Dr. Carol Lee talks to us about professional growth, understanding what young people bring to their learning, addressing the needs of the whole child, humanizing the field of education, and the stuff of classrooms money just can’t buy. Carol is known for her work addressing cultural supports for learning that include a broad ecological focus, with attention to language and literacy and African-American youth. Dr. Lee is Professor Emeritus of Education in the School of Education and Social Policy and in African-American Studies at Northwestern University.
To cite this episode:
Persohn, L. (Host). (2021, Mar. 9). A conversation with Carol Lee. (Season 1, No. 17) [Audio podcast episode]. In Classroom Caffeine Podcast series. https://www.classroomcaffeine.com/guests. DOI: 10.5240/A990-DF71-C4AA-15BA-2C07-5
Connect with Classroom Caffeine at www.classroomcaffeine.com or on Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter.
Dr. Carol Lee talks to us about professional growth, understanding what young people bring to their learning, addressing the needs of the whole child, humanizing the field of education, and the stuff of classrooms money just can’t buy. Carol is known for her work addressing cultural supports for learning that include a broad ecological focus, with attention to language and literacy and African-American youth. Dr. Lee is Professor Emeritus of Education in the School of Education and Social Policy and in African-American Studies at Northwestern University.
To cite this episode:
Persohn, L. (Host). (2021, Mar. 9). A conversation with Carol Lee. (Season 1, No. 17) [Audio podcast episode]. In Classroom Caffeine Podcast series. https://www.classroomcaffeine.com/guests. DOI: 10.5240/A990-DF71-C4AA-15BA-2C07-5
Connect with Classroom Caffeine at www.classroomcaffeine.com or on Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter.
Education research has a problem. The work of brilliant education researchers often doesn't reach the practice of brilliant teachers. Classroom Caffeine is here to help. Each week, I invite a top education researcher to sit down and talk with teachers about what they have learned from years of study. This week, Dr. Carol Lee talks to us about professional growth, moving away from deficit thinking to understand what young people bring to their learning, humanizing the field of education, and addressing the needs of the whole child. Carol is known for her work addressing cultural supports for learning that include a broad ecological focus with attention to language and literacy and African American youth. For more information about our guest, stay tuned to the end of this episode. So pour a cup of your favorite morning drink. And join me your host, Lindsay Persohn for Classroom Caffeine, research to energize your teaching practice. Carol, thank you for joining me. Welcome to the show.
Carol Lee:Thank you for having me.
Lindsay Persohn:From your own experiences in education, will you share with us one or two moments that inform your thinking now?
Carol Lee:Well, three experiences come to mind. The first was when I was a senior in high school back in 1962. I grew up in a working class family. By the time I was in high school, we were living in public housing. I went to Crane High School, an all African American High School at the time, and I was among the honors students. And you know, in my graduating class, we were taking the ACT. And our counselor, I've never forgotten her name Mrs. Morrison, there was a questionnaire, I think before we took the exam, and it was asking you about your sort of future plans, particularly going to college and considering graduate school. And I remember asking her what should we do if we weren't sure. And she told us it didn't matter because none of us were going to do well on the test anyway. And so that was in retrospect, interestingly, one of the memorable experiences from high school that reinforced for me the importance of the kinds of expectations, if you will, that schools provide for students about their own possibility. Second, back in 1972, a group of us in Chicago made the decision to start our own school, an African centered school called New Concepts School at the time and we were young, none of us were parents, we weren't married. And we started working with young children, none of us had children. And we taught, I taught high school, others taught elementary school. And we came up with these activities, because we started as a Saturday school, as an African centered school culturally focused activities for these young children, only to discover when they came that we had activities that involve using scissors, and three and four year olds couldn't use scissors. And we didn't know that. We went on two years later to establish this as a full time School, which is still in operation. And the experience that we learned was that we had really important and powerful hopes for the development of these children. But there was much that we didn't know. And so we organized ourselves as a professional learning community at a time in'74, when this wasn't part of the public conversation in terms of what teachers did. And we read Piaget and ask ourselves, repeated some of his experiments, and what does it have to do with other black children, we were studying what was going on in schools in China at the time. I can recall, this was the beginning of the new math. And I was teaching third grade, I was trained as a high school English teacher, I was teaching third grade math, and had this new math to teach and realize that a fundamental aspect of my role as a teacher was to be committed to ongoing learning. So I think that was the second big influence on how I think about teaching. And the third is, in my own research, which I'll talk about, I think in your second question, I have always focused on what it means to draw on knowledge and experiences and ways of using language that the students with whom I work, who've been African American, and we were working in high school English classes, and by drawing on students' prior knowledge and language practices in relationship to the work in the disciplines, in this case, it was the teaching of literature. And in the moment of teaching, because in that work from my dissertation forward, probably for the first decade of my work as a researcher, I would always teach and I was as I would develop curriculum and interventions, and would work with English departments in schools, I would also teach a class with the assumption that I would have a better understanding of the demands of doing that work if I did it myself. And where these moments would occur when students I call it like a kid says, a genie, with a little cap on that battle, that so many of our practices hold back that power that young people have and when you figure out how to open it in and explodes, and these moments that would occur in reading novels that we will teach, and the kids would come up with some insights that I had never even thought about, and both what a wonderful and yet challenging moment it was. So I think for me, the continuity across those three sort of episodes of my professional life have reinforced for me one, again, the importance of fundamental beliefs that we have about the power of children's ability to learn, on the one hand, and in order to meet those needs, the understanding that we have to be committed to lifelong learning.
