Please read the information on the link carefully as times and locations vary.

To RSVP, please visit one of the links below:

Food Studies Program
November 24th from 12-2pm

Clinical Nutrition Program
Thursday, December 17th, 6:30-8pm

Qualifications

Candidates should have a doctoral degree in public health (or a doctoral degree in a social science along with an MPH), leadership experience, a strong commitment to teaching, research, mentoring students at the graduate and undergraduate levels, an active portfolio of externally-funded research, and a productive record of peer-reviewed publications.

Responsibilities

The successful candidate will assume a leadership role in the growing MPH, undergraduate, and doctoral programs in the Department, teach, mentor, and advise undergraduate and graduate students, and provide service to the university and the community. The candidate will be able to participate in NYU's University-wide Global Program in Public Health. For more information see here www.nyu.edu/mph.

NYU's dynamic Global Network University includes NYU Abu Dhabi and international programs and academic centers around the world. NYU Steinhardt faculty may be afforded the opportunity for variable term work at these global study and research sites.

NYU is a large, private university located in the Greenwich Village area of New York City. For further information, visit http://steinhardt.nyu.edu/nutrition

Applications

Candidates should send a cover letter discussing qualifications, a curriculum vitae, copies of publications, and the names and telephone numbers of five references to:

Professor Sally Guttmacher,
Department of Nutrition, Food Studies & Public Health,
NYU Steinhardt School of Culture, Education and Human Development
35 West 4th Street, 10th Floor
New York, NY 10012-1172.
Tel: (212) 998-5580
Fax: (212) 995-4194
Email: nutrition@nyu.edu (subject: faculty search).

Review of applications will begin November 15, 2009 and will continue until the position is filled.

New York University is an Equal Opportunity Employer and is committed to building a culturally diverse educational environment.

To view the full article, please visit: "Code is Speech: Legal Tinkering, Expertise, and Protest among Free and Open Source Software Developers." Cultural Anthropology. 24(3): 420-454. 

"In today's increasingly globalized world," he writes, "our children need more exposure to different people and cultures, not less."

Although he recognizes that the hiring of foreign teachers alone will not solve critical shortages in science and math educations, Zimmerman notes that foreign teachers can help students in innumerable ways.

"As more and more countries outpace the United States in science and math, these teachers might help up catch up. Best of all, though, they can also teach our kids something new and important about the larger world." 

 To read Professor Zimmerman's entire opinion article, click here. 

Zimmerman notes that "the idea that there should be state-supported education was, although not unique to the United States, in many ways distinct to it. By 1850 there was a greater fraction of elementary school-age kids going to school in our country than in any other on earth."

Despite their many deficiencies (which include lack of heat and lack of proper training for teachers), one-room schoolhouses were communal institutions, often the only public building in a community, providing truly democratic spaces for functions like debates and voting.

To listen to the segment, produced by the Virginia Foundation for the Humanities, click below.

Global Food Cultures: Mexico  lead by Dr. Amy Bentley
International Issues in Nutrition  lead by Dr. Domingo Pinero
Issues in Global Public Health  lead by Dr. Yumary Ruiz

Please click here to download an application and get further information about these programs.

Citing surveys from Transparency International, a global organization that fights corruption, Zimmerman notes that 24 percent of respondents across the globe reported paying bribes to the police in the last year. Abuse and murder of civilians by police is all to common in some countries.

Zimmerman recounts his own experience with official corruption on a recent trip to the African country of Togo with his daughters.

While police corruption and brutality do happen in the U.S., Zimmerman writes that, from an international perspective, the Gates controversy "is a tempest in a teapot."  He call for an official investigation into the incident and reminds us that "in a world in which police routinely abuse civilians or extort bribes from them, we're pretty fortunate to be debating the arrest of Gates."

To read the full article, click here. 

Citing the first "muckraking" journalists, such as Henry Demarest Lloyd and David Graham Phillips, Zimmerman argues that  journalists who investigate issues of corruption or malfeasance can have a profound effect on democracy.

Although some small blogs are maintaining coverage of state capitols in the wake of cuts to mainstream media, it is unclear whether these innovations will work.

"Without more reporting from state capitols, most of us won't have a clue what our lawmakers are doing," he writes. 

Writing in The New York Times, book critic Dwight Garner calls Michael and Elizabeth Norman's Tears in the Darkness "authoritative history" and "a narrative achievement."

Tears in the Darkness: The Story of the Bataan Death March and its Aftermath, is the extraordinary story of America's worst military defeat told from the shifting point of view of three cultures: American, Japanese, and Filipino. Until the Japanese surrendered in August 1945, the Filipino and American prisoners of war on the tiny Philipine peninsula of Bataan suffered an ordeal of unparalleled cruelty and savagery: forty-one months of captivity, starvation rations, dehydration, hard labor, deadly disease, and torture.

Juxtaposed against the sobering tale of the Death March and its aftermath is the story of Ben Steele, a young 22 year old Montana cowboy who wanted to see the world and serve his country.

To read the full New York Times review of Tears in the Darkness, click here.

To read an interview with Michael and Elizabeth Norman, click here. 

Elizabeth Norman is a professor in the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences in the Professions at NYU Steinhardt. 

Module 1: Gross Screens/Scans and Differential Diagnosis
Gail D. Deyle, PT, DPT, DSc, OCS, FAAOMPT
Physical Therapy Consultant in San Antonio, TX
October 9-10, 2009

Module 2: Shoulder
Eric J. Hegedus, PT, MHSc, OCS, CSCS
Doctor of Physical Therapy Division
Department of Community and Family Medicine
Duke University
October 30-31, 2009

Module 3: Elbow, Wrist and Hand
Susan Michlovitz, PT, PhD, CHT
Cayuga Hand Therapy PT, Ithaca, NY
and
Adjunct Associate Professor, Rehabilitation Medicine
Columbia University
November 20-21, 2009

Module 4: Knee
Tara Jo Manal, PT, DPT, OCS, SCS
Director of Clinical Services, Department of Physical Therapy
University of Delaware
December 4-5, 200

Registration Deadline: 1 month prior to each module

Contact: Anne Seaton, 380 Second Ave, 4th Fl, New York, NY 10010, 212-998-9414, mas2@nyu.edu

Only Physical Therapists may apply

Seating is limited to 30

Cost: $400 per weekend,$1600 for 4 weekends

Credits can be applied towards the Clinical Residency Program in Orthopedic Physical Therapy. The student must enroll as a special student at NYU and attend all 4 modules to obtain 3 graduate credits.

NYU is an eligible sponsor of the mandatory continuing education hours for licensed PTs required by the New York State Education Department.

Although her journey from the housing projects of the Bronx to Princeton University and Yale Law School is impressive, they write, her successes stand in stark contrast to the realities of many of today's Latino students. Making up more than 25 percent of students K-12, Latinos face the largest drop-out rate and lowest college attendance level of all racial/ethnic groups.

They call on President Obama to develop evidence-based interventions to help curb the Latino/white achievement gap.

"Judge Sotomayor's biography is all the more inspiring considering the odds she faced," they write. "After celebrating her biography and debating her ideology let us turn this moment into a reflection of the work ahead so that the more than 16 million Latina and Latino children have a fair chance to follow her path."

To read the full article, click here.

• Opening Music and Steinhardt Singers
• Dean Brabeck and Dean Robin Welcome
• David McLaughlin - Provost of NYU
• Distinguished Alumni Speaker Linda Carter, Ph.D. '74
• Faculty Speaker Robert Rowe
• Student Speaker Preetika Mukherjee, Ph.D. '09, Department of Applied Psychology
• Student Awards
• Steinhardt Singers
• Hooding Ceremony
• Congratulations!

In a statement announcing the appointment, Tisch remarked that under her leadership, the Board will "embrace innovation with a data-driven approach that seeks to constantly identify and advance policies and best practices to raise test scores, raise graduation rates, and finally close the achievement gap." A former elementary school teacher, Tisch serves on the executive committees of numerous non-profit organizations and institutions of higher education, in addition to currently serving on the Dean's Council of NYU Steinhardt. The New York State Board of Regents sets education policy and supervises the State Department of Education as well as the state university system.

The study stems from the Chicago School Readiness Project (CSRP) that Raver developed; the study measured the impact of classroom-based interventions in Head Start classrooms. The interventions were designed to reduce children's behavioral problems and improve their readiness for school.

Sue Shellenbarger, a Wall Street Journal columnist who covers  work and family, recently noted Raver's study in a column on classroom behavior. 

To read more about Raver and the Chicago School Readiness Project, click here.

To read Sue Shellenbarger's column, click here.

Ron Sadoff, Steinhardt associate professor of music, composed the score for "Chuck Jones: Memories of Childhood," which features music by David Schroeder, director of NYU Jazz studies, and his band Combo Nuvo.

The original TCM documentary, created by Oscar-winners John Canemaker and Peggy Stern, features one of the last filmed interviews with Jones. The half-hour documentary also includes clips from Jones' cartoons, along with vintage photographs and new animation based on drawings Jones made during the interview. 

Canemaker is a professor at NYU's Tisch School of the Arts, where he directs the Animation Program of the Kanbar Institute of Film and Television.

For more information, visit tcm.com.

"Music reduces depression," he says. "We have so many examples of people who are isolated and withdrawn and not relating who, through musical interaction, will become animated and interested in what is going on around them."

Zimmerman argues that the federal government has historically distributed aid to schools for construction and repair. He cites Franklin Delano Roosevelt's focus on rural schools during the economic crisis of the 1930s.

"All told, the federal goverment spent over $1 billion on school construction between 1933 and 1942," he writes. "So when present-day Republicans say that school building has always been the exclusive province of states and localities, they're simply misinformed."

Zimmerman notes that federal funding for school contruction began to dry up in the 1950s, as Southern congressmen blocked school funding bills because the measures required the schools to desegregate. He cites a Department of Education study that found by 1999, 75 percent of schools were in "disrepair."

"Ironically, these same years witnessed massive and unprecedented incursions into teaching, curriculum and other school priorities," he writes. "In a nation founded on the ideal of human equality, no child should be left behind in a decrepit, dilapidated school."

To read the full column, click here.

How are children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) educated?

Most often, children with an ASD are educated in a self-contained class. Alternatively, they can be placed in a general education class with an aide. Neither setting is ideal. Self-contained classes don’t help children learn how to interact with their typically developing peers and often don’t provide sufficient access to the academic curriculum. General education classes are too large, socially stressful and over-stimulating for most children with ASD.

Talk a little about your ideas for integrating children with autism into public school classrooms.

