Just Schools: Pursuing Equality in Societies of Difference Participant Bios

Martha Minow "Just Schools" Conference
June 2, 2008
New York University
Kimmel Center, 60 Washington Sq. South
E&L Auditorium, 4th Floor

James A. Banks (Contributor) is the Kerry and Linda Killinger Professor of Diversity Studies and Director of the Center for Multicultural Education at the University of Washington, Seattle. Professor Banks has pursued questions related to education, racial inequality, and social justice in more than 100 journal articles and 20 books. His books include Educating Citizens in a Multicultural Society (2nd edition); Diversity and Citizenship Education: Global Perspectives; Teaching Strategies for Ethnic Studies (8th edition), and Race, Culture, and Education: The Selected Works of James A. Banks (Routledge, 2006). He is now editing The Routledge International Companion to Multicultural Education, which includes chapters by authors from around the world.

Professor Banks has received many awards and honors for his research and professional service. He was elected president of the National Council for the Social Studies (NCSS) in 1982 and later received that organization's Distinguished Career Research Award. In 1997, he was elected President of the American Educational Research Association (AERA). From AERA Professor Banks has received the Research Review Award (1993), a Distinguished Career Contribution Award (1996), and the inaugural Social Justice Award (2004) for his work "demonstrating the critical role of education research in supporting social justice." He was elected to the National Academy of Education in 2004. He was a Spencer Fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford during the 2005-2006 academic year. In fall 2007, Professor Banks was the Tisch Distinguished Visiting Professor at Teachers College, Columbia University.

John R. Bowen (Contributor) is the Dunbar-Van Cleve Professor in Arts & Sciences at Washington University in St. Louis, where he teaches Anthropology and directs the Pluralism, Politics and Religion Initiative. He studies issues of religion, law, and cultural pluralism, and in particular contemporary efforts to rethink Islamic norms and law in Asia, Europe, and North America. His long-term fieldwork has been in Indonesia, particularly in Aceh, and is most recently reflected in his book, Islam, Law and Equality in Indonesia: An Anthropology of Public Reasoning (Cambridge, 2003). Current research on Islam and the state in France is reflected in Why the French Don't Like Headscarves (Princeton, 2007), and his next book, Can Islam be French? will appear from Princeton in 2009, followed by The New Anthropology of Islam from Cambridge. He has been a Fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, received the Herbert Jacobs Book Prize from the Law & Society Association, and was a Carnegie Scholar in 2005-2006.

Maryann Dickar is an Assistant Professor of Secondary Education at NYU Steinhardt School. She earned her doctorate in American Studies from the University of Minnesota, an MA in US History from SUNY Binghamton, and her BA at Vassar College. She researches and publishes about urban youth culture, local identity, and school reform. She also writes on the role of race in the work of teachers and on the relationship of student culture to school culture. Her forthcoming book, Corridor Cultures: Mapping Resistance in an Urban School, develops a new paradigm for understanding student resistance and its relationship to school reform. Currently, she is developing programs in local high schools that use video games to deepen student engagement with content. She grew up in New York City and attended and taught in its public schools.

Arthur Eisenberg is the Legal Director of the New York Civil Liberties Union where he has worked for more than 35 years. During that time he has been involved in more than 20 cases that were presented to the United States Supreme Court. He has litigated extensively around issues of free speech and voting rights. In recent years, Eisenberg has been increasingly involved in litigation concerning national security and civil liberties. He is currently involved in a challenge to the National Security Agency surveillance practices; the use of National Security letters by the FBI; the CIA's destruction of videotapes relating to interrogation practices; and the video surveillance of political activity by the NYPD. Among the Supreme Court cases in which he has been involved are those involving questions of whether a state violates the First Amendment and the constitutional right to vote when it denies voters the right to cast write-in ballots (Burdick v. Takushi (1992)); whether a school board violated the First Amendment in removing nine books from its high school library (Island Trees Union Free School District v. Pico (1982)); and whether the Indiana legislature engaged in unconstitutional political gerrymandering when it drew congressional district lines (Davis v. Bandemer, 1986)).

