a number of other opportunities.
Ready Schools Florida
An alarming number of children face extreme obstacles to learning before they enter school – poverty, poor access to health care and meager early-learning opportunities, to name a few.
Ready Schools Florida hopes to change that. UF’s College of Education is a partner in this ambitious, $10 million push to smooth the transition to school for students who are likely to enter it unprepared. Funded by the W. K. Kellogg Foundation, the partnership pairs UF’s Lastinger Center for Learning with the Miami-based Early Childhood Initiative Foundation in a drive to address the challenges that face preschoolers from families at all income levels.
The two organizations already worked together on a project called SPARK – for Supporting Partnership to Support Ready Kids. The project encouraged close parental and school involvement and intensive community-wide efforts to help 1,600 Miami-Dade three-year-olds make the transition to school ready to learn.
Ready Schools Florida is now expanding the SPARK model to other children throughout Miami-Dade and eventually to other communities throughout Florida.
Summer Holocaust Institute for Florida Teachers (SHIFT)
It’s hard to look genocide in the face. To take widely-quoted figures and facts, and see the real human toll behind them. Even a short look at that toll can shake you, disturb you and change you. And we all must look because the consequences of forgetting are too grave.
Every year, the College of Education partners with UF’s Center for Jewish Studies to host the Summer Holocaust Institute for Florida teachers -- a course that gives Florida K-12 teachers the tools they need to confront this most difficult of classroom topics. Teachers in the program return to their schools with a grasp of how to share the reality of the Holocaust with their classes – affecting thousands of students per year.
Advice -- from a master of the profession
The home is the first schoolhouse. Students with well-informed, involved parents are much more likely to succeed in school – and staying informed and involved, as any parent can tell you, is not easy.
That’s why Professor Thomasenia Lott Adams, of the college’s math education program, pens a regular column on education for The Gainesville Guardian, a newspaper serving Gainesville’s African-American community. Her column is available to an even broader community through the website of The Gainesville Sun, which owns the Guardian.
Smallwood Scholarships
For almost half a century, the University of Florida’s Summer Science Training Program (SSTP) has been the training ground for some of the state’s most impressive future scientists. The program brings promising high school science students to UF to work in our laboratories with our faculty on real, ongoing research projects. Students who undergo the intense, live-in program typically go on to major in science at UF and other top-tier research universities.
The program does carry a price tag, however, and tuition could be a barrier to promising young students with limited income. The UF College of Education has established a partnership with the Francis C. and William P. Smallwood Foundation to develop a scholarship program with the intent of making SSTP more accessible. Assistant Professor Troy Sadler uses the college’s connections in Florida’s school system to identify the most promising students from high-poverty schools and send them through SSTP with scholarships funded by Smallwood Foundation. The Smallwood Foundation, a non-profit organization which supports a variety of educational and other philanthropic initiatives, provided a gift that established the scholarship program in 2007 and renewed its support in
2008.
For more information, contact Troy Sadler.
Online Education Research
In today’s networked world, you don’t need to be in the same room with someone to have an impact that lasts forever. Today hundreds of thousands of American K-12 students are taking online classes that expand the course offerings available to rural schools, home-schoolers and GED-seeking adults. Equipped with a $600,000 grant from the AT&T Foundation, Associate Professor Rick Ferdig is leading a comprehensive study of online K-12 education in 22 states – with an eye toward finding the best in online teaching techniques, for the improvement of online secondary education everywhere. Ferdig is also working with fellow Ed Tech Faculty Cathy Cavanaugh and Kara Dawson on the nation’s first-ever online internship for teachers – a 21st-Century take on an old tradition of teacher preparation.
Couple and Family Clinic
Nobody is born knowing how to be a good partner, spouse, or parent. We usually enter into relationships without a lot of “training” in how to be a good partner or parent, and then learn on the job. Not surprisingly, many people need some help – through family counseling – at some point in life.
Help should not be limited just to those who can afford services through private pay or insurance. That’s why, since 1992, the College of Education has operated a Couple and Family Clinic to provide free relationship and family counseling for residents in Alachua as well as other surrounding Counties.
Under the direction of Professor Silvia Echevaria-Doan, the faculty and students of the Counselor Education program have offered more than 7,000 hours of supervision and counseling to more than 300 couples and families.
For services or information, contact Silvia Echevarria-Doan.
Lastinger Center for Learning
The noblest reason for having a public school system is to reach those at risk of being left behind – to provide a book for a child who has none at home, to put the dream of college in the mind of the child who never thought college was possible.
Yet in reality, the schools that serve our poorest communities are often also the least well-equipped, with the least social and educational support for their teachers. UF’s
The good work of the
Professors-in-Residence
Teaching is an art that takes years to master, and the collective knowledge of the professors at UF is too vital to be locked away at Norman Hall.
That’s why many faculty members in our School of Teaching and Learning – themselves veterans of the K-12 classroom – work directly with struggling schools through our Professors-in-Residence program. Our professors-in-residence spent much of their time
For more information, contact Dorene Ross.
