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.