My ideas for integrating children with autism evolved from my experience as a parent, special ed advocate, and school board member in Brooklyn’s District 15 in the late ‘80s and early 90s. District 15 tried a radical experiment: it created a school in which special and general education children were educated together in the same classroom with two teachers sharing the teaching responsibilities. This experimental program, called The Children’s School, showed that a carefully designed, truly collaborative team teaching (CTT) classroom is the best option for most children with special needs.

How is the program that you helped create different from the collaborative team teaching (CTT) program?

Working with a group of District 15 educators, we set out to create a therapeutic environment within the academic framework of a CTT class. The main idea is to train a team of teachers and therapists on the strategies, structures, and approaches that work best with higher functioning children on the autism spectrum. There are weekly team meetings, so that everyone interacting with the child is aware of his needs and the strategies the team has decided to use to maximize the child’s success. Today, almost all the children who started out in the Nest program are thriving. Parents and principals alike are thrilled and tell me that the structure and strategies they learned have influenced the entire school community and how we treat all children.

Entitled "Syndemic Production in Gay and Bisexual Men: Considerations of the Interplay of Mental Health Burden, Drug Abuse, and Sexual Risk-taking and the Interplay for a Paradigm Shift in HIV Prevention," Halkitis's lecture provided a comprehensive overview of current HIV statistics in the United States as well as a description of HIV prevention strategies in New York City.

Halkitis also provided details of a new research program, "Project Desire," funded by the New York City Department of Health and Mental Hygeine, that investigates the alarming increase in HIV infection among young gay men in NYC (ages 13 -29).

To read more about "Project Desire", click here.

To watch the full video of Professor Halkitis's talk, click here.

•  Visit Dean Mary Brabeck's blog on GETIdeas.org

Developed by Cisco's Global Education group, the website is meant to foster dialogue among education thought leaders and to function as a hub for the exchange of knowledge and ideas on transforming education.

The website features a blog by noted experts, video content, case studies as well as news and other resources for educators.

In her most recent blog post, Dean Brabeck writes about the need for increased use of evidence-based interventions (EBI) and evidence-based practice (EBP) among educators.

"Teachers need to be encouraged in their early training to use both EBI and EBP approaches," she writes. "Both are attempts to apply science to rigorously examine the results of teaching interventions. And researchers need to be encouraged to fill the gap of knowledge about evidence based interventions."

To read Dean Brabeck's blog entry in full, click here. 

Th exhibition, on view through Saturday, December 6, is staged in conjunction with "The Poetics of Cloth: African Textiles / Recent Art" at NYU's Grey Art Gallery and a parallel exhibition titled "The Essential Art of African Textiles: Design Without End" at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Gallery Viewing Hours are Tuesday 10-7; Wednesday & Thursday 10-6; Friday & Saturday 10-5.

To read the New York Times review and see a slideshow of images from the exhibition, click here.

Zimmerman writes that despite often being behind the "racial equality curve", the U.S., in electing Obama to the presidency, is finally ahead of it.

"So Americans should be celebrating, too, no matter whom they supported on Tuesday," he writes. "In choosing Barack Obama . . . the United States proved that it can still can serve as an exemplar for the rest of the world."

Watch a clip

Thanks to YouTube user projectvoteorg

"Last time I checked," he writes, "universities were supposed to challenge students' biases and preconceived opinions"

To counter the pro-Obama bias expressed by students and many faculty, Zimmerman suggests ways in which teachers can use the hotly contested campaign to infuse "political energy" into the classroom. Teachers, he writes, can bring in outsider speakers to discuss opposing viewpoints, or give assignments that challenge student's preconceived notions.

He looks to Barack Obama himself for inspiration. Obama, Zimmerman reminds us, "taught law for 12 years at the University of Chicago, where he developed a reputation for rigorous open-mindedness. He challenged everyone, especially the students who agreed with him."

To read the full USA Today article, click here.

Her publications and funded grants reflect a commitment to research that bridges science and practice, and has been praised for providing new and exciting protocols for teaching sciences in schools. Basu was praised for her productivity as a scholar - she has published widely on the subject of youth and science education. She is the recipient of awards from the Petrie Foundation, the American Education Research Association, and has received a Knowles Young Scholar Fellowship.

"Dr. Basu has been committed to helping inner city children feel excited about science. She has created research that informs teachers how to engage their students and reach their academic potentials," said Steinhardt Dean Mary Brabeck. "Through her passion, scholarship, teaching, and research, Dr. Basu has made a great gift to our community."

The Games for Learning Institute (G4LI) is a joint research endeavor of Microsoft Research, New York University, and a consortium of universities. The partners include Columbia University, the City University of New York (CUNY), Dartmouth College, Parsons the New School for Design, Polytechnic Institute of NYU, the Rochester Institute of Technology, and Teachers College. The G4LI will identify which qualities of computer games engage students and develop relevant, personalized teaching strategies that can be applied to the learning process. Ken Perlin, professor of computer science in NYU's Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences and founding director of the Media Research Laboratory at NYU, who will co-direct the G4LI.

Microsoft Research is providing $1.5 million to the Institute. NYU and its consortium of partners are matching Microsoft's investment, for a combined $3 million. Funding covers the first three years of the G4LI's research, which will focus on evaluating computer games as potential learning tools for science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) subjects at the middle-school years (grades 6-8). The institute will work with a range of student populations, yet focus on underrepresented middle-school students, such as girls and minorities.

Video games, with their popularity and singular ability to engage young people, are showing promise as a way to excite and prepare the Net generation, the current crop of students who have grown up on technology. This generation, though well-versed in using technology for social networking and Internet research, is continuing a decline in proficiency and interest in math and sciences - the very skills needed to prepare them for the new demands and requirements of the 21st century.

While NYU will serve as the hub of the G4LI in its Computer Science Media Research Laboratory at the Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences, the multi-institutional organization will have a myriad of partner spokes. The G4LI also will evaluate game prototypes and introduce them, along with accompanying curricula, to an existing network of 19 New York City area schools; results in the classroom will be tracked. Based on the findings, the institute's goal is to expand its research and game development to all K-12 grades. Resulting scientific evidence will be shared broadly with researchers, game developers and educators.

Media coverage of G4LI announcement: 

The New York Times
e-Week
Popular Mechanics
Washington Square News
PC World

In October Dr. Brabeck also will be awarded the 2008 Distinguished Alumni Award from St. Cloud State University (MA '70) for outstanding contributions to society and the university. At St. Cloud, Dr. Brabeck served as an intern with the College of Education Teachers' Corps, teaching in urban public schools while earning her master's degree.

Dr. Brabeck joined the Steinhardt School as dean in 2003. She is widely known for her leadership in the fields of education and psychology, and recently received the Homes Partnership Board of Directors Service Award, the American Psychological Association Committee on Women in Psychology Leadership Award, and an honorary degree from St. Joseph University.

From the article:

The design [of the space] addresses and integrates the needs of three unique population groups: faculty and administrators; student clinicians; and patients who range in age from infants to senior adults... The architect worked closely with a lighting designer and acoustic consultant to develop a design that integrates audiovisual technology seamlessly into the space - using it strategically to bridge between physically unconnected labs and learning rooms.

• Click here to see a PDF of the full article.
• More images of the new Speech Language Pathology and Audiology facilities

"We're deeply grateful to Mrs. Virginia Gorodnitzki for this exceptional gift," said Mary Brabeck, dean of NYU's Steinhardt School of Culture, Education, and Human Development. "Sascha Gorodnitzki highly valued teaching throughout his life, his perfoming career, and as a noted member of the Juilliard faculty, developing a coterie of brilliant pianists. It is fitting that such a Chair be established in his memory." 

Mrs. Gorodnitzki's bequest generously allows for the creation of a studio, to be named The Sascha Gorodnitzki Piano Studio, that will include photographs, artworks, written, and audio materials, that celebrate Gorodnitzki's illustrious career and inspiring legacy. The search for the Faculty Chair in Piano Studies will commence this fall.

Featured in a recent article in The New York Times by reporter Amanda Schaffer, Jeremijenko explains the reasoning behind the Clinic and her aims for helping people create environmental change in their own communities.

"How do we translate the tremendous amount of anxiety and interest in addressing major environmental issues into something concrete that people can do whose effect is measurable and significant?" she asks. 

 To read the full story, click here.

"In view of the deteriorating viewership of television news programs, station and networks should embrace the use of disclosure and any other opportunity they can find to maintain a relationship of trust and credibility with the American people," he writes.

This brand new clinical residency program, designed so that licensed physical therapists can obtain advanced orthopedic knowledge and clinical skills, is part of the America Physical Therapy Association's 2020 vision plan which stresses the increasing need of residency/fellowship education within a doctoring profession.

The program includes a didactic component consisting of six courses at a total of 240 contact hours and a clinical component consisting of 3 internship experiences requiring 1596-1700 hours (including patient care, OCS mentorship, case presentations, teaching assistance, and physician contact hours). Courses, which will be available throughout the year in summer, fall, and spring (weekends and weekdays), will focus on advanced anatomy, physiology, pathology, and examination and intervention skills of the musculoskeletal system as well as evidence-based orthopedic physical therapy. Students can complete this program in 12 months.

Upon graduation, therapists will be able to provide specialized care for this rapidly growing patient population, and will be eligible to sit for the clinical specialist exam in orthopedic physical therapy offered by the American Physical Therapy Association

"Through its roster of education programs, including professional development programs for teaching artists, the New Victory Theater has enhanced the lives of children, their families and arts educators," said Robert L. Lynch, president and CEO of Americans for the Arts. "New Victory sets a new standard at all levels of the teaching pyramid, providing programs for students of all ages and the adults who affect their lives."

Known as New York City's ultimate theater for kids and families, the New Victory (or, New Vic) offers a rich theater experience in the heart of Times Square, presenting more than a dozen professional theater shows from the United States and abroad each season, and dozens of innovative year-round workshops ranging from theater, dance, and puppetry, to improvisation, theater games, and circus skills. For many students, New Vic shows are their first live performance experience. The company also supports students by taking theater into hundreds of classrooms each school year, preparing students for the programs they will see, and talking with them after their visits.

Teachers and family members get to take part too, through innovative programs that bring adults into the mix. In addition to creating materials for teachers that support curriculum connections to the programs students will experience, New Vic has a team of professional, highly skilled and creative artists to co-facilitate the activities of its Education Department. It was this Teaching Artist team that nominated New Vic for the 2008 Award.

"New Victory Theater has changed my life and those of my fellow teaching artists, and has impacted the lives of myriad children who have been introduced to quality programming throughout the school year," wrote one New Vic teaching artist.

