Nearly 300 youths from around the state brought their best ideas to Gampel Pavilion Saturday, to vie in the 36th annual Connecticut Invention Convention.

E.B. Kennelly School in Hartford, Conn., hosted the second annual “UConn Day” at the school on May 2, an event that included a schoolwide parade and a basketball game with students playing against the teachers and staff.

This town 2 miles from the Canadian border is home to five churches, a post office, an ATM but no bank, Mike’s family market, a hairdresser, and a nonprofit coffee shop that runs on donations. There is no stoplight.

It is also home to the second-best public high school in the entire country, according to new rankings from U.S. News & World Report.

The UConn AAUP honored Professor Sandra Chafouleas as the 2019 recipient of the Edward C. Marth Mentorship Award at a reception on Thursday, April, 25, 2019. Dean Kent Holsinger from The Graduate School at UConn presided over the ceremony and led the toast honoring her many contributions.

Today, nearly every state recognizes and accepts American sign language (ASL) as a second or world language and a growing number of universities now offer ASL in fulfillment or foreign language requirