The University of Connecticut’s Neag School of Education is teaming up with the Mashantucket Pequot Museum and Research Center and the Upstander Project for a new professional development project.

Led by Erik Hines, assistant professor in the Department of Educational Psychology, students and faculty advisors from University of Connecticut’s ScHOLA2RS House traveled to the Bahia region of Brazil this spring to learn about the low access rate to higher education among Afro-Brazilian adolescents. Hines is the faculty advisor for the ScHOLA2RS House Learning Community.

A new collaboration between UConn and the University of Pavia in Italy will serve to foster not only opportunities for student exchanges among those from each university pursuing studies in the disciplines of gifted education, creativity, and talent development, but also shared research efforts in these areas.

Since 2015, Monique Duzant-Hastings has been working with students in grades 5 through 8 who have social, emotional, and behavioral needs. Thanks to the Neag School’s new partnership with her employer, the LEARN Regional Educational Service Center, she has now found a way to advance her career by pursuing certification as a K-12 special education teacher — at no cost to her. The new partnership offers LEARN personnel like Duzant-Hastings — a busy mother of three — the opportunity to apply for admission to the Neag School’s Teacher Certification Program for College Graduates (TCPCG) in special education at UConn’s Avery Point campus.

The aim of the University of Connecticut awarded research project is to gather best practices for creating supports for universities and public school teachers to help students of color and students from urban areas to major in music and become music teachers.

Approximately 100 school, mental health, and community leaders from across the state gathered at the University of Connecticut campus in Storrs on Wednesday, May 24, to discuss childhood trauma and the impact it can have on a child’s education, as well as possible strategies for responding to children who have experienced trauma or have behavioral health issues.

Stemming from the Thomas J. Dodd Center’s human rights education initiative, a new partnership was established between University of Connecticut’s Neag School of Education, the Upstander Project, and the Mashantucket Pequot Museum. The partnership is called the Upstander Academy, which formally came together last year as a way to practice outreach and human rights education with the community.

Solomon Schechter Day School students Olivia Boustani and Jeremy Eisen were privileged to present at the annual University of Connecticut Teaching and Learning with iPads Conference last week.

Armed with a new plan about how to make New Haven “the City That Reads,” Mayor Toni Harp is putting a call out to big-buck not-for-profits to help pay the freight.

Harp and leaders of a 36-member blue ribbon panel released the plan — a report on how to bring all students to grade-level reading and make all citizens more literate — at a Wednesday afternoon press conference at City Hall.

When Mayor Toni Harp was elected president of the Board of Education in October 2015, she said convening a blue ribbon commission on reading would be a priority to make New Haven “a city that reads.”