Also accepting the award with Dr. Demas was Mary Rose Lloyd, Director of Programming, and New Vic board member and two-time Tony Award winner Bill Irwin.
The Arts Education Award is presented by the Arts Education Council of Americans for the Arts.

Americans for the Arts is the leading nonprofit organization for advancing the arts in America. With offices in Washington, DC, and New York City, it has a record of 48 years of service. Americans for the Arts is dedicated to representing and serving local communities and creating opportunities for every American to participate in and appreciate all forms of the arts. Additional information is available at www.AmericansForTheArts.org.

In exploring key prevailing fictions about the AAPI community, the report builds on the simple premise that educational policies and practices must be based on fact, not fiction. Without this basis, such policies and practices will have little value "to teachers, students, parents and society as a whole."

In addition to dispelling the myths with empirical data, "Facts, Not Fiction" goes on to reveal how the "model minority" stereotype is detrimental, explaining that in assuming universal academic strength, teachers and counselors often do not extend help to their AAPI students in the same way they do to other students.

"To successfully meet the needs of all our young people, schools and colleges must recognize that students differ. Institutions must involve everyone in efforts to meet individual needs - students, parents, advocates, teachers and administrators," said Gaston Caperton, president of the College Board. "We also can help these students by recognizing the many wonderful contributions of Asian Americans and how they can assist the United States in becoming a better participant in the global society."

The U.S. Census Bureau estimates that there are now almost 17 million Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders in the United States. The umbrella term AAPI shelters 48 different ethnic groups, the report notes, from such historically different places as East Asia, South Asia, Southeast Asia, and the Pacific Islands. Historically, some individuals entered the country because U.S. employers needed their expertise, while others came as refugees with few resources and opportunities. Still others come to study and then return home. Yet they are all seen as the same studious, self-sufficient high achievers.

"In reality, there is no single AAPI composite," according to Robert Teranishi, associate professor of education in the Steinhardt School of Culture, Education, and Human Development at NYU and co-principal investigator of CARE. "A single story does not represent the AAPI experience."

Jack Tchen, director of NYU's Asian/Pacific/American Institute and associate professor of social and cultural analysis, served as the report's second co-principal investigator.

With such varied backgrounds, Asians should not be lumped together as a homogenous group with uniformity in educational and financial attainment, culture, religion, and histories. For example, AAPI students are evenly distributed in community and four-year colleges in the United States. They are not "taking over" U.S. higher education, as one myth suggests, although their concentration in a small number of institutions may create such an impression. Two hundred colleges and universities enroll two-thirds of all AAPIs attending college nationally, which is less than 5 percent of all postsecondary institutions in the United States. Nearly half of all AAPI students attend college in just three states: California, New York, and Texas.

"Despite the growth in the number of AAPIs in the United States during the past two decades, it continues to surprise me how little we know about the population," said Teranishi. "Prior to this report, there wasn't even basic baseline information about AAPI participation in U.S. higher education."

Another debunked myth is that AAPI college students only pursue degrees in science, technology, engineering, and math. While there are a number of AAPIs who do pursue STEM fields, trends also show that a large proportion of AAPI students obtain degrees in the social sciences and the humanities.

The report was released in conjunction with the Education Summit hosted by the Congressional Asian Pacific American Caucus, which featured three panels of experts, and highlighted the diverse needs of AAPI students and educators. Congressman Mike Honda, D-Calif., CAPAC chair, said "I applaud the College Board and NYU for investing in Asian American and Pacific Islander students through a study of this kind. The myth of student achievement throughout our communities has masked particular linguistic and cultural needs of our young people for far too long. I will continue to advocate for greater attention to this community in the national debate on education, and look forward to future collaboration with the College Board and NYU."

A series of regional events are planned to bring together local constituents, including representatives from the K-12 and higher education sectors, AAPI community-based organizations, and AAPI advocacy groups.

National Commission on Asian American and Pacific Islander Research in Education
The National Commission on Asian American and Pacific Islander Research in Education (CARE) was formed through a collaboration of the Asian/Pacific/American Institute at New York University, the Steinhardt Institute for Higher Education Policy at New York University, and the College Board.

The College Board: Connecting Students to College Success
The College Board is a not-for-profit membership association whose mission is to connect students to college success and opportunity. Founded in 1900, the association is composed of more than 5,400 schools, colleges, universities, and other educational organizations. Each year, the College Board serves seven million students and their parents, 23,000 high schools, and 3,500 colleges through major programs and services in college admissions, guidance, assessment, financial aid, enrollment, and teaching and learning. Among its best-known programs are the SAT®, the PSAT/NMSQT®, and the Advanced Placement Program® (AP®). The College Board is committed to the principles of excellence and equity, and that commitment is embodied in all of its programs, services, activities, and concerns. www.collegeboard.com.

# # #

Mary Brabeck, Dean

Read poetry
Any poetry
Read Maya Angelou
Seamus Heaney
Walt Whitman
And
Adrienne Rich
Octavio Paz
Robert Frost
Then write your own poem

Elizabeth Norman, Professor

Department of Humanities and Social Sciences in the Professions

Walt Whitman's Leaves of Grass: This book should be required reading for every American journalist and non-fiction writer. Whitman was a reporter and it shows. His details and descriptions are not only accurate, they are lyrical, which means the reader can both see and feel them. He was key in shaping an American sense of identity.

Gabrielle Coleman

Department of Media, Culture, and Communication

The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Díaz is about the life, trials, and tribulations of an unlikely character, a Dominican SUPER NERD by the name of Oscar Wao who has more than a lot of trouble scoring with the ladies (a "lovesick ghetto nerd").

In the process, you learn about the experiences of Dominican immigrants in the tri-state area, the brutal history of the Trujillo dictatorship in the Dominican Republic as well as a good dose of odd cultural folklore (both geek and Dominican, if you can believe it!) and all of this is told in a style that manages to combine the rhythm and passion of a poetry slam with classic issues of tragedy common in Greek literature.

Floyd M. Hammack

Associate Professor
Department of Humanities and Social Sciences in the Professions

I recommend Patrick Chamoiseau's School Days (University of Nebraska Press, 1997). It is a narrative of his childhood in Fort-de-France, Martinique, during the colonial period. It gives a view of the world through the eyes of a little boy experiencing family, neighborhood and (French) school; a window in the colonial Caribbean experience. Wonderfully written, and a great read.

Steve Sagner

Assistant Dean for Development and Alumni Relations

I recommend The Lost by Daniel Mendelsohn. It's a complex, fascinating, and extremely moving account of an American professor's attempt to find out exactly what happened to six of his relatives in the Holocaust. He'd grown up with the vague information that this uncle, aunt, and cousins were killed by the Nazis, and thus sought to learn their exact and specific fates. Incredible book.

Patricia Carey

Associate Dean for Student Services

Allen Lightman's Einstein's Dreams, a small book that is timeless. It engages the reader in an element of reality that we cannot manipulate or hold in our hands. We can't make it standstill or go back. But, suppose we could? Suppose time were circular? Young Einstein shares his dreams about time fantasized in different ways and consequences of suppose that were our world.

Robby Cohen

Professor, Social Studies Education
Chair, Department of Teaching and Learning

The Torture Debate edited by Karen Greenberg (of NYU's law school). What kind of democracy have we become if we give a green light for the use of torture in Iraq?

No End in Sight: Iraq's Descent Into Chaos by Charles H. Ferguson is an excellent introduction to the origins and current state of America's latest Vietnam-style war. Every student should be concerned about this conflict and ponder why it is that the US so often wages war. Is the US an imperialist power?

The University Against Itself: The NYU Strike and the Future of the Academic Workplace, edited by Monika Krause, Mary Nolan, Michael Palm, and Andrew Ross. This book indicts NYU for breaking the TA union here. What does this conflict tell us about the nature of American higher education and our own university?

Beth McDonald

Master Teacher
Department of Teaching and Learning

My very strong recommendation for summer reading is What is the What by Dave Eggers. This gripping story is actually a "novelized" memoir written in collaboration with Valentino Achak Deng, one of Sudan's Lost Boys. He fled his village after it was destroyed in civil war and spent more than 10 years in African refugee camps before being resettled in Atlanta. Students will learn about the ravages of ethnic warfare in a part of the world that most of us only know from news accounts. All proceeds from the book go to Deng's foundation to support refugees and the education of girls in his homeland. Eggers, a best-selling author, took no money for the project. Students wanting to know more can also look for the documentary film, God Grew Tired of Us. It follows three young men from the Kakuma refugee camp in Kenya, where Deng spent many years, as they move into their new lives in Pittsburgh and Syracuse.

Marion Nestle

Professor of Nutrition and Food Studies
Paulette Goddard Professor

I recommend Michael Pollan's In Defense of Food. It's a terrific introduction to today's movement to create a food system that is good for health and the environment – even on college campuses.

Catherine Fitterman, Director

Undergraduate Music Business Program
Department of Music and Performing Arts Professions

I suggest students read Songbook by Nick Hornby. It's a gentle, humorous collection of music-as-metaphor essays about the rock and pop songs that have influenced the acclaimed author's life, including "Your Love Is the Place Where I Come From" by Teenage Fanclub, "A Minor Incident" by Badly Drawn Boy, "You Had Time" by Ani DiFranco, and 28 others.

Mary B. McRae

Associate Professor
Department of Applied Psychology

I suggest What is the What by Dave Eggers. It is about the Lost Boys in Sudan walking to Ethiopia and then life in USA. It is heartwarming and provides a slice of life for some in another part of the world.

Shondel Nero

Associate Professor
Department of Teaching and Learning

I highly recommend Barack Obama's book, Dreams From My Father. Given that Obama has a serious shot at the presidency, and he's still relatively unknown, I think that students should read this refreshingly honest, compelling, and well-written memoir of his life. I just finished reading it, and now have a much more in-depth and nuanced understanding of Obama.

Lindsay Wright

Assistant Dean for Planning and Communications

The Places that Scare You: A Guide to Fearlessness in Difficult Times, by Pema Chodron. Chodron is an American Buddhist nun and author of many books about Buddhism. This book seems particularly relevant today as we as individuals and nations confront economic recession, ethnic and religious divisions, and conflict, particularly in Tibet. She writes in an easy and accessible way about how we can move beyond our fears and problems to awaken our natural openness to and acceptance of others.

Stage will work with the University's School of Education in the area of educational assessment, evaluation and research methods to support staff in curriculum development at the graduate level and staff development in graduate supervision and student support. Stage will also provide support as the School offers leadership and guidance to policymakers as well as outreach educational activities to various stakeholders across the Caribbean region.