Lindsay Persohn:I love that genie moment. I can picture that happening, you know, so often, I think, we use the term aha moments, which is not my favorite term to begin with. But I don't think it quite captures the magic that you capture there with the genie sort of coming out of the bottle and that knowledge coming to life.
Carol Lee:I would also say one other aspect of this work is in my own teaching, and in my work with other teachers, we always videotape. So I literally have a room full of VHS tapes, and all those kind of old tapes. But what is fascinating for me in terms of these genie moments, is I can look at these tapes, even today, 30 years later, and find that there are these interesting moments that I didn't understand at the time. And I didn't understand from multiple viewings of the videotape, which for me is isn't that as the power of what it means to try to observe human learning, particularly human learning and children and young people as an exciting endeavor. I would also add kind of related to this, in our schools are African centered schools, we have three in Chicago, spanning close to a 50 year, span of time, still operating. In the tradition, African tradition, our teachers are called Mama and their first name, and Baba, which in Swahili means father. So we think about teaching like parenting, the notion that it takes a village to raise a child. And so in my own, I'm a grandmother now... And I'm observing my grandchildren, I have adult and young children, but observing these young children now, from a distance that I didn't have when I was a parent of this tenacity for learning, that from the moment they wake up to the moment you can finally get them to go to sleep. They are committed to exploring the world physically, socially, emotionally. And then facination which I have always tried to figure out, what's, as the teacher side now coming in, what is it that they're learning? What are the conditions that are supporting their need to explore? And again, I think for me that that's that if we think about teaching, as we do parenting, where we have with our own children, an unquestioned belief about their beauty and their power, but also about the enigma of how they unfold in the world, and how you have to navigate trying to understand that. And in some sense, for teachers, it's a more complex process, because personally, I had three children two years apart was quite different than having 30 or having 150 if I'm in high school, and so a need for the broader public, even to have an understanding of the complexity of the work that teachers do is really highly important.
Lindsay Persohn:I think that speaks to your earlier point about the need for continued professional learning. Because I think that we see those situations and understand them differently, as you said, and watching video recordings of your own teaching, you understand situations differently when you have more experience and more knowledge. You can see a situation maybe for what it always was, but you didn't know what it was when it happened. Right?
Carol Lee:Yeah, well, that's the difference, I think between if I do the family analogy between parenting and grandparenting. So as a parent, because I was in the process of learning, I had some sense of the moment but it's only when I've had the retrospect of having done it, now in the role of grandparent, that I'm asking myself different kinds of questions about what is this an instance of.
Lindsay Persohn:Well in some ways you've you sort of seen it play out. So you can can anticipate a little bit differently in the the second go round.
Carol Lee:But I will also add just as this African principal that we have in our schools, and the notion it takes a village to raise a child, I think it's similarly the case for teacher professional learning, that there is an aspect of it that is individualized and personalized. But at the end, learning in a school community, among all the adults in the building, needs to be a collaborative effort. And that's something that's placed solely on the shoulders of individual teachers.
Lindsay Persohn:Carol, what would you like teachers to know about your research?