Eisenberg is the co-author, with Burt Neuborne, of the Rights of Candidates and Voters (2nd ed. 1980). He has published law review articles on a range of topics including essays on Lani Guinier (Review Essay: The Millian Thoughts of Lani Guinier, 21 New York University Review of Law and Social Change 617 (1995)); on Robert Bork (Repaid In The Coin Of A Controversialist: The Bork Nomination Process, 58 University of Cincinnati Law Review 1319 (1990)); and on campaign finance reform (Civic Discourse, Campaign Finance Reform, and the Virtues of Moderation, 12 Cardozo Studies in Law and Literature 141 (2000)). He contributed an essay on issues of faith and conscience, "Accommodation and Coherence: In Search of a General Theory for Adjudicating Claims of Faith, Conscience and Culture," to the volume Engaging Cultural Differences (Russell Sage Foundation, 2002). He has recently lectured on academic freedom at Columbia University and on civil liberties and national security at the University of Colorado, the University of Minnesota, the Cardozo Law School and the Cornell law School. Eisenberg earned his B.A. degree from The Johns Hopkins University and his J.D. from Cornell Law School. He has taught courses in Constitutional Litigation, Civil Rights Law and Constitutional Law at Cardozo Law School and the University of Minnesota Law School.
 

Melinda Fine is Principal of Fine Consulting, advises a wide variety of foundation and education, advocacy, and research organizations on a broad range of education and youth development issues, with a particular focus on civic education, youth engagement, and social and emotional learning. A nationally recognized expert and advisor on youth civic learning, Dr. Fine provides strategic guidance and planning, research and evaluation, and program development expertise to the nonprofit and philanthropic sector. Her articles on civic learning have appeared in Harvard Educational Review, Teachers College Press, and Educational Leadership. Her book, Habits of Mind: Struggling Over Values in America's Classrooms (Jossey-Bass, 1995), explores the politics and practice of what it means to educate for democracy. Dr. Fine received her Ed.D. in Education from the Harvard University Graduate School of Education in 1991. She holds appointments as a Fellow at the NYU Research Center for Leadership and Action, the NYU Metro Center for Urban Education, and the Brown University Annenberg Institute for School Reform, Community Involvement Program.

A member of the Facing History and Ourselves Scholars Advisory Board, she has been a strategic consultant to and evaluator of FHAO for two decades. She is a co-Principal Investigator of FHAO's national, experimental evaluation of program impact on both teachers and students; a former senior advisor on the organization's study of program impact on inter-group relations; and the author of various strategic analyses, logic models, and practitioner briefs for the organization.

A parent activist in NYC public schools, Dr. Fine is a former elected member of the New York City School Community Council for District Two and the P.S. 234 School Leadership Team.

James Fraser James W. Fraser is Professor of History and Education and Interim Chair of the Department of Teaching and Learning at the Steinhardt School of Culture, Education, and Human Development at New York University. His teaching includes courses in the History of American Education and Inquiries into Teaching and Learning. He also serves as NYU liaison to the New Design High School, a public high school in New York's Lower East Side and to Facing History and Ourselves.

Fraser was the founding dean of Northeastern's School of Education, serving from 1999 to 2004. He served as a member and chair of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts Education Deans Council, the Boston School Committee Nominating Committee, and other boards. He was also a lecturer in the Program in Religion and Secondary Education at the Harvard University Divinity School from 1997 to 2004. He has taught at Lesley University, University of Massachusetts, Boston, Boston University and Public School 76 Manhattan.

Fraser's newest book, Preparing America's Teachers: A History was published by Teachers College Press in January, 2007. His recent books include A History of Hope: When Americans Have Dared to Dream of a Better Future (Palgrave-Macmillan, 2002), The School in the United States: A Documentary History (McGraw-Hill, 2000), Between Church and State: Religion and Public Education in a Multicultural America (St. Martin's Press, 1999), and Reading, Writing, and Justice: School Reform as if Democracy Matters (State University of New York Press, 1997). He has also published in the Journal of Teacher Education, Education Next, Education Week, as well as reviews in the Journal of American History and the History of Education Quarterly. Fraser holds a Ph.D. from Columbia University. He is an ordained minister and was pastor of Grace Church in East Boston, Massachusetts from 1986 to 2006.

