After a year of careful planning, the Neag School of Education’s Two Summers Educational Technology program and the UConn School of Fine Art’s Digital Media and Design (DMD) program co-hosted the inaugural Frontiers in Playful Learning conference from June 1 – 3, 2022.

Might prohibiting religious charter schools amount to an illegal form of discrimination under the Constitution? The Supreme Court may eventually have to answer that question. “Charter schools are the next frontier,” Preston Green, an education law professor at the University of Connecticut, previously told Chalkbeat.

Soribel Torres-Jimenez ’23 (ED), a bilingual elementary education major from Waterbury, who will present about English language learners and curriculum to pre-teaching majors at UConn. She will also partner with a professor to present to education students about bilingual education and to kindergarten students through the organization Jump Start.

Are school choice programs contributing to segregation in American schools? The answer is undoubtedly yes, according to a recent research brief published by the National Coalition on School Diversity and written by Casey Cobb, the Raymond Neag Endowed Professor of Educational Policy in UConn’s Neag School of Education.

“Whenever a mass shooting takes place in schools, public discussion often focuses on laws or policies that might have prevented the tragedy. But averting school violence needs more than gun policy. It requires both prevention and crisis response that take students’ emotional well-being – not just their physical safety – into account,” say authors Sandra Chafouleas and Amy Briesch.

While UConn’s unique Conservation Training Partnerships program has concluded its five-year run, the environmental projects it inspired and relationships it established continue to support Connecticut communities

Megan Delaney serves as the pre-professional academic advisor for UConn’s School of Pharmacy. She works with first- and second-year students from orientation through application and admission to the professional pharmacy program. In addition, Delaney serves as Assistant Director to the School’s Pharmacy House Living Learning Community.

“The concern that I have is the temptation to just say that we’ve done enough, and we don’t have to worry about students in the traditional public schools, because if they don’t like it, they have another school they can go to,” Preston Green said.

Are charter schools like polluting industries? That’s a provocative analogy, but two University of Connecticut researchers explore it in a recent paper. They contend that, while some charter schools may help students, the sector needs stronger regulation to prevent harm to students and school districts. “I would argue that, even if there are benefits, that does not give you carte blanche to not regulate or mitigate the harms that occur,” Preston C. Green III, the paper’s lead author, told me.

For more than 50 years, the University of Connecticut Alumni Faculty Excellence Awards have served as an opportunity to recognize the outstanding contributions and achievements of the University’s faculty members to the institution, their current and former students, and their respective areas of academic discipline.