“We look for students who are passionate about wanting to be leaders and wanting to act on ideas,” explains Sally Reis, a faculty leader with the BOLD Women’s Leadership Network and UConn Board of Trustees Distringuished Professor in the Neag School of Education. “Some are very outgoing, some are quiet. But it’s that focused, intense drive to succeed, do good work, and change the world in a good way that we hope to find.”

“On my way to school when I was younger, I used to pick up the newspaper Metro Boston at the local train station or at Dunkin’, flip to the sports section, and clip out pictures of the Celtics players like Ray Allen to use as a bookmark,” says Wura Olusekun ’16 MS. “Sports and education have really been the two foundations of my life.” Now manager of community engagement for the National Basketball Association’s Boston Celtics, Olusekun works for the same team whose players’ photos used to mark which chapter she’d just read.

Throughout the academic year, the Neag School is proud to share the latest achievements of its faculty, staff, students, and alumni. Explore their most recent promotions, awards, retirements, publications, and more.

This month, the University of Connecticut’s Neag School of Education awarded alumni for their work in the field.

For the past 25 years, Neag has given out eight awards, with the recipients being chosen by the school’s alumni board. Categories which the awards fall under include outstanding school educator, outstanding school administrator, outstanding diversity equity and inclusion professional and more.

For the past six years, I have taught a college course on sports and social justice, starting at my alma mater, the University of Pennsylvania, and then at Yale University and currently, at the University of Connecticut. Inspired by topics that were targeted by the “stick to sports” mantra, the class was an opportunity to engage the next generation on the intersection of sport and society. It has been shaped by and vetted through years of academic research, current events, personal experience, and student feedback.

Chris Rock is taking full advantage of Will Smith’s inability to cope with his emotions, demonstrated when he slapped Rock during last year’s Oscars event. Almost a year later, Rock used the incident to both open and close his recent Netflix stand-up special, for which he was reportedly paid 40 million. There were moments of different comedic threads woven throughout the special, but a central focus was on that slap. Will Smith’s mistake may have made him the brunt of a lot of jokes and decreased his popularity in the short-term. This A-list actor, however, is not going to be canceled for life based on his lapse in effective emotion-coping.

Puppets are wonderful teaching tools—they are appealing and accessible, and they can be proxies on sensitive topics, expressing feelings and acting out scenarios the humans around them sometimes can’t. At the University of Connecticut, educators, researchers, and puppeteers made a video series called Feel Your Best Self to teach simple evidence-backed strategies that help elementary school students with self-regulation and emotional intelligence—through puppets.

In March 2022, coinciding with Sheryl Sandberg’s announcement she was leaving as Facebook’s COO, The New York Times did a retrospective of the legacy of her book Lean In: Women, Work, and the Will to Lead. While acknowledging that the book provided inspiration to many, it also highlighted the more problematic part of the book’s message—that, in the end, the only real thing holding women back is themselves.

This newly expanded partnership between the Neag School of Education and Division of Athletics helps students score valuable career-building experience

A University of Connecticut professor has received a $10 million federal grant to improve the equity of programs administered to children with disabilities and their families through the school’s new Early Childhood Intervention Personnel Development Equity Center. Mary Beth Bruder, a professor at the UConn School of Medicine and the UConn Neag School of Education, will establish the center, which will work to create more equity in early childhood intervention access, especially those who have traditionally been underserved.