Fall 2023
Greetings from the Chair
Hello. As the temperatures grow colder and we wake to frosty mornings, I am excited to provide you with updates on what has been happening in Graduate Education over the past several months. Since I communicated with you in the spring semester, our students, staff, faculty, and alumni have been very busy.
Much like the approaching holidays, a theme of this fall Graduate Education e-newsletter is connectedness. At a time when education, particularly K-12 education, is a battleground, we have continued to forge deep connections across local, state, and global communities. As an integral part of the University of Richmond, we view our role as helping to promote the ideal that education is a fundamental right for every K-12 student.
In this edition of the newsletter, you will see how we are establishing connections in communities that are just a few miles from our campus to those that are thousands of miles away. Below is a summary of these connections. I encourage you to read and view the pictures in the newsletter:
- The REB Foundation has awarded the University of Richmond’s Provisional License Support (PLuS) program an additional $188,294 in continued resources to support our efforts to address critical teacher shortages in K-12 education. PLuS addresses teacher shortages in under-resourced schools through mentoring, coaching, and financial support for academic coursework. Through PLuS, we continue to assist teachers in our local school divisions by providing provisional license coursework and quality advising that will hopefully lead to licensure.
- Faculty and staff are actively engaged with local schools and communities through a variety of innovative programs such as Teacher LEAD, Next Generation Leadership Academy, and our Partners in the Arts.
- Faculty are busy publishing their research in academic journals, books, and local periodicals on issues that connect disparate groups in education and in our communities. One of our colleagues, Dr. Kate Cassada, is even writing a continual series of articles on K-12 education for the national publication Forbes.
- Our students continue to be our focus and passion in classes, internships, advising, and capstones. Since we have students at various levels – professional development, undergraduate, graduate — we are always looking for ways to connect them and bring our diverse student population together.
- Our alumni are enjoying incredible successes, so please be sure to check out (and follow) @URleaders on X (Twitter).
Through the visuals and the narratives in this e-newsletter, you will see the impact that our connectedness is having on communities and schools. I have always appreciated how a former-colleague described education, “as a human-to-human endeavor.” I think in this e-newsletter you will see how we are striving to make our work an example of those human connections.
In previous newsletters, I have closed with this thought and will reiterate it in this one — we all should go out of our way to thank K-12 teachers, staff, coaches, and school leaders. In such a challenging environment, they deserve our praise and gratitude for the work that they do each and every day. And, if you know anyone who wants to be a future teacher, school leader or just take a class — make sure you tell them about our wonderfully connected Spider family!
Have a great end to the semester!