Carol Lee:Well, my research, as I say, there was sort of two phases of it. The first is the development of what are called Cultural Modeling framework. And the idea of Cultural Modeling is that if we look in disciplines, in the literacy field, my work has focused specifically on supporting students in engaging in complex reasoning about literary texts. One of the things that we know about human evolution is that narrative is endemic to human sense making. We recall and make sense of experiences in the world, in terms of turning into stories, that there are people who have actors who have internal states and engage in actions and bear some relationship to one another, for some purpose, something we're supposed to get out of that experience. And so kids have experiences with multiple forms of narrative storytelling in their families and traditions in their communities, television, cartoons, music, lyrics, etc. And so they develop quite often without any explicit instruction, how to make sense. For example, I've been watching even my little two year old grandbaby, the youngest of them, who will be looking at cartoons, and will start to laugh, which means he can recognize when there's the disjuncture, that is the signal that something odd and funny is going on. And yet, nobody's ever, we've never had any conversation with him about how you detect humor, right. And so what I've tried to do in my work, is to analyze the sources of complexity in a variety of literary texts, and try to map the demands of recognizing those features, and making sense of them with experiences that kids have in their everyday lives. And so, and it doesn't matter, although my work is focused primarily with African American students who are speakers of African American English in that early work, we looked at signifying, which is a form of humor, and among speakers of African American English, that involves simile, metaphor, figuration, satire, etc. And so what we do in this work is to develop what we call cultural data sets, which are examples of everyday text, quote, unquote, they could be music, lyrics, cartoons, clips, from movies, and having kids talk about what they notice, why they notice it, to begin to develop a language and a kind of metacognitive awareness of their own thinking processes, and then began to have them work to apply those principles that they've already articulated to literary texts. And what it requires in terms of I hope, as a takeaway for this work, is, on the one hand, the analysis of the demands of reading literary texts is not sufficiently articulated in the commercial curriculum that most teachers have access to. Again, I do my work his high school English teachers. So if you look at most anthol-, literature, anthologies, they will ask kids questions about outcomes. Tell me about something that is symbolic. Rarely do Is there any support for helping kids figure out, what are the signals in the text, that what I'm reading is not literal, and then if it's not literal, how do I know it's figurative? And then what processes am I using to make attributions between what I see in the text, what I know in the real world to hypothesize some, some meaning? The point I'm simply making is that part of this part of professional learning that I think is part of the work that I do, is that we have to as teachers engage in deep analysis of the demands, what Lee Shulman called pedagogical content knowledge, the deep demands of the of the task in these content areas that they were asking students to engage in, and then having to do the work of figuring out what is it that kids bring to this enterprise. And the point of it is, you can't buy it. Pearson doesn't, does not a critique of Pearson, Pearson doesn't produce it. Right. And the extent to which you can design within a school community, sometimes across things like Bread Loaf in the literacy world, the National Writing Project for teachers, who are not physically in the same building, but create communities of investigation, that is, to me makes the word fascinating. And that is a, I hope, one takeaway for teachers. The other is in, so I was trained as a high school English teacher, I got my undergraduate degree in teaching of English from University of Illinois, Champaign Urbana, I have a master's in English from University of Chicago, a PhD in Curriculum and Instruction from the University of Chicago. When I began research, and began my career as a researcher in 1991 at Northwestern University, I ended up in something called the Learning Sciences Program, which is the first program of its sort in the country and found myself surrounded by a bunch of cognitive psychologists. I had a course in cognition, one in graduate school, but I knew that if I was going to survive in that community, I had to learn how to know what were these people doing and thinking. As part of that work, we received a grant. This was many years ago from the Spencer Foundation, to try to facilitate graduate problems in education to think creatively about new things, new ways that they could think about all the work that we did. We had at Northwestern both the Learning Sciences program and a human development program. And we typically we lived in our own silos, we didn't talk to each other accepted faculty meetings, through the Spencer Foundation, we had a grant and over 10 years, I was able to co teach a seminar with a three different colleagues and Human Development Program. And it opened up a whole world of thinking about the role of human development of identity, emotions, of relationships, as a formal part of how we think about human learning and development. The first 10 years was more or less curriculum, culture, cognition, the second 20 years, was really trying to think more holistically about the demands of the kind of work that we do as teachers. And so I would say attentio, so the growth of the social emotional learning movement has been important. But the difference is that work typically focuses on social emotional learning in important ways as something you you add on, but rarely do we see exemplars of how does that get integrated in the day to day organization of instruction, the kinds of relationships that one builds. What does it mean in relationship to learning how to engage in mathematical reasoning, or scientific reasoning, or literary reasoning? These are absolutely essential aspects of robust learning environments. But again, Pearson does make it, you