Stage is one of over 400 U.S. faculty and professionals who will travel abroad this year through the Fulbright Senior Specialists Program. The Fulbright Senior Specialists Program, created in 2000 to complement the traditional Fulbright Scholar Program, provides short-term academic opportunities (two to six weeks) to prominent U.S. faculty and professionals to support curricular and faculty development and institutional planning at post secondary, academic institutions around the world.

The Fulbright Program, America's flagship international educational exchange activity, is sponsored by the U.S. Department of State, Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs. Over its 60 years of existence, thousands of U.S. faculty and professionals have taught, studied or conducted research abroad, and thousands of their counterparts from other countries have engaged in similar activities in the United States. Over 285,000 emerging leaders in their professional fields have received Fulbright awards, including individuals who later became heads of government, Nobel Prize winners, and leaders in education, business, journalism, the arts and other fields.

Recipients of Fulbright Scholar awards are selected on the basis of academic or professional achievement. Among thousands of prominent Fulbright Scholar alumni are Milton Friedman, Nobel Prize-winning economist; Alan Leshner, CEO of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS); Rita Dove, Pulitzer Prize-winning poet; and Craig Barrett, Chairman of the Board of Intel Corporation. Distinguished Fulbright Senior Specialist participants include Mahmoud Ayoub, Professor of Religion at Temple University, Heidi Hartmann, President and CEO, Institute for Women's Policy Research, Percy R. Luney, Jr. Dean and Professor, College of Law, Florida A&M University and Emily Vargas-Barone, Founder and Executive Director of the RISE Institute.

For further information about the Fulbright Senior Specialists Program, please contact FULSPEC@cies.iie.org or consult www.cies.org.

The Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs of the U.S. Department of Stat sponsors the Critical Language Scholarship Program. The Critical Language Scholarship Program is part of the National Security Language Initiative (NSLI), a U.S. federal government effort to expand the number of Americans studying and mastering critical-need foreign languages.

"As a multilingual and multicultural teacher and student," said Villarroel, "gaining the perspective of an adult language learner will be immensely illuminating in my own scholarship which is focused on adolescent second language learners literacy and their aquisition of academic, digital age and global era English."

Ryce is the project director of an ongoing study, funded by the Foundation for Child Development, called "Longitudinal Immigrant Families and Teachers Study" (LIFTS), for which Selcuk Sirin, assistant professor of applied psychology, is primary investigator. LIFTS is a three-wave study that examines the influence of cultural discontinuity on teachers' academic achievement expectancies for children of immigrants. Cultural discontinuity refers to differences in culture between home and school contexts. Teachers, the majority of whom are Euro-American, may potentially misunderstand immigrant students' aptitudes or abilities due to cultural differences.

Ryce's research will focus on the role of parental involvement in math and science achievement among children of immigrants. She will investigate the extent to which parental involvement moderates the relationship between cultural discontinuity and achievement in math and science.

Sasaki is also the recipient of a scholarship from the Japanese American Association Honjo Foundation. The scholarship will allow her opportunity to travel to Japan to study Japanese-Brazilian and Peruvian communities there, with an emphasis on how migration patterns shape their ethnic identity, how they readapt to Brazil and Peru, and what influence this migration has on the groups' future aspirations.

Two senior colleagues--LaRue Allen, director of the Child and Family Policy Center at NYU, and Linda Richter, executive director of the Child, Youth, Family and Social Development program at the Human Sciences Research Council in South Africa--will serve as co-investigators.

The grant will be administered by NYU Steinhardt's Institute of Human Development and Social Change.

Sixty percent of South African children live in households with incomes under US$2000 per year. By the end of 2005, South Africa had more adults and children (5.3 million) living with HIV/AIDS than any other country in the world. Recent estimates are that 14.4 percent of all children ages 2 to 18 have lost one or both parents.

In order to better understand these conditions, Aber, Allen, and Richter will research how household poverty and parental illness and death affect South African children's well-being and life chances.

In addition, the study will test the influence of a new antipoverty strategy - conditional cash transfers - on children's psychosocial, educational, and health status.

The conditional cash transfer, paid directly to the poorest families in communities affected by HIV/AIDS, has emerged as a strong policy option to mitigate the impacts of the combined effects of poverty and disease.

The research team will follow 6,000 7- to 10-year olds for three years in 60 communities with high concentrations of both household poverty and parental illness and death.

Children's outcomes will be examined as a function of community-level factors (e.g. policies, resources, norms), household factors (e.g. poverty and illness) and adverse childhood experiences (e.g. lack of food, withdrawal from school).

The project is a collaboration of researchers at New York University and the Human Sciences Research Council in South Africa in cooperation with the South African government and the World Bank.

The Test of English as a Foreign Language (TOEFL) is taken by more than half a million students every year and used by more than 6,000 institutions and agencies in 110 countries to select students with the English skills needed to succeed. First introduced in 2005, the new TOEFL Internet-based Test (TOEFL-iBT) measures all four language skills important for effective communication in academic settings and includes new test tasks in the Speaking and Writing sections that require the use of integrated skills. In order to gather information about the validity of this new version of the test, the study will examine the comparability of students' performance on the TOEFL-iBT writing tasks to their performance on actual academic writing tasks assigned in introductory writing courses at U.S. universities.  

The new, twelve-month project is devoted to improvement in the teaching of Jewish history in Jewish day schools at the high-school level. The project will bring together teams of teachers from seven to eight major Jewish high schools, will assist them in defining the current status of their Jewish history teaching and their aspirations for change, will provide an intensive week-long summer workshop for all participants, and will carefully monitor progress during the ensuing school year. The key liaisons to these schools will be students in the Doctoral Program in Education and Jewish Studies at the NYU Steinhardt, who will simultaneously implement and study change in the participating schools. 

"I'd like to think that fundamental changes have occurred. The pet food industry as a whole took a big hit, and everyone learned some lessons. Companies across the board are looking more carefully at sources, demanding and doing more testing and upping their quality control."

"The recalls exposed deep problems with food safety regulation in China as well as in the United States, and I see many signs of efforts to do something about them. Lasting improvements won't happen overnight, and they won't happen at all unless people who care about these issues keep pressuring the industry and the FDA to do what they say they will do."

Source: "What are the lessons of the pet food recall?" by Christie Keith in the San Francisco Chronicle, Saturday, March 15, 2008.

Beginning in fall 2008, one student will be selected to receive a fellowship. Students interested in receiving the fellowship will write a special essay describing their reasons for seeking the fellowship and their plans for environmental leadership; NYU will select fellows on the basis of students' academic and leadership potential. Applications are due to the Office of Graduate Admissions by April 15, 2008.

"We're delighted to partner with EnergyWatch for such a wonderful initiative," said Mary Brabeck, Dean of NYU Steinhardt. "This Fellowship will enable us to give invaluable support to the next generation of leaders in environmental education, research, and advocacy."

"We hope the EnergyWatch Fellowship will inspire and encourage NYU Steinhardt's exceptional students to go forward and achieve great things in the field of Environmental Education," said EnergyWatch President Jay Raphaelson. "It's our way of giving back to the community."

Parties interested in supporting the Fellowship with a tax-deductible gift may contact Lisa Klimkiewicz at NYU Steinhardt, at 212-998-6942 or lisa.klimkiewicz@nyu.edu.

Founded in 2000 by Jay Raphaelson and Diana Sweeney, EnergyWatch is the premier energy consulting firm located in New York City. Their clients include Morgan Stanley, Vornado, Sony and British Airways, among others.

Editor's Note
About EnergyWatch Inc
EnergyWatch Inc. is an innovative, full service utility rate and renewable energy consulting firm located in Manhattan's financial district since 2000 and serving clients throughout the U.S. EnergyWatch has negotiated and implemented more than 1,500 energy contracts. Its principals are on the leading edge of regulatory issues - Diana Sweeney is President of the New York Energy Consumers Council, one of the largest consumer advocacy groups in New York State, and Jay Raphaelson has been appointed to and currently serves on Mayor Bloomberg's NYC Energy Policy Task Force.

About the Steinhardt School of Culture, Education, and Human Development
Founded in 1890 as the School of Pedagogy, the Steinhardt School of Culture, Education, and Human Development was the first school of its kind in the United States. Today, NYU Steinhardt advances knowledge, creativity, and innovation at the crucial crossroads of human learning, culture, development, and well-being. Through rigorous research and education, the school's faculty and students evaluate and redefine processes, practices, and policies in their respective fields and lead in an ever-changing world. For more information, go to http://steinhardt.nyu.edu.

Mr. Robinson has been involved with the careers and/or the catalogues of hundreds of well-known songwriters and composers including Carole King, Gerry Goffin, Neil Sedaka, Barry Mann, Cynthia Weil, David Gates, Mac Davis, Carole Bayer Sager, Todd Rundgren, Mark James, Sammy Cahn, Jule Styne, Burton Lane, George and Ira Gershwin, Rodgers and Hammerstein, The Bee Gees, Andrew Lloyd Webber, Marvin Hamlisch, Hall & Oates, Alan J. Lerner, Stephen Sondheim, Leonard Bernstein, Stevie Wonder, Gloria Estefan, Smokey Robinson, Rod Stewart, Bono, Lou Reed, Pink Floyd, Linda Perry, Buckcherry, Bjork, Bush, Boyz II Men, Phil Galdston, Aimee Mann, Shakira, Eminem, Busta Rhymes, Akon, and Hal David.

Irwin Z. Robinson is a tireless advocate for all creators of music and in January of this year testified before the Copyright Royalty Board in support of the rights of songwriters, composers and music publishers for an increase in the mechanical royalty rates in connection with the sale of physical and digitally delivered recordings. Mr. Robinson has also given testimony at Congressional hearings in connection with proposed legislation to streamline the licensing of mechanical recordings.

In each of the companies he managed, Mr. Robinson instituted new business innovations encouraging songwriters to collaborate with other creators within the company and those signed to other publishers in order to both broaden the creative horizons of these songwriters as well as to ensure the highest quality repertoire for his company. He also encouraged collaboration with songwriters and composers in countries outside the United States, thereby facilitating the exploitation of these works internationally. His companies developed new royalty systems to ensure that songwriters and composers received accurate and timely royalty statements.

Irwin Z. Robinson is a member of the ASCAP Board of Directors and serves on the Executive Committee of both ASCAP and NMPA. Mr. Robinson is also on the Board of the Songwriters Hall of Fame and has served as a trustee of the U.S. Copyright Society.

Mr. Robinson formerly served as Chairman and Chief Executive Officer of Famous Music Publishing (1992-2007), President and Chief Executive of EMI Music Publishing Worldwide (1987-1992), and President of Chappell/Intersong (1977-1987). His first position in the music industry was with Screen Gems-Columbia Music/Screen Gems-EMI Music, Inc. (1964-1977) where he served first as General Counsel and then as Vice President and General Manager.

