Join us for the March 2012 installment of Chat in the Stacks, as Temple scholars explore: “Is Education Under Assault” ? Faculty panelists include:

• Matt Tincani Profressor Tincani is an Associate Professor of Special Education at Temple and coordinator of the Master’s Degree Program in Applied Behavior Analysis. His research interests focus on teaching language and social skills to people with autism spectrum disorder, positive behavior support, and applied behavior analysis. He is author of numerous journal articles, book chapters, and books on these topics, including “Preventing Challenging Behavior: Positive Behavior Support and Effective Classroom Management” (Prufrock Press, 2011).He is also interested in how policy informs the education of children with with ASD and other disabilities in public schooling.

• Yasuko Kanno Professor Kanno is an Associate Professor of TESOL in the College of Education, Temple University. She is interested in linguistic minority students’ negotiation of identity and educational opportunities within institutional settings, and this interest has resulted in two books, Negotiating Bilingual and Bicultural Identities (Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 2003) and Language and Education in Japan (Palgrave, 2008). Yasuko is currently working on several projects on linguistic minority students’ access to college, including statistical analyses of the National Education Longitudinal Study of 1988 (NELS:88) and the Education Longitudinal Study of 2002 (ELS:2002), and an ethnographic study of linguistic minority high school seniors going to college. Her latest work is Linguistic Minority Students Go to College: Preparation, Access, and Persistence (with Linda Harklau, Routledge, 2012). As a teacher educator, she teaches a variety of TESOL courses, including an undergraduate introductory course in English Language Learner Education, graduate courses in sociopolitical aspects of language teaching and learning, bilingual education and bilingualism, and language teaching methods. At home, she is the mom of an energetic and incredibly social 8-year-old son.

• Maia Bloomfield Cucchiara Professor Bloomfield Cucchiara is a sociologist of education focusing on urban education policy. My research examines urban education policy and its implications for disadvantaged students. I do this in two distinct ways. First, I am interested in understanding the impact urban revitalization and redevelopment have on public schools. My research in this area is designed to provide an understanding of the relationship between public education and deindustrialization, urban revitalization, and other macro-level urban processes. What role do schools play in 21st century cities? How do processes such as urban transformation and gentrification affect policy and practice in public schools? In particular, I am interested in the extent to which these developments ameliorate or exacerbate existing inequalities between students, families, and schools. Second, I am interested in school reform in Philadelphia and its implications for equity and capacity. Much of my work on Philadelphia school reform has examined the ways the state takeover of Philadelphia’s schools and the resulting marketization of the district affected civic engagement and civic capacity around education. I have published in the American Educational Research Journal, Teachers College Record, and the Journal of Education Policy.

BETTYE COLLIER-THOMAS on Women’s History March 22, 2:00 PM, the Charles L. Blockson Afro-American Collection Join us for an annual Women’s History Month program at the Charles L. Blockson Afro-American Collection. This year’s program features Temple’s own Dr. Bettye Collier-Thomas. A professor in the Department of History and the former director of the Temple University Center for African American History and Culture, Collier-Thomas is also a Distinguished Lecturer for the Organization of American Historians. She is the founder and served as the first executive director of the Bethune Museum and Archives in Washington, D.C., the nation’s first museum and archives for African American women’s history. She is the author of the award-winning Jesus, Jobs, and Justice: African American Women and Religion (2010) and editor of Sisters in the Struggle: African American Women in the Civil Rights-Black Power Movement. She is currently a Public Policy Scholar at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, where she is working on a book-length history of African American women and politics.

VINCENT FELDMAN and the Abandoned City in conversation with Ken FinkelMarch 13, 4:30 PM, Paley Library Register and spread the word on facebook!

Photographer Vincent Feldman has made a career of capturing the architectural ghosts of our city, the remainders of our built environment that have been rendered obsolete by the constant changes of the city and nation. His photography captures commercial, cultural and government buildings left vacant throughout Philadelphia. He has also worked on photography projects focusing on the built and natural environments of the Gulf Coast, the Ivy League schools and overseas, in Europe, Japan and China. Join photographer Vincent Feldman in conversation with Temple’s Ken Finkel, as they discuss Vincent’s artistic oeuvre around the abandoned city. City Abandoned: Charting the Loss of Civic Institutions in Philadelphia, Feldman’s first monograph, will be released by Paul Dry Books next Fall.

Since 1993, Vincent Feldman has produced photographs of public landmarks in the Philadelphia region creating a detailed inventory of abandoned civic structures. His work has been exhibited in solo exhibitions in Philadelphia at the Paley Design Center and the Open Lens Gallery at the Gershman Y, and in group exhibitions at Moore College of Art & Design, the Allentown Art Museum, the Philadelphia Art Alliance and the Philadelphia Museum of Art. Feldman received his BFA from George Washington University and his MFA from Tyler School of Art. His work is in the collections of the Allentown Art Museum, the Free Library of Philadelphia, Tokyo Metropolitan Museum of Photography, Zeit-Foto Salon and KOWA, Tokyo. Feldman was awarded Pew Fellowship in 2001. He is currently a Master Lecturer at the University of the Arts and Adjunct Assistant Professor at Tyler School of Art and Philadelphia University.

Kenneth Finkel joined Temple University as a Distinguished Lecturer in 2008 having previously served as Curator of Prints and Photographs at the Library Company of Philadelphia, Program Officer at the William Penn Foundation and Executive Director of Arts & Culture Service at WHYY. At WHYY, he developed cultural programming for TV, radio and the web. Finkel posted weekly columns at Brownstoner-Philadelphia (Philadelphia Magazine’s “Best Blog” for 2010) and now contributes weekly essays illustrated by images from the Philadelphia City Archives at phillyhistory.org/blog/.