can't buy it. Right. This has been the sort of second phase of my research is trying to understand what's entailed, particularly when you're trying to help kids learn difficult stuff, in terms of the content that you teach, in ways that make their kids feel safe in ways that make kids feel efficacious in terms of their capacity to work, that make kids, to help kids to see the relevance of doing this work. One of the stories I tell, my husband is a poet, poet Haki R. Madhubuti, he is one of the founders of Black Arts Movement. And our oldest child Lainey is like her father, she's a wonderful writer absolutely loves to read, she ended up having to wear glasses, because we will put her to bed, turn the lights out, she had a lead right over bed, and once we left, she would turn him off so she could keep reading. And when she was a freshman, and she's very outspoken, she was a freshman, she had this algebra class. And she asked the teacher, what is the purpose? Why am I studying is? And the teacher had no answer. And so she was she interpreted that well, there really is no purpose to doing this. And so she acted accordingly. But bottom line, I think, the takeaway, I hope from the research that I've done, and the publications that I have produced have been about one, what's the work entailed and tried to understand what young people bring, no matter what their life circumstances may bring, they bring knowledge, they bring dispositions that are important. And it's not just inspiration to work hard. It's knowledge that they develop about in any of the content areas we're talking about, and the other aspect of what does it mean to address the needs of the whole child? Understanding the world into which you are anticipating this child will be moving into, that you want the child to be empowered to understand his or her power to impact that world on the one hand, but to think about what this means, in terms of the disciplines. I think that there are lots of work, people work in all these areas, but they typically don't focus on what does it mean about teaching kids to read, teaching kids to read and disciplines, teaching kids to write, you know, a compelling arguments to engage in scientific investigations, how to bring all of these pieces together, in the design of learning environments, not only in individual classroom, but in schools, as learning communities, is what I think my work is about, and what I think is a primary and compelling task and challenge for the profession of teaching.
Lindsay Persohn:One thing I think I hear loudly and clearly from your work, Carol, is that when we think about social and emotional health, well being, learning, however you want to phrase it, that can't be confined to a particular time period during the school day, which I think is often our solution. When we need to make a change in schools, you say, Oh, well, we'll give this 20 minutes a day to this particular program. That's not what we're talking about here at all, I think this idea of focusing on the whole child and understanding what children bring with them to school, and supporting them to, to be the best learners they can be and to understand the world and to be curious about the world is really what this is all about.
Carol Lee:Absolutely. And again, just as as a parent, this is gonna show my age, talk about Doctor Spock, a Doctor Spock book might be helpful, but it can't dictate what you do with your children. Right? When I had my first child, and elder woman in the community, and again, this is an African American community, African centered values, said to me that when you become pregnant, the creator and I'm not religious, I don't go to church but the Creator, imbues in your body a spirit that already exists, and that your task, as a parent, is to come to know that spirit and to feed it and to understand it doesn't belong to you. And I take this, this sort of metaphor of parenting to teaching, because more complicated, because it's not one, two, or ten, it's 30 or 100. So you don't do it by yourself. And the joy, it seems to me is in being part of a community in which you're constantly studying these unfolding, unanticipated phenomena, with an understanding that you have to bring all these pieces together. Kids have to develop deep content, knowledge epistemological orientations toward I like stuff that's hard and complex, but they have to feel safe in doing it. They have to build efficacious in doing it. They have to feel that it has some usefulness in the world and in their lives. And the problem is, you can't purchase it, you have to build and create it. And the way in which you build and created in one school doesn't necessarily mean if you move to a different school, with a different community of children coming from a different community that you can simply import, you have lessons that you learn, but you can't necessarily import that directly. And I would also say that as children get older, particularly in middle school, but particularly in high school, we have to understand that the demands for students and for teachers in navigating these multiple demands becomes more complicated, because the child is now dealing in middle school, maybe the two teachers. In high school, what five or six content area teachers, plus the lunchroom staff, plus the security guard, who potentially may have different expectations, and figuring out how you navigate that is a very complex developmental challenge for students, but equally important, for teachers in that you're going to have more than that 30 kids you had if you would teaching kindergarten or third grade on the one hand, and that you're going to have to navigate the consequences of what went on in the class before they came to you on that day. But again, for me, that is what makes teaching interesting. As I said, I have taught high school, community college, a primary school, and university over 50 some odd years, I started teaching in what 1966. So I've had the experience across the sort of life course spectrum, if you will. And I don't think I could have survived, let's say, particularly as a classroom teacher, if I had to follow a script somebody bought from somebody. Not to say that rigorously developed commercial curriculum is not a useful tool. It is a useful tool, you shouldn't have to start from scratch. But to understand that it's a tool and not a script. And you have to figure out what are its affordances and what are its limitations.