Alachua County Circle of Change
For adolescents, school can be a brutal place. A place where the unspoken prejudices of our culture come out into the open. A place where students use words as weapons at a time in life when words can hurt the most.
Professor Dorene Ross and her colleagues at the
For more information, contact Dorene Ross.
Library Internships
Librarians play a valuable and sometimes overlooked role in the lives of young children. For prosperous children, the librarian may be just another friendly adult figure pushing books – but for children from chaotic or low-income homes, the school librarian may be their first guide to the literate life.
Sadly, libraries in many small towns – where the need is often greatest – cannot afford to hire enough staff to hold regular story times for children, arrange visits by authors, and set up other events to bring people and books together. That’s why the College of Education’s Elementary ProTeach program places many of their students in voluntary, unpaid internships with these libraries. The students learn skills that will prove valuable in the elementary classroom –such as dealing with parents, teaming with other professionals, conducting story times with children – and libraries benefit from having the help of highly-skilled workers.
Helping Immigrants in the Big Apple
Always a diverse nation of immigrants,
For the past decade, UF Professor Danling Fu has been working with New York City schools to help them improve their instructional methods for children who speak English as a second language. Fu knows the topic in a way few do. Herself a non-native speaker of English, Fu emigrated to the U.S. from China in the 1980s, and went on to become a respected authority on the teaching of English language, literature and writing – serving, among other things, as a member of the board that sets composition standards for the National Council of Teachers of English.
Fu has offered workshops to parents in
For more information, contact Danling Fu.
Bright Futures Mentoring Program
Public housing will give a struggling family a roof over their heads, but a public housing complex rarely has enough doors. There aren’t enough doors to home ownership, to a better job, to a higher level of education. While many make it out of the projects, those who remain must fight a sinking feeling that you can’t get there from here.
The
Alachua County Children’s Alliance
Ever wonder why, if so many people care about disadvantaged children, there are never enough services to meet their needs?
One reason perhaps, is lack of organization. All over this nation, there are grassroots organizations designed to help kids in need. Sometimes, they compete for the same grant money. Sometimes, two organizations offer the same service and leave some other service unfilled.
For years, COE Professor Elizabeth “Buffy” Bondy, long an activist for childrens’ welfare, called on
When the Alachua County Children’s Alliance was founded in 2007 – with just that mission in mind – the group’s founders credited Bondy with providing the vision to make it happen. They gave Bondy their first Vision Award, created to recognize exceptional service to children.
School Involvement
University faculty and staff don’t exist in a vacuum. Many have families of their own, and all have multiple connections to the community. Gainesville and Alachua County profit from the presence of so many parents who are education professionals.
Professor Linda Behar-Horenstein is just one example. As one of UF’s respected Distinguished Teaching Scholars – professors recognized for their teaching excellence and scholarship – Behar-Horenstein devotes much of her time to helping other UF colleges, including the College of Dentistry and the College of Health and Human Performance, develop curriculum and polish faculty teaching skills.
Still, she hasn’t forgotten her roots in the K-12 system. In her off hours, Behar-Horenstein offers valuable volunteer services to her own children’s school – grading papers for teachers, proctoring tests, offering a course on learning strategies for 7th and 8th-graders, and even acting as a substitute teacher for first-grade students.
College Reach-Out Program (CROP)
Nothing should hold a bright child back from a college education. Sadly, even in the 21st century, there are often invisible barriers that keep low-income and minority children from getting the education they deserve.
For more information, contact Michael Bowie.
Empowering Immigrants with English
Among the well-manicured lawns of suburbia, and the rolling fields of farm communities, lies an invisible America. It’s a nation of new immigrants, doing the manual labor that keeps this country fed, clean and in good repair. Many of its members, and their children, are locked out of the most basic public services because they don’t speak English.
Assistant Professor Maria Coady is working on solutions to that problem. In her classes, she trains future K-12 teachers in the methods of bilingualism and teaching English as a second language. Her research sheds light on the influences that affect Spanish-speaking students’ ability to pick up English as a second language. Her most recent project is Libros de Familia, a mobile library that lends books – in both English and Spanish – to children in migrant worker families in northern Florida.
For more information, contact Maria Coady.
Florida Fund for Minority Teachers
In many ways, the teaching profession doesn’t resemble the audience it serves. A majority of teachers are white women from middle-class backgrounds – while their classrooms are as diverse as America itself.
For all the skills and concern these teachers bring to the profession, the fact remains that many children from ethnic and linguistic minorities never study under a teacher who looks like them, or shares their experiences in the school system.
The Florida Fund for Minority Teachers is a state-funded non-profit organization that specializes in recruiting minority students into the teaching profession and connecting them with the school systems that need them. The organization -- headquartered at the College of Education, with Dean Catherine Emihovich as chairperson of its board of directors – has placed more than 2,500 teachers in Florida classrooms.
To see what UF's other colleges are doing to give back to the community, visit the university's Colleges with a Conscience website.