Mr. Robinson was admitted to the New York State Bar in 1962. He was honored with the Abe Olman Publisher Award for lifetime achievement in music publishing at the 29th Annual Songwriters' Hall of Fame Awards in 1998.

About the NYU Steinhardt Music Business Program
The NYU Music Business Program prepares both graduate (MA) and undergraduate (BMus) students to be leaders in the dynamic, global music marketplace. Academically rigorous and cross-disciplinary by definition, Music Business combines the boundless artistic resources of New York City with the cutting-edge inquiry and innovation of a major research university. The program is located in the Department of Music and Performing Arts Professions in NYU's Steinhardt School of Culture, Education, and Human Development. More information is available at http://steinhardt.nyu.edu/music/business

About Viacom
Viacom, consisting of BET Networks, MTV Networks and Paramount Pictures, is the world's leading entertainment content company. It engages audiences on television, motion picture and digital platforms through many of the world's best known entertainment brands, including MTV, VH1, CMT, Logo, Harmonix, Nickelodeon, Noggin, Nick at Nite, AddictingGames, Neopets, COMEDY CENTRAL, Spike TV, TV Land, AtomFilms, Gametrailers, BET, Paramount Pictures, DreamWorks and Paramount Vantage. Viacom's global reach includes approximately 150 channels and 300 online properties in 160 countries and territories.

About Paramount Pictures Music Publishing Group
Paramount Music Enterprises (PME) is the music publishing division of Paramount Pictures Corporation, a global producer and distributor of filmed entertainment. Paramount Allegra Music (ASCAP), Paramount Bella Music (BMI) and Paramount Simpatico Music (SESAC) hold PME's copyrights for original musical compositions used in its motion pictures.

Attendance at the award presentation is by invitation only. Interested reporters can contact Tim Farrell by phone at 212.998.6797 or email at tim.farrell@nyu.edu. Reporters interested in speaking with Irwin Robinson can contact Jeremy Zweig by phone at 212.846.7503 or email at Jeremy.zweig@viacom.com.

Clinton Veering Close to Stereotypes

By Charlton McIlwain

Many suspected that Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton's recent substance-over-mere-words attacks against Sen. Barack Obama smacked of desperation. Some expected these attacks to come to an end once Wisconsin had come and gone, giving the Clinton campaign its expected defeat there. But the fact that Clinton continues to repeat the substance-over-mere-words theme indicates that it may be the last card she has to play.

In her speech following the Wisconsin results, Clinton articulated several contrasts between herself and Obama. The first was a contrast of style versus substance, speeches versus action. With this alleged contrast, she comes dangerously close to the line of evoking a long-standing stereotype about black men: that they are "slick."

The stereotype has a history, especially tied to black men who deal in the currency of words. The idea is that they dazzle the soft-minded with a persuasive prose, but leave them with nothing more than a feeling, at best. At worst, the charm in their speech leaves unwitting audiences with something quite different from what they were promised.

In the blaxploitation films of the 1960s and '70s, the black slickster was the pimp who charmed women into selling their bodies and remitting the proceeds. He was the drug dealer who seduced the poor and oppressed into a chemical high that left them poorer, physically damaged, in jail or dead. It was he whose inspirational orations were used to set a trap, to lure the innocent into the realm of the criminal. The slick trickster can't be trusted; his words are dishonest, serving only himself.

In the world of politics, the seductive power of words is used by black politicians to gain something they don't deserve. At least, that was the story line according to former Republican Sen. Jesse Helms of North Carolina, in his Senate race against Harvey Gantt in 1990. If you are the Republican National Committee, slick and smooth politicians like Harold Ford Jr. use the gift of speech to attract white women and live a lavish lifestyle. Such was the idea behind an ad attacking Ford in his 2006 run for the U.S. Senate against Bob Corker of Tennessee.

When Clinton spotlights the seductive emptiness of Obama's words, is she making a substantive contrast or evoking a stereotype replete in both pop culture and political rhetoric? Maybe the second contrast Clinton highlighted the night of the Wisconsin primary last week will help answer this question.

Differentiating herself from Obama, Clinton said, "We have to have hard work." The implication is that Obama is either incapable of working hard or unwilling to do so. In either case, Obama becomes the stereotype of the lazy black. Like the slickster, the stereotypical lazy black is a prominent figure in the lineage of American cultural and political history - from the welfare queens that sparked the Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton revolutions in government assistance all the way back to the conspicuous representations of lazy blacks in "Birth of a Nation."

Similar to the slickster, the stereotype of black laziness formed the basis of countless racial appeals made by white candidates against their black opponents in recent electoral politics. It was the basis of an attack in 1994 for David Perryman, who pointed out that his opponent for the House of Representatives, former Rep. J.C. Watts (R-Okla.), got paid a full government salary while admitting he "only needs to work 12 hours a week."

The laziness stereotype was cast on Florida congresswoman Corrine Brown in 1992, when opponent Don Weidner attacked her for receiving a government grant for a jobs program, where he claimed she never worked to produce a single job. And former Illinois Sen. Carol Moseley-Braun fell prey to this allegation in 1998, when her opponent, Peter Fitzgerald, said she used money she did not work for to pay for luxuries.

The lazy black stereotype is so much a part of white political parlance against black candidates that the term "hard work" specifically has been used by most black politicians to characterize themselves when appealing to white voters. It's become a way of inoculating themselves against one of the most common of stereotypes.

Should Obama become the nominee, it will be interesting to see how his camp responds to such attacks. If history is any indication, they are likely to continue.

Charlton McIlwain is assistant professor of culture and communication at The Steinhardt School of Culture, Education and Human Development at New York University

In the study, the professors measure the size and distribution of the racial and ethnic gaps in performance among New York City's elementary and middle schools. The data allow them to explore the role of many factors at the school and classroom level in shaping racial disparities. They are able to explain variations within and between schools, using a complete census of students. They also complement their analyses of the black/white test score gaps - standard in the research literature - with a wider focus that also compares whites with Hispanics and Asians.

Entitled "Languages Without Borders," Professor Nero's talk will pose the question: what does/should English language teaching and learning look like in a world of languages without borders?

An applied linguist whose work focuses on the education of second language and second dialect speakers, her research examines the politics, challenges, and strategies of educating students who speak or write in varieties of English that are at variance with academic discourse. She has extensively researched the linguistic and educational needs of speakers of Caribbean Creole English in New York City public schools and colleges.

For more information on the TESOL 2008 Conference, click here. 

To listen to the segment, click here.

"I'm proud of Steinhardt students' commitment to global public service," said Mary Brabeck, dean of NYU Steinhardt. "Their dedication to improving the lives of those in the developing world speaks to Steinhardt's mission to prepare students to lead in an ever-changing world."

The Peru project was the biggest, most extensive international service trip Steinhardt has organized, said Lindsay Wright, assistant dean for planning and communication at NYU Steinhardt. "The decision to spend a week engaged in international development work evolved from discussions with the students themselves," she said. "Seeing firsthand how individuals become change agents, within the context of a developing country, was an invaluable lesson for them."

Students installed cleaner burning stoves in homes where families traditionally cook over an open fire without a chimney. The families inhale a dangerous amount of smoke, which is the fourth leading cause of death in the developing world. The stove funnels the smoke out of the home and reduces the amount of wood burned by 20 to 50%, improving lung and eye health and conserving trees.

Students also traveled to communities to give workshops on nutrition and hygiene and help local doctors and nurses treat patients. Students worked in obstetrics, dentistry, and general medicine, helping with teeth cleaning, anemia testing, treatments for stomach parasites and tapeworms, and pap smears to test for cervical cancer. Without the clinics, many of the patients would not have been able to see a doctor or pay for the treatments.

The students worked directly with community members to build hygienic lavatory facilities for three local schools. Before the construction, children had no clean facilities for hand-washing. According to ProPeru Cusco Site Director Kenny Ewan, "Proper bathrooms are so important because parasites in children lead to problems with growth and development."

All of the students participated in one day of tree-planting to help replenish the native forests of Peru and reduce global warming. The students also worked individually with community members to plant every tree, forging connections with individuals they might not otherwise have the chance to meet.

ProPeru Service Corps is a not for profit development agency founded in 1998 and funded by ProWorld Service Corps. ProWorld's mission is to promote social and economic development, empower communities, and cultivate educated compassionate global citizens.

Considerable research over the past decade has shown that women's performances on math tests are compromised by stereotypes. In over 200 published experiments, females as young as first graders and as old as 22 have been found to perform worse on math tests whenever the testing environment cues them to think about their gender, a phenomenon named "stereotype threat" by the psychologists Claude Steele and Aronson in the mid 1990s.

"This research has always carried the positive message that stereotype threat could be overcome-and women's test performance boosted-by small changes in the way tests were presented," says Aronson, a professor of psychology at NYU's Steinhardt School of Culture, Education, and Human Development. "But critics of this research frequently tried to trivialize these findings by claiming that they were merely laboratory studies that said little about performance in the ‘real world,' or that we weren't talking about highly proficient mathematicians, who were immune to stereotypes. These findings should make the critics think again."

The researchers asked male and female students enrolled in a fast-paced calculus course at a large public university to take a practice calculus test in preparation for an upcoming exam. The course was the most rigorous calculus class offered by the university and satisfied requirements for degrees in mathematics, engineering, and many of the natural sciences.

One group of students in the study received the test under normal testing conditions; that is, they were informed that the test was designed to measure their math abilities and knowledge. Among these students, the women performed just as well as the men, reflecting the fact that these were high-performing women. The surprise came from the second group of students in the class, who took the test under the same instructions but who were additionally informed that the test was free of gender bias. The researchers found that the women in the no-gender-differences group outperformed all the other test-takers in this high-level math class, even the men.

"We now have really compelling evidence," says, Aronson, "that women at the very highest levels of math ability are held back by cultural images that portray their math abilities as inferior to men's. But it's also clear that small changes by wise teachers and professors can help a lot. Furthermore, we know that stereotype threat is not some artificial laboratory phenomenon. It has real consequences for women who have extremely high abilities and who aspire to be scientists. While this study doesn't prove that sex differences in math ability are not the root cause of the lack of women in math and science, it does prove that biology is far from the whole story."

The researchers hope that their findings will encourage educators to be aware of the degree to which negative stereotypes contribute to the lack of women who succeed in high-level mathematics and to encourage gender-fair testing.

Reporters interested in reviewing a copy of the research paper can contact Tim Farrell in NYU's Office of Public Affairs by phone at 212.998.6797 or email at tim.farrell@nyu.edu.

