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.

Morgaen Donaldson, associate dean for research at the University of Connecticut’s Neag School of Education, says CCERC “is a shining example of how research can make a positive difference. Bringing together researchers from across Connecticut’s higher education institutions, CCERC breaks down barriers to produce research that addresses pressing issues in the state’s schools.

Emily Wicks with UConn’s Ballard Institute and Museum of Puppetry noticed the pandemic-era disruptions to kids’ social-emotional learning and development, and reached out to Sandy Chafouleas at the university’s Neag School of Education. Together they developed Feel Your Best Self, a puppet-centered program aimed at helping “strengthen the emotional well-being of elementary-aged children.”