Lindsay Persohn:That's such a humanizing way of thinking about the way we teach. I think, in an era when a lot of that humanization has been really diluted from schools, you know, with the rigorous scheduling and the scripting of curriculum into the kind of plug and play sort of mentality I think a lot of schools work with. But when we take a moment to stop and regroup and realize that we too, are feeling, thinking, creative humans, we just have to understand where we take it, where we leave it, you know, and how we get to a place where we are educating the whole child.
Carol Lee:Well, I think one point you made that very important, and that is, is not only understanding the the malleable power of children, but also of ourselves as teachers, and of ourselves as professional communities.
Lindsay Persohn:We know we have to adapt, I think teachers have always had to adapt. But now maybe we feel that even more than ever, with so many new new things to learn about teaching, but much of it is still the same. That's one thing I'm finding is that even though our settings have changed, or situations have changed, it is the people that make all the difference.
Carol Lee:Absolutley.
Lindsay Persohn:So Carol, given the challenges of today's educational climate, what message do you want teachers to hear?
Carol Lee:Well, I think there are multiple challenges, certainly the most in your face at this point is certainly the impact of the COVID pandemic. At the same time, I think it's very clear that the pandemic I think, has only made more visible challenges around inequities, along multiple dimensions that existed before the pandemic hit. And so I think that we are at a pivotal moment in many, many ways of raising public awareness of the need to address these sources of inequities. We do know that in the midst of this pandemic, that from a health perspective, those who have been most widely impacted have been minority communities and communities living in poverty, and how we come to understand, for example, the dimensions of children learning to recognize and to challenge assumptions around conceptions of race, conceptions around gender, conceptions around what poverty means, one of the things that I've often said is the fact of the matter is that most human beings on the face of the earth, live in poverty, and in many cases live in poverty that we cannot imagine. And if poverty in and of itself was a detractor to human development and possibility, I say the bugs would be ruling the world. Human beings would not exist. My colleague Margaret Beale Spencer, at the University of Chicago, has developed a framework she calls PVEST, Phenomenological Variant of Ecological Systems Theory. And in it, she argues that it is not the objective nature of experiences in the world that determine outcomes, but rather the relationship between the nature of those risks and the quality and responsiveness of supports that are available to help people at all stages of life course learn how to understand, to navigate and to respond to the risk of life. She argues, I think very powerfully that to be human is to be at risk. And we have, I think, among our more foundational challenges, it's easy to identify the structural changes that need to occur in terms of the organization of schooling, the preparation of teachers, with the demands of curriculum to address the complexities of learning and disciplines, but from a holistic fashion, access to health care, housing, we really know what's needed. Our debates are over how to accomplish these. But how we think about addressing these needs is also influenced by a more foundational set of beliefs we have about human communities. And the extent to which our fundamental assumptions are that there are no sources of resilience in communities living in poverty, that there are no sources of resilience in communities that are defined by constructs of race. One of the things that I talked about in a conference presentation that led you to invite me into this conversation was the need to interrogate the construct of race and how it plays out in our society in much of the Western world, of understanding that race is in human history is a relatively new idea that if you go back into the ancient world, there was no idea, the idea of race didn't exist. And to understand that race is a political construct, and it has to be studied and attended to because as a political construct, it informs policies and institutional configurations. On the other hand, I would argue that ethnicity because we conflate ethnicity and race, that ethnicity is a much more powerful construct about how human communities organize themselves and pass on practices and belief systems across space and time. That's why in Chicago, over these last 50 plus years, we've developed what we call African centered institutions, with the understanding that one of the things that has sustained communities of African descent, particularly as we have migrated, sometimes by choice, often forced to the Diaspora in other parts of the world, that they have been belief systems around the notion of the importance of the extended family, respect for elders, belief in the power of spirituality, the driving force of music and rhythm in our lives, have sustained people, just as if you look, for example, at the Holocaust of the second, during the Second World War of Jews in these camps, and understanding what sort of belief and relationships are sustained them under these horrific life conditions. So upon simply trying to make in a rather long winded way is and I think that schools can play a really important role in this, I'm heading up a project with the National Academy of Education, focusing on the role of public education in preparing young people for civic to engage in civic reasoning and debate, and arguing that public education in a democracy is the only place where this kind of socialization can take place ubiquitously, if you will. You can't force families to do this. You can't force you know, churches or community institutions, it's only public education. I raised the question, if you look at some of what has been emerging in