"To an American," he writes, "the most refreshing part of this celebration is the apparent absence of national jingoism or chauvinism."

Zimmerman writes than American sports fans should look to their Ghanaian counterparts for a lesson in celebrating the home team without "diminishing others."

This semester, Zimmerman is teaching at NYU's study abroad program in Accra, Ghana.

"We're thrilled to announce this scholarship, which will provide essential financial support for young female film composers who represent the next generation of leadership in this important field," said Lawrence Ferrara, professor and director of the Department of Music and Performing Arts Professions.

"The Sorel Organization hopes to provide a heritage of greatness to each recipient," said Judy Cope, executive director of the Sorel Organization. "Film scoring as an art form has the power to touch many lives. Encouragement is our patrons' legacy."

Claudette Sorel, who founded the charity in honor of her parents, was a child piano prodigy who graduated from the Juilliard School and became an internationally acclaimed concert pianist. She was a distinguished professor of piano at SUNY, Fredonia. The mission of the Elizabeth and Michel Sorel Charitable Organization is to keep musical excellence alive and to help stretch the boundaries for women in music.

Press contact: Tim Farrell, 212.998.6797, tim.farrell@nyu.edu

"The immigrant body is a displaced body--it reveals its habits much more than a body at home, because you can see the social friction," Professor Ray said in the article. "The ethnic restaurant is one of the few places where the native and the immigrant interact substantively in our society." 

From the upscale Devi in Union Square to the famous Jackson Diner in Jackson Heights, Queens, Ray discusses the cultural and sociological forces at play at each of the restaurants and within immigrant culture in general.

To read the full text of the article, click here. 

Last month thousands of our best and brightest high-school students found out whether they had been accepted by early decision to the colleges of their choice. Each had spent weeks poring over application forms, polishing essays, and agonizing over where to submit an application - a promise to matriculate at one institution, forsaking all others, in exchange for often considerably better odds of admission and a couple fewer months of worry about where they would spend their college years.

The applicants' anxiety was unwarranted - and it was also deceptive. Even before the applications were mailed, most of the decisions had been more or less preordained by social class.

I recently spent a year and a half in the admissions office of a highly selective Eastern college as an ethnographer, seeking to understand just how admissions officers make their decisions. I accompanied them on recruitment trips to high schools and college fairs, helped manage their offices' relentless current of visitors and mail, and observed them deliberate the fate of literally thousands of applicants.

What I found was consistent with the American ideal of educational meritocracy. I saw admissions officers who invariably made the quality of high-school transcripts the most prominent criterion of evaluation. They assessed standardized-test scores as only one part of an application, recognized outstanding records of leadership and community service, and were wise enough to distinguish genuinely strong applications from ones that were buffed and puffed by private consultants. Yes, I saw officers give special consideration to applications that were connected to promising donors - it was a private institution and, while hardly poor, it depended on philanthropy for its financial well-being - but nothing close to the shameless horse trading that occasionally makes selective admissions headline news.

Recruited athletes also enjoyed a systematic admissions advantage and often were admitted with weaker academic records. But then fully a third of the students who enrolled at the college in a typical year were varsity athletes who had invested heavily in their athletic skills throughout many years of childhood and were eager to hone those skills at competitive levels of play. In a sense, admissions preferences for top athletes are not really preferences but rather an extension of meritocratic standards to nonacademic skills.

Indeed, I realized that it was not big donations or athletic recruitment that most undermined the American dream of meritocratic admissions, but rather, and however paradoxically, the fact that our dream has come true. The days when old-school connections were enough to get through the doors of top colleges, and when dark skin or a Jewish surname were enough to be excluded, are over. Selective colleges now sort applications based on measurable accomplishment. But in general, only the more affluent among us can afford the infrastructure necessary to produce that accomplishment in our children: academically excellent high schools, rich with extracurricular programs; summer sports camps; private tutoring; "service" trips to Israel or Guatemala; and, of course, the time and money to invest in the elaborate competition for seats at selective institutions.

All that investment means that by the time upper-middle-class 17-year-olds sit down to write their applications, most of the race to top institutions has already been run, and they already enjoy comfortable leads. As William G. Bowen, former president of Princeton University and president emeritus of the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, and his colleagues demonstrate in Equity and Excellence in American Higher Education (University of Virginia Press, 2005), the majority of students likely to meet the baseline criteria for admission to top institutions are from the top quarter of the national income distribution. For those kids, the big question is not whether they will be admitted to an elite institution, but which ones will offer them spots. Even while the fate of individual applicants at particular colleges remains uncertain until decision letters are mailed, the overall distribution of outcomes is heavily skewed in favor of affluent applicants. That is not the result of discrimination by admissions officers, but rather the consequence of privileged families deftly playing by the rules of the meritocratic game.

My research convinced me that the ever-more-frenzied activity surrounding selective admissions is essentially ceremonial - an elaborate national ritual of just desserts. The fact that the fates of particular applicants at particular colleges remain uncertain until the end enables us to believe that the winners earn their victories in a fair game. That is how the anxiety that attends the application season is deceptive: It encourages those who experience it to believe that the outcomes of the process are considerably more uncertain than they actually are.

More perniciously perhaps, the feverishness of each year's application season allows us to take comfort in modest reforms that mostly only tinker with that process. Some recent fixes at selective institutions - eliminating early decision, making the SAT an optional component of applications, or, a bit more radically, proposals to replace individualized selection with a lottery system for all those applicants who meet some general criteria - will do nothing to change the distribution of opportunity that delivers talented applicants to admissions officers in a markedly class-stratified way.

It would be far better if we turned our reformist energies toward improving educational opportunity earlier in life. Research in child development makes clear that young people's academic fates are decisively shaped by the amounts and kinds of resources available to them in their earliest years. A national preschool program, generously supported by the federal government, would take us a long way toward equity in selective college admissions. So too would national support for adequate college guidance at high schools in low-income areas and for the "extra" curriculars, like music, art, and varsity sports, that make meritocracy more varied and more fun for kids in wealthier school districts. Focusing our concern on larger, undoubtedly more difficult educational problems will be a tough change, especially when it means thinking about the needs of children other than our own. But the only way to have an educational meritocracy that is also genuinely just will be to make the entire system of college preparation more equitable.

Mitchell L. Stevens is associate professor of education and sociology at New York University. He is the author of Creating a Class: College Admissions and the Education of Elites (Harvard University Press, 2007).

Originally published in The Chronicle of Higher Education, January 11, 2008 (http://chronicle.com) 

"Balance is a motor skill," says Moffat in a "Personal Health" column by Jane E. Brody. "To enhance it, you have to train your balance in the same way you would have to train your muscles for strength and your heart for aerobic capacity."

Moffat offes tips for testing your balance, and simple exercises that can be done at home to improve balance.

To read the entire article, clicke here. 

"The degree to which people are attacking him on his ability to lead and on his not having had the experience to lead, Oprah will have a significant impact," he told "Eyewitness News".

McIlwain went on to say that Oprah's involvement will help close the "woman gap" for the Obama campaign.

Air date: Monday, Dec. 10, 2008

To view the segment, click here.

For a complete description of the honor, and to learn more about Drs. Moffat and Robbins, click here.

At the 2007 conference, Alan Turry, managing director of the Center, discussed his research as part of the Music Therapy Innovator Series. Michele Ritholz, senior music therapist, organized a well-attended training institute dedicated to the Nordoff-Robbins approach with contributions from Center staff, including John Mahoney, music therapist.

Among the highlights of the conference was a clinical case presentation by Jacqueline Birnbaum describing her music therapy work with a young girl who was adopted from China.

Technical Assistance Center on Disproportionality (TACD) project, formerly known as Chapter 405, at The Metro Center is contracted through VESID to develop, implement, and assess a process of providing comprehensive technical assistance and professional development trainings to New York State School Districts that are addressing issues of disproportionality. 

Technical Assistance Center on Disproportionality's work includes building the capacity of regions and districts in understanding the root cause and systemically addressing the disproportionate assignment of various subgroups in special education.  This entails providing professional development trainings, coaching, training follow-ups, materials and resources.  The resources include a Web-Based Clearinghouse and a Disproportionality Data Repository (DDR).

McWayne and Melzi's proposed research seeks to strengthen the connection between the home and school environments of English-learning Latino children. They intend to study the ways in which Spanish-speaking, Head Start Latino families support their children's school readiness through their involvement behaviors and to better understand the parents' perception of family involvement in their children's early educational experiences. McWayne and Melzi hope to answer necessary questions about culturally relevant measures of family involvement that are lacking in scientific research today. The grant from Head Start will help them to find results which will have a direct impact on the Head Start programs in New York City, and suggest implications for early childhood programs serving Latino families and children all over the United States.

Funding from the grant given by the Department of State will go towards short-term, non-credit courses on American studies and cultural exchange topics, in which worldwide representatives are invited to participate. Staff of Hosay's institute have served as consultants in over 15 countries around the world in order to better improve their studies of the U.S. Hosay has served as a consultant for the U.S. State Department in Norway, Portugal, Sweden, Italy, Egypt, Armenia, Belarus, Russia, Japan, Korea and Thailand, and has also lectured at a number of foreign universities.

More information on MIAS can be found at: http://steinhardt.nyu.edu/humsocsci/mias/

Siskin's study will focus on national survey and assessment data and field studies of schools providing the IB program along with a support system, and schools without this additional support. Some questions that the research intends to study are: What are the pathways (and obstacles) to expanding IB enrollment for disadvantaged students? What support structures and services enhance a school's capacity to ensure student access and success? What are the characteristics of students who participate and persist--and those who do not? What effect does that participation have on the students' own performance, and on the school as a whole?

"It's a place where morality and personal life and behavior and social change all come together," he told the Times. "There's this feeling it's an important issue in everyday life."

Source: New York Times, Oct. 25, 2007

To read Adam Stoler's bio click here.

To read more about Richard Bona and his band click here.

"By providing really nice things for our kids, we're teaching them to expect such goodies as their due. And we're forgetting the older collegiate ideal, which prized the life of the mind over the lure of materialism."

Source: Philadelphia Inquirer (10/23/07) 

Last week's hateful and racist incident against a faculty member at Teachers College has left us all outraged, shocked, and deeply saddened. NYU Steinhardt stands in solidarity with the students, faculty, and staff at TC in deploring this racist act. Such behavior is antithetical to the goals of all academic institutions and serves as a reminder to us that, sadly, hatred and racism are forces with which we must reckon still.

I have been in touch with Teachers College President Susan Fuhrman and with Professor Madonna Constantine to offer words of support on behalf of all of NYU Steinhardt.  