William A. Galston is a Senior Fellow in the Brookings Institution's Governance Studies Program and College Park Professor at the University of Maryland. Prior to January 2006 he was Saul Stern Professor at the School of Public Policy, University of Maryland, director of the Institute for Philosophy and Public Policy, and founding director of the Center for Information and Research on Civic Learning and Engagement (CIRCLE).

From 1993 until 1995 Galston served as Deputy Assistant to President Clinton for Domestic Policy, where he had principal responsibility for education policy, among other assignments. His political activities include service as issues director for Walter Mondale's presidential campaign (1982-1984), as a senior advisor to Albert Gore, Jr.'s run for the Democratic presidential nomination (1988) and again as a senior advisor to Gore's presidential campaign (1999-2000).

Galston is the author of eight books and more than 100 articles in the fields of political theory, public policy, and American politics. His most recent books are Liberal Pluralism (Cambridge, 2002), The Practice of Liberal Pluralism (Cambridge, 2004), and Public Matters (Rowman & Littlefield, 2005). He is a member the Editorial Board of the recently founded quarterly journal, Democracy. In 2004 he was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

Galston serves on the boards of numerous organizations, including the National Endowment for Democracy, the Council for Excellence in Government, and the National Campaign to Prevent Teen Pregnancy.

Heather L. Lindkvist (Contributor) is a lecturer in Anthropology at Bates College and a PhD candidate in the Department of Comparative Human Development at the University of Chicago. Her dissertation examines how Somali refugees establish and (re)imagine a sense of community based on their religious identity. Drawing on long-term ethnographic fieldwork, this study traces the pre- and post-9/11 secondary migration of Somalis from primary resettlement sites to a small-scale, racially-homogenous city in Maine. For many Somalis now residing in central Maine, secondary migration represents a decisive strategy to create a "safe haven" in which they may raise their children according to Somali and Islamic norms. Her ongoing work investigates the ensuing conflicts - between Somalis and members of the host community, and within the Somali community - that emerge as Somali parents and their children struggle with and accommodate to different conceptions of what it means to be Somali, Muslim, and American. Ms. Lindkvist's research has been supported by the Searle Fund of the Chicago Community Trust; the Social Science Research Council's Working Group on Ethnic Customs, Assimilation, and American Law; the Russell Sage Foundation; and Bates College.

Hazel Markus (Editor/Contributor) received a PhD in Psychology from the University of Michigan in 1975. She has been a professor of psychology at Stanford University since 1994. Previously, at the University of Michigan, she was a faculty member in the Department of Psychology and a research scientist at the Institute for Social Research. She is a fellow of the American Psychological Society and the American Psychological Association, a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, a former John Simon Guggenheim fellow, former President of the Society for Personality and Social Psychology (SPSP), and the 2002 recipient of the Donald T. Campbell award from SPSP for contributions to social psychology. She has received numerous grants from various organizations including the National Institutes of Health, The Ford Foundation, National Science Foundation, National Institute of Mental Health, National Institute on Aging, American Psychological Association, The John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, The Hewlett Foundation, and others. In 2002, she received a Distinguished Alumni Recognition Award from California State University at San Diego. Currently, Dr. Markus serves as Director of Stanford's Research Institute of Comparative Studies in Race and Ethnicity.

