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Part of the Center’s mission is to recruit
Eminent Scholars, nationally recognized experts who have made
important contributions in urban education. These scholars
are not merely theoreticians, but true practitioners who have
proven themselves in the classroom. The Center has four permanent
Eminent Scholars, two of which are currently filled. We are in the process of seeking candidates for the other two positions.
Dr. Lisa Delpit
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Dr. Lisa Delpit, Knight Eminent Scholar and Executive Director for the Center for Urban Education & Innovation, received the award for Outstanding Contribution to Education
in 1993 from Harvard Graduate School
of Education, which hailed her as a “visionary scholar
and woman of courage.” Her work on school-community
relations and cross-cultural communication was cited when
she received her MacArthur “Genius” Fellowship.
Most recently, Delpit has been selected as the Antioch College
Horace Mann Humanity
Award recipient for 2003, which recognizes a contribution
by alumni of Antioch College who have "won some victory
for humanity." She describes her strongest focus
as "finding
ways and means to best educate urban students, particularly
African-American, and other students of color." Among
her publications are Other People’s Children: Cultural
Conflict in the Classroom (1995); The Real Ebonics
Debate: Power, Language, and the Education of African-American
Children (co-edited with Theresa Perry, 1998); and The
Skin That We Speak: Thoughts on Language and Culture in
the
Classroom (co-edited with Joanne Kilgour Dowdy, 2002).
See
recent speaking engagements of Dr. Lisa Delpit, The Center’s
Executive Director/Eminent Scholar
Dr. Bob Moses
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In the 1960s, Knight Eminent Scholar, left his comfortable job at a New York private school to become the field director of Mississippi 's Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. On one of the Civil Rights Movement's bloodiest battlegrounds, he led thousands of activists in a door-to-door campaign to register black sharecroppers. Twenty years after becoming the driving force in the libera tion of the Mississippi Delta, Moses came back to teach math, something totally different from political activism, yet very much the same. As he details in his book Radical Equations: Math Literacy and Civil Rights , mastery of math is just as important in the fight against oppression as the right to vote: “If you want to be a citizen of this country... you have to know math. Technology today brings math on equal footing with reading and writing.” To raise achievement in math, Moses developed The Algebra Project, an organization of more than 300 teachers across the country that serves 10,000 students. The Project Curriculum makes math accessible by basing it on “physical events” that students translate into conversational “people talk” and finally mathematical expressions.
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