We often speak of "teachable moments," real-life experiences that spark dialogue and debate. I hope this terrible incident will stimulate dialogue in classrooms, dorm rooms, and offices around the NYU campus on the need for increased action against racism. It is through our own commitment to promoting pluralism, diversity, and respect for all people that we can help assuage the trauma that such hateful actions cause.

Sincerely,
Mary Brabeck

"We want to be an outside agency that is looking at data to see what is really effective," Arum told the New York Times.

The group's inaugural conference will be held on October 5 at the CUNY Graduate Center. For more information, visit http://nycresearchpartnership.ssrc.org/.

In this talk, Professor Lemke will be discussing the need to combine a first- person, more phenomenological approach to video analysis that considers, among other things, the role of affect and feelings (both the researchers’ and others’) in learning and meaning making, along with more traditional semiotic-analytic 3rd person perspectives. Professor Lemke looks to computer games for how they foreground affect and afford multiple time scales and attentional spaces.

Professor Lemke’s research interests include the role of language and multimedia in learning; the study of education re-structuring and institutional change in the framework of complex systems theory and multiple timescale analysis; and how explorations of online peer networks mediate out-of-school learning and interactions with popular culture media.

He is the co-editor of the journal Critical Discourse Studies, former co-editor of Linguistics and Education, and the author of Talking Science (1990) and Textual Politics (1995).

"We need a paradigm shift, in the manner with which we conduct HIV prevention work," he wrote. "Too often we rely on the tired slogans of the past to advocate for safe sex. But these models no longer work for a generation bombarded with conflicting messages. We need more sophisticated public health campaigns that address safe sex and condom use to which the new generation can relate."

http://nyblade.com/2007/9-28/viewpoint/opinion/

A former Peace Corps volunteer and high school teacher, Zimmerman is the author of "Innocents Abroad: American Teachers in the American Century" (Harvard, 2006), "Whose America? Culture Wars in the Public Schools" (Harvard, 2002), and "Distilling Democracy: Alcohol Education in America's Public Schools, 1880-1925" (Kansas, 1999). His academic articles have appeared in the Journal of American History, the Teachers College Record, and History of Education Quarterly. Zimmerman is also a frequent op-ed contributor to the New York Times, the Washington Post, the New Republic, and other popular newspapers and magazines.

For more information on the History News Network, visit http://hnn.us.

Focusing on urban, ethnically-diverse young children and adolescents who are undergoing the transition to formal schooling and high school, respectively, the work will advance research and theory on intersections among developmental domains and social settings. Plans are to follow parallel cohorts of urban, predominantly low-income families of Mexican, Dominican, Chinese, European, and African American descent with young children (4-7 years) and adolescents (13-17 years) as children enter preschool/elementary school and high school. These high-stake transitions entail major psychological adjustment and reorientation in how children relate to their environments.

The research will generate new, culturally grounded theory and knowledge on the development and experiences of children from diverse ethnic backgrounds across multiple developmental domains, social settings, and significant developmental transitions. In the context of the growing diversity among the nation's children, inquiry into the developmental processes and experiences of children from different cultural communities is needed, especially during major transitions.

The proposed research is the continuation of five years of research at NYU's Center for Research on Culture, Development, and Education (http://steinhardt.nyu.edu/crcde). To date, approximately 1,300 families of Mexican, Dominican, Chinese, European, and African American descent with infants (birth through age 3 years) and early adolescents (6th through 8th grade) have been studied using ethnographic, survey, semi-structured interview, and observational methods. This work has produced publications, 75 presentations, and dozens of workshops, policy reports, and training sessions to community agencies, councils, schools, and hospitals. Over three dozen ethnically diverse students, postdoctoral fellows and junior faculty have been actively engaged in the CRCDE, and the proposed IRADS will continue in the tradition of fostering the next generation of scholars to engage in the study of culture and development.

New York University's Steinhardt School of Culture, Education, and Human Development, in partnership with the James Beard Foundation, will present Mediterranean Diet: Food Culture, Nutrition, and the Question of Quality, a two-day conference to be held at NYU's Casa Italiana Zerilli-Marimò and the James Beard House on Friday, October 19, and Saturday, October 20, 2007.

Food enthusiasts, academics, nutritionists, and food industry professionals will join industry leaders in addressing fundamental questions about the Mediterranean Diet as a nutritional ideology, marketing tool, cultural marker, and gastronomic paradigm.  The conference will include a series of panel discussions, product tastings, field trips, and a dinner at the historic James Beard House in Greenwich Village prepared by Giordano Monni of Buca dell'Orafo restaurant in Florence, Italy.

"When the public thinks Mediterranean Diet, they think wine, olive oil, pasta," says Lisa Sasson, associate professor of nutrition at NYU Steinhardt's Department of Nutrition, Food Studies, and Public Health. "The term ‘Mediterranean Diet' has been the focus of great interest and research in both the medical and nutrition community, with purported benefits ranging from reduced incidence of heart disease to decreased risk of cancer.  This conference will focus on foods rather than nutrients, as well as the larger context of the diet as a lifestyle."

"Over the last few years the Mediterranean Diet has captured the American imagination as both an approach to nutrition and a fantasy lifestyle," says Mitchell Davis, vice president of the James Beard Foundation and co-director of the conference.  "When we think Mediterranean, we think Italy, but we don't always think about the reality of what's happening there. By investigating trends in Italian nutrition and food culture, by learning how to recognize and appreciate quality ingredients, and by understanding the cultural mechanisms behind the choices we make about what we eat, we believe we can improve the quality, healthfulness, and deliciousness of our own diet."

Scheduled participants include: Marion Nestle, Paulette Goddard professor of nutrition and food studies at NYU and author of What to Eat; Lidia Bastianich of Felidia Ristorante, author of several cookbooks and television host; Dr. Vincenzo Bacci of Umberto I University Hospital in Rome; Ian D'Agata of the International Wine Academy of Rome; Dr. Ernesto Illy, founder of illy caffè; Gianluigi Zenti of the Academia Barilla in Parma; and other food, wine, and nutrition experts from Italy and the United States.  Product tastings will be conducted by Louie DiPalo of DiPalo's in Manhattan's Little Italy.  Cooking demonstrations will be led by instructors from Apicius, The Culinary Institute of Florence, and Anthony Mangieri of Una Pizza Napoletana in the East Village.

The registration fee of $200 for students, $250 for James Beard Foundation members and NYU faculty and staff, and $295 for the general public includes a day of panel discussions, a dinner at the James Beard House, and a day of tastings, workshops, and field trip.

Visit http://www.jamesbeard.org/education/conferences/2007/mediterranean.shtml, or call 212.992.9380 to register.

Published estimates demonstrate that affecting energy intake by 100 kcals/day could prevent weight gain in most of the population. A 100 kcal reduction is 5% of the USDA's recommended calorie intake of 2000 calories/day for most adults. Calorie labeling requirements, proposed by the NYC Department of Health and Mental Hygiene to take effect July 1 2007, are intended to allow customers to consider calories in their menu choices. This study examines caloric value of purchases at regulated quick service establishments (e.g., fast food restaurants), before and after implementation of the calorie labeling regulations. It also assesses the prevalence of customers who report they saw caloric information and that said the information affected their choices. In Spring 2007, faculty members in the Department of Nutrition, Food Studies and Public Health received a contract to assist with baseline ("before implementation of the mandate") data collection in 60 fast food restaurants in NYC.

Development and implementation of effective physical activity and nutrition policies in childcare environments are critical steps toward prevention of childhood overweight. In 2007, the NYC Department of Health and Mental Hygiene (DOHMH) added several evidence-based physical activity and nutrition policies for group daycares to the NYC Health Code.

Dixon's proposal will evaluate whether NYC group daycares meet the new policies, and assess perceived difficulties and barriers to implementation of these policies. The study sample will include 40 daycares from four distinct regions of NYC (Manhattan, the Bronx, Harlem, Brooklyn). The daycares vary in enrollment size, participation in the Child and Adult Care Food Program (CACFP), and availability of a cook on-site; the children who attend the daycares also vary in ethnicity, household income, and prevalence of overweight.

For the proposed study, the project team will collect survey data from Directors about their current physical activity and nutrition policies, and observe related behaviors of preschool children who attend the daycares. These findings will be compared to data on some of the nutrition policies collected from these 40 daycares by the team in 2005-2006 (before official policies on physical activity and nutrition were added to the NYC Health Code). Results of this study will inform and guide implementation of these policies in NYC and other U.S. communities. 

The study will advance the knowledge base about how teachers use Standards-based, particularly NSF-funded, instructional materials in mathematics. The results of this study can begin to move the societal discourse about instructional materials beyond "what works?" and toward a focus on helping teachers be able to effectively use high quality instructional materials. This work will also provide key information to instructional materials developers on how teachers use their materials, aiding them in their designs.

The project builds on efforts by the Steinhardt School and the Faculty of Arts and Science to make teacher education at NYU a joint enterprise and to ensure that prospective teachers have strong content knowledge.

The principal investigator of the scholarship program is David Scicchitano, professor of biology. Co-princial investigators are Jalal Shatah, professor of mathematics; Karen D. King, associate professor of mathematics education; Pamela Fraser-Abder, associate professor of science education; and Joseph P. McDonald, professor of teaching and learning.

More information on the scholarship program, and application procedures, will become available in early fall.

Citing his own research, Teranishi notes that while California has tremendous diversity, 88 percent of high schools have a racial majority of one group. Of those schools, 44.7 percent have a white majority, while 43.4 percent have a black or Latino majority. Minority students who are admitted to top University of California campuses are more likely to have attended white majority schools.

Teranishi's research counters the argument that lack of merit by black students accounts for enrollment declines in post-affirmative action California.

"New York University, like all universities, creates an intimate community among the scholars and students who join us. We strive to create a residential community for our faculty and their families. Our interest in one another does not end at the classroom door; it includes the lives of spouses and children, the stories of achievements, and the times of sorrow and even tragedy. So, it is with great sadness that New York University and the Steinhardt School of Culture, Education, and Human Development absorb the news of the death of Tumi McCallum, the daughter of two of our faculty colleagues, Teboho Moja and Robert McCallum. Every year, our halls fill with energetic and talented young people just like Tumi, and we devote our professional lives to them and their amazing potential; we understand in an immediate and personal way how tragic this death is. Our hearts break for our colleagues and their loved ones, and we grieve with them for their loss."

This study will identify the institutional components of a successful suburban school in New Jersey to inform discussions about adjustments to New Jersey's current school funding formula. This study was commissioned by the Education Law Center (Newark, New Jersey) to identify the resources needed and how they are allocated to meet the state's Core Curriculum Content Standards (CCCS). The New Jersey Supreme Court identified the state's most affluent districts as the benchmark for academic success and school funding in the Abbott districts (the poorest districts in the state). Based on this discussion and analysis of public data, the investigators will estimate the cost of educating all of New Jersey's students to the standards of successful districts in the state.