particularly the last year, nearly the last four years of asking yourself, how is it in the United States that we can have young people coming through 12 years of public education and learning to hate other people or coming through 12 years of educated public education and not believing science, not that one shouldn't have a skeptical view of science, science is not value neutral. But there certainly are, when you find a consensus across communities around things like climate change, or how the virus spreads, this isn't about whether you're conservative or progressive or Democratic or Republican. There's a deeper set of issues, it seems to me about ideas, and the idea of race being one of them of understanding, I tell the story often I give each year to Shriners Hospital, and what moves me so is these images of these children, who, again, as part of these broader public metanarratives we have, that those children that we see are disabled, right? Their futures are set and restricted. But when you see them, you get a whole different sort of vision. So our point is, I'm suggesting that is the easiest thing for us to do in terms of the challenges is to identify the kind of structural challenges that need to be addressed. Everybody talks about them, we know what they are, we can have some disagreements about the process of going through them. But the ability to filter even how we think about what those processes might be to achieve these goals, I think is deeply hampered by these historic meta narratives about deficit and differences among human communities. And that I think this is a powerful work for teacher communities to think about, how does this unfold in the organization of our school? How does it unfold in terms of who's teaching it? Who's doing what? How does it unfold in terms of our discipline policies? How does it unfold in terms of the content and focus and scope of our curriculum that we all in our own way, have I think, powerful opportunities, particularly at this moment in time, to really begin to, to critically examine ideas that we take for granted, that are not marked, and so they go unnoticed, which is part of what gives them power.
Lindsay Persohn:I do hope that teachers will take this opportunity to to look around in their their own school environments and the children they work with and try to identify some of those hidden structures, the things we don't know we think with and determine not only what's the issue here, but how can we begin to affect some kind of change?
Carol Lee:Absolutely.
Lindsay Persohn:Carol, I could talk to you all day, you are just a delightful person to speak with. And you give us a lot to think with. So I really appreciate your time and your energy to share with teachers.
Carol Lee:Well, thank you, I really appreciate this opportunity. And I want to say that this is a very powerful exemplar that you are presenting. So often in the academy, we stay in our own silo, and don't really reach out in terms of interacting with the broader community that really is the foundation for the reason we do the work in the first place. So congratulations to you.
Lindsay Persohn:Thank you so much. Dr. Carol D. Lee is known for her work addressing cultural supports for learning that include a broad ecological focus with attention to language and literacy and African American youth. Carol is a member of the National Academy of Education in the United States, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, a Fellow of the American Educational Research Association, a Fellow of the National Conference on Research in Language and Literacy, and a former Fellow at the Center for Advanced Studies in the Behavioral Sciences. She's the past president of the American Educational Research Association. AERA is past representative to the World Educational Research Association, a past vice president of Division, G, which is Social Context of Education for AERA, past president of the National Conference on Research in Language and Literacy, and past co chair of the esearch assembly of the National Council of Teachers of English. Carol is a recipient of the Distinguished Service Award from the National Council of Teachers of English, Scholars of Color Distinguished Scholar Award from the American Educational Research Association, the Walder award for research excellence at Northwestern University, the Distinguished Alumni Award from the College of Liberal Arts at the University of Illinois Urbana, the President's Pacesetters award from the American Association of Blacks in Higher Education, the Lifetime Achievement Award of the American Association of Colleges of Teacher Education, and an honorary doctorate from the University of Pretoria, South Africa. She has led three international delegations in education on behalf of the people to people's ambassador program to South Africa and the People's Republic of China. She's a founder of four African centered schools that span a 48 year history, including three charter schools under the umbrella of the Betsy Shibez International Charter Schools, where she serves as a chair for the Board of Directors. Her 50 plus year career includes work as an English language arts teacher at the high school and community college levels, a primary grade teacher, and a university professor. She's the author or co editor of three books, the most recent Culture, Literacy and Learning, Taking Bloom in the Midst of the Whirlwind, four monographs, and she's published over 60 journal articles and book or handbook chapters in the field of education. Dr. Lee is Professor Emeritus of Education in the School of Sducation and Social Policy, and in African American Studies at Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois. For the good of all students, good research should inform good practice and vice versa. Listeners are invited to respond to our guests, learn more about our guests research, and suggest a topic for an upcoming episode through this podcast's website at ClassroomCaffiene.com. If you've learned something today or just enjoyed listening, please subscribe to this podcast. I raise my mug to you teachers. Thanks for joining me.