Martha Minow (Editor/Contributor), the Jeremiah Smith, Jr. Professor of Law and Senior Lecturer at the Graduate School of Education, has taught at Harvard since 1981. She writes about human rights and advocacy for members of racial and religious minorities and for women, children, and persons with disabilities. Her books include Breaking the Cycles of Hatred: Memory, Law and Repair (2003); Partners, Not Rivals: Privatization and the Public Good (2002); Between Vengeance and Forgiveness: Facing History After Genocide and Mass Violence (1998); Not Only for Myself: Identity, Politics and Law (1997); and Making All the Difference: Inclusion, Exclusion, and American Law (1990), and casebooks on civil procedure and on women and the law. A member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, she received her A.B. at the University of Michigan, Ed.M., at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, J.D. at Yale Law School; she also received an Honorary Doctorate of Education at Wheelock College, and an Honorary Doctorate of Law at the University of Toronto. She served on the Carnegie Commission on Learning in the early years that produced Years of Promise: A Comprehensive Learning Strategy for America's Children (1996) ; her 5-year partnership with the federal Department of Education and the Center for Applied Special Technology worked to increase access to the curriculum for students with disabilities. She served on the Independent International Commission Kosovo and helped to launch Imagine Co-existence, a program of the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees, to promote peaceful development in post-conflict societies. Her co-edited books include (with Richard Shweder and Hazel Markus; published June 2002, Russell Sage Foundation Press and forthcoming April 2008) entitled Engaging Cultural Differences: The Multicultural Challenge in Liberal Democracies and Just Schools: Pursuing Equality in Societies of Difference (Russell Sage Foundation Press).

Barnaby B. Riedel (Contributor) is the Human Development Preceptor in the Master of Arts Program in the Social Sciences at the University of Chicago and a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Comparative Human Development. His doctoral work examines how Islamic private schools in the U.S. define the aims and objectives of Islamic education and selectively appropriate American educational discourses and resources for the purposes of Muslim social reproduction. This research takes place at both the national level and in the context of two Islamic private schools in the Chicago suburb of Bridgeview. As an anthropologist of moral and religious education, Mr. Riedel combines ethnographic fieldwork with the meta-ethical framework of cultural psychology to draw attention to both the distinctiveness of Islamic private schools and the ways in which their moral orientations and pedagogical concerns converge with non-Muslim peoples and educational projects in the U.S. His on-going work explores how intra-Muslim diversity, in contrast to out-group majority confrontation, serves as a primary adaptational context for the construction of Islamic education and the negotiation of what it means to be an American Muslim. Mr. Riedel's research has been supported by the National Institute of Mental Health, the Russell-Sage Foundation, and the University of Chicago.

Richard A. Shweder (Editor/Contributor) is a cultural anthropologist and the William Claude Reavis Distinguished Service Professor of Human Development in the Department of Comparative Human Development at the University of Chicago. He received his Ph.D. degree in social anthropology in the Department of Social Relations at Harvard University in 1972, taught a year at the University of Nairobi in Kenya and has been at the University of Chicago ever since.

He is author of Thinking Through Cultures: Expeditions in Cultural Psychology and Why Do Men Barbecue? Recipes for Cultural Psychology (both published by Harvard University Press); and editor or co-editor of many books in the areas cultural psychology, psychological anthropology and comparative human development, including Culture Theory: Essays on Mind, Self and Emotion; Cultural Psychology: Essays on Comparative Human Development; Metatheory in Social Science: Pluralisms and Subjectivities; Ethnography and Human Development: Meaning and Context in Social Inquiry; Welcome to Middle Age! (And Other Cultural Fictions); Engaging Cultural Differences: The Multicultural Challenge in Liberal Democracies; Clifford Geertz By His Colleagues; and the forthcoming volume Just Schools: Pursuing Equality in Societies of Difference. He is the Editor-in-Chief of a prospective reference work on diversity in child and adolescent development titled The Chicago Companion to the Child (University of Chicago Press).

Professor Shweder has been a recipient of a John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship (1985-86) and was selected as a Carnegie Scholar (2002). He is the recipient of the American Association for the Advancement of Science Socio-Psychological Prize for his essay "Does the Concept of the Person Vary Cross-Culturally?" He has twice been a Fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Palo Alto (1985-86 and 1995-96), where he has co-chaired a special project on "Culture, Mind and Biology." Dr. Shweder has been a Visiting Scholar at the Russell Sage Foundation (1990-91) ; he has been a Hewlett Visiting Scholar at the Stanford University Research Institute for the Comparative Study of Race and Ethnicity (2003-2004) and a Visiting Scholar at the Stanford University Hoover Institution (Spring 2005 and Spring 2006). He is a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and has been a member of the MacArthur Foundation Research Network on Successful Midlife Development (MICMAC). Professor Shweder has served as President of the Society for Psychological Anthropology and is currently co-chairing a joint Social Science Research Council/Russell Sage Foundation Working Group on "Law and Culture"(previously named "Ethnic Customs, Assimilation and American Law"), which is concerned with the issue of the "Free exercise of culture: How Free Is It? How Free Ought It To Be?" For the past forty years Professor Shweder has been conducting research in cultural psychology on moral reasoning, emotional functioning, gender roles, explanations of illness, ideas about the causes of suffering, and the moral foundations of family life practices in the Hindu temple town of Bhubaneswar on the East Coast of India. During the 1999-2000 academic year he was a Fellow at the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin (The Institute for Advanced Study in Berlin) where he co-edited an issue of the journal Daedalus (Autumn 2000) entitled The End of Tolerance: Engaging Cultural Differences.