Dr. Noguera has also been awarded a grant in the amount of $50,000 from Goldman Sachs Foundation to develop and implement an innovative year-long mentorship program for high school students, called "Adolescent Post-secondary Education Exchange" (APEX). The mentoring activities for the Goldman Sachs APEX Fellows will comprise both college preparation and professional orientation; and the program will engage first generation college students of African-American and Latino heritage at NYU as mentors.

This project will investigate the nature of writing tasks high school students face in classrooms and on tests and the challenges they experience with these tasks. Information collected from this study will subsequently be used to develop a diagnostic assessment of high school students' difficulties with academic writing, which will help teachers target their instruction to address these difficulties.

Fellow status is awarded to APS members who have made sustained outstanding contributions to the science of psychology in the areas of research, teaching, service, and/or application.

The change of name was proposed by the faculty in the spring and approved on June 25, 2007, by the trustees of New York University.

The new name better reflects the Department's focus, mission and practice:  to conduct research and teaching that probes the role of media as fundamental to human communication and culture.

A young scholar whose research focuses on how new technologies impact privacy and information flows, Zimmer recently defended his doctoral dissertation, "The Quest for the Perfect Search Engine: Values, Technical Design, and the Flow of Personal Information in Spheres of Mobility," an abstract of which can be found at www.michaelzimmer.org/dissertation.

While at ISP, Zimmer will further develop his dissertation topic as well as participate in ISP's larger Access to Knowledge Initiative, which aims to protect access to knowledge both as the basis for sustainable human development and to safeguard human rights.

Zimmer looks forward to convening representatives from the major search engine companies to begin a workable dialogue on how to practically implement value-conscious design in their search engines.

The ISP awards residency and fellowships to young scholars, organizes international conferences and events, and provides advice and education to policy makers, business leaders, nonprofit organizations, and the global legal community. More information can be found at http://research.yale.edu/isp.

Moffat has been active in WCPT, representing the North America Caribbean Region on the confederation's Executive Committee since 2003. She served on WCPT's task force that developed a description of physical therapy and helped to develop international standards for education and practice. In 2003, she received WCPT's Mildred Elson Award for International Leadership.

Among her many publications are Age-Defying Fitness and the American Physical Therapy Association's Book of Body Maintenance and Repair. As part of her commitment to research, Dr Moffat is a member of the Board of Trustees of the Foundation for Physical Therapy.

Dr Moffat has given more than 800 professional presentations throughout her practice lifetime, and she has taught and provided consultation services in Taiwan, Thailand, Burma, Viet Nam, Panama City, Hong Kong, and Puerto Rico.

Dr Moffat is a Catherine Worthingham Fellow of APTA. She has been the recipient of the APTA Lucy Blair Service Award, the Robert G Dicus Private Practice Section APTA Award for contributions to private practice, Outstanding Service Awards from the New York Physical Therapy Association and from APTA, the Ambassador Award from the National Strength and Conditioning Association, the Howard A Rusk Humanitarian Award from the Word Rehabilitation Fund, the United Cerebral Palsy Citation for Service, the Sawadi Skulkai Lecture Award from Mahidol University in Bangkok Thailand, New York University's Founders Day Award, the University of Florida's Barbara C White Lecture Award, the Massachusetts General's Ionta Lecture Award, the Chartered Society of Physiotherapist's Alan Walker Memorial Lecture Award, the APTA Minority Affairs Diversity 2000 Award, and the Section of Health Policy's R Charles Harker Policy Maker Award. She was the first recipient of APTA's Marilyn Moffat Leadership Award, and the New York Physical Therapy Association also named its leadership award after her. She was APTA's 2004 Mary McMillan Lecturer, the Association's highest honor. Dr Moffat has been listed in Who's Who in the East, Who's Who in American Women, Who's Who in America, Who's Who in Education, Who's Who in the World, and Who's Who in Medicine and Healthcare. She is also on the Board of Directors of the World Rehabilitation Fund and is a member of its Executive Committee. In addition to her professional associations, she was elected to be a member of Kappa Delta Pi and Pi Lambda Theta. Dr Moffat has served on a Citizen's Advisory Council of the New York State Assembly Task Force on the Disabled, has been a member of the State Board for Physical Therapy in New York, has served as a consultant to the New York City Police Department, and has been a member of the Boards of Trustees of Children's Village and the Four Oaks Foundation.

The World Confederation for Physical Therapy is the only international organization representing over 100 member countries around the world. Its headquarters are based in London.

American Ballet Theatre and New York University have entered into a partnership to offer the first ever Master of Arts in Dance Education with a concentration in Ballet Pedagogy. This ground-breaking degree is offered through the Dance Education Program at the NYU Steinhardt School of Culture, Education, and Human Development through its Department of Music and Performing Arts Professions. The new program can be completed in three semesters of full-time study. The program will welcome its first class in fall 2008.

The NYU/ABT collaboration is a 36-point master's degree program that prepares dance teachers for studios, conservatories, and company schools, as well as for further doctoral study in dance education and teaching in higher education. Students in the program will examine the study of ballet technique for the express purpose of developing research-informed and proficient teachers who possess a complete understanding of the use of the biomechanics of movement, artistic imagery, and the development of students on professional and recreational tracks of study. Integrated fieldwork studies will give students the opportunity to cultivate professional networks in the dance capital of the world, while visiting exemplary artistic, teaching, and learning venues in New York City.

Unique courses in the curriculum include Methods & Materials for Teaching Dance, Teaching Performance and Composition, Ballet Fieldwork and Analysis, Creative Movement for the Studio School, Dancing Jazz through History, Dance Education Research, Principles and Processes of Dance Administration, and Teaching Apprenticeship. Students can also select from a diverse selection of courses such as African Dance, Dance for the Special Child, and Hip-Hop. Culminating projects for the degree include the development of a unique syllabus with a related research project and business plan tailored to individual teaching contexts.

ABT faculty for the NYU Master's degree program include Franco De Vita, principal of the Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis School at American Ballet Theatre, Kirk Peterson, artistic director of the ABT Studio Company, and Raymond Lukens, a faculty member at ABT's JKO School. NYU Steinhardt Dance Education faculty includes Dr. Susan Koff, director of the dance education program, and Barbara Bashaw, associate director.

"This academic partnership between NYU Steinhardt and American Ballet Theatre is unique in the world of higher education," said Mary Brabeck, dean of the Steinhardt School of Culture, Education, and Human Development. "It is just one example of the kinds of partnerships Steinhardt is forging with cultural and educational organizations throughout New York City. This new curriculum, drawing on the expertise and talent of both ABT and NYU Dance Education faculty, will provide a wealth of learning opportunities for our students."

"We are delighted to be partnering with NYU on such an extraordinary program," said Rachel Moore, executive director of American Ballet Theatre. "The opportunity to marry excellence in academics with excellence in dance pedagogy is thrilling. Through this program ABT and NYU will be working together to raise the quality of dance training across America. I believe this will be a tremendous step forward for the dance field and will benefit many young artists nationally."

Applications for the NYU/ABT Master's degree program are available through the NYU Steinhardt Office of Graduate Admissions at http://steinhardt.nyu.edu/graduate_admissions/. Applications for fall 2008 must be submitted by January 6, 2008.

Additional information on the M.A. program in ABT Ballet Pedagogy at NYU Steinhardt can be obtained through NYU's website at: http://steinhardt.nyu.edu/ABTBalletPedagogy. For more information on American Ballet Theatre, please visit: http://www.abt.org/.

Arum and his collaborators, Calvin Morrill (UC Irvine), Lauren Edelman (UC Berkeley), and Karolyn Tyson (UNC Chapel Hill), are conducting the first large-scare survey and ethnographic analysis of the dynamics of law and everyday school life. The research focuses on three arenas of legal regulation that are central to schools: discipline, civil rights (including sexual harassment), and free speech.

Arum's research study, "A National Probability Survey of Teachers and Administrators: Tracking Variation in Educators' Perceptions and Experience of Law," also has received funding in the amount of $92,400 from the Kauffman Foundation. An extension of the research project mentioned above, the study will survey a national sample of public school teachers and administrators and will identify variation in legal consciousness and its relationship to education.

"You can teach students how to take a less negative attitude about their difficulties. If they remind themselves that [test anxiety] is just something people go through, and it can go away if they relax, they can do beautifully well."

Source: The Chicago Tribune, May 24, 2007

ODS offered this course to provide essential knowledge of dietary supplements to professors and their doctoral or post-doctoral students with a serious interest in this subject. Experts from NIH, academic institutions, and Federal regulatory agencies such as the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) served as speakers.

The ODS practicum provided a thorough overview of issues, concepts, unknowns, and controversies about dietary supplements and supplement ingredients. It also emphasized the importance of scientific investigations to evaluate the efficacy, safety, and value of these products for health promotion and disease prevention and treatment, as well as how to carry out this type of research.

On May 23rd participants spent the day at the U.S. Dept. of Health and Human Services in Washington, D.C., to meet with representatives from professional associations, media, the dietary supplement industry, and consumer advocacy groups that study, advocate, regulate, or educate about dietary supplements.

The pair has designed a pilot study to conduct an investigation of the specific and unique ways that Latino families support children's school readiness through their involvement behaviors. Integrating quantitative and qualitative research methods, the study aims to understand Latino parents' conceptualization of family involvement in their children's early educational experiences; to develop a culturally-relevant, multidimensional measure of family involvement; and to examine the culturally-relevant construct of family involvement in relation to important areas of school readiness.

The knowledge gained from this study has the potential to inform the design of culturally responsive family involvement programs to enhance child development within New York City's Child Care and Head Start systems and will have implications for early childhood programs serving Latino families and children across the nation.

The annual Competition, which began in 2000, was inspired by TCM's commitment to film preservation. Entrants submit a 60 second film score for a silent film. Following a round of judging by industry experts, ten semi-finalists are named. The winner will receive the opportunity to compose a musical score for the silent film "Beau Brummel," with a premiere on Turner Classic Movies. 

For more information, visit www.turnerclassicmovies-yfcc.com.

With her husband, John Sidtis, a research scientist with the Nathan Kline Institute for Psychiatric Research, Professor Van Lancker Sidtis has been using a novel approach to functional brain imaging and sophisticated acoustic analysis of Parkinsonian speech in subjects with deep brain stimulation. Her work is supported by the NIH and has involved graduate students from NYU and Columbia.