Dr. Shweder's recent research examines the scopes and limits of pluralism and the multicultural challenge in Western liberal democracies. He examines the norm conflicts that arise when people migrate from Africa, Asia and Latin America to countries in the "North". They bring with them culturally endorsed practices (e.g., arranged marriage, animal sacrifice, circumcision of both girls and boys, ideas about parental authority) that mainstream populations in the United States or Western Europe sometimes find aberrant and disturbing. How much accommodation to cultural diversity occurs and ought to occur under such circumstances? He has co-edited two books on this topic (with Martha Minow and Hazel Markus; published June 2002, Russell Sage Foundation Press and forthcoming April 2008) entitled Engaging Cultural Differences: The Multicultural Challenge in Liberal Democracies and Just Schools: Pursuing Equality in Societies of Difference (Russell Sage Foundation Press). He is currently writing a book provisionally titled Customs Control: The Moral Challenge in Cultural Migration. During the 2008-2009 academic year he will be a member of Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey.

Gillian Smith is Principal of the Facing History School (FHS), a small New York City Department of Education high school that is in its third year. For the 2008-2009 school year, FHS will grow to its full size, serving 9^th-12^th grades and will graduate its first class in June 2009. As lead partner, Facing History and Ourselves has teamed with the school to help integrate its mission, values, resources, and pedagogical approaches into a rigorous, relevant, and cutting edge four year curriculum. Thanks to a generous grant from New Visions for Public Schools' New Century Schools initiative, which is funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, The Open Society Institute, and the Carnegie Foundation, Facing History is able to work in-depth with the school and provide access to a network of local, national, and international speakers and extensive on-line resources. As principal, Ms. Smith believes that creating community is crucial and notes, "We want to have a community that's safe enough for us to disagree, that's safe enough for us to make change and acknowledges that we're all different. Our goal is that when you walk into the building, you actually feel this sense of community."

Carola Suarez-Orozco is a Professor of Applied Psychology at NYU's Steinhardt School of Culture, Education, & Human Development and Co-Director of Immigration Studies @ NYU. She publishes widely in the areas of cultural psychology, immigrant families and youth, the role of the "social mirror" in identity formation, immigrant family separations, the role of mentors in facilitating youth development, and gendered experiences of immigrant youth. Her books include: Children of Immigration, Transformations: Migration, Family Life, and Achievement Motivation Among Latino Adolescents, The New Immigration: An Interdisciplinary Reader, and Learning a New Land: Immigrant Students in American Society. Professor Suárez-Orozco received an American Psychological Association Presidential Citation for her seminal work on the cultural psychology of immigration in 2006.

Diana Turk is an Associate Professor of Social Studies Education at NYU's Steinhardt school. Dr. Turk received her Ph.D. in American Studies from the University of Maryland at College Park. She has been a member of the NYU Department of Teaching and Learning's Social Studies Program since August 1999. She brings to her work in teacher education a passion for civic engagement and a commitment to teaching history for democratic change. She is a co-author of the forthcoming Teaching U.S. History: Dialogues Among Historians, Educators, and Students (forthcoming, Routledge Press) and the author of Bound by a Mighty Vow: Sisterhood and Women's Fraternities, 1870-1920 (New York University Press, 2004) and of several articles on innovative and interdisciplinary approaches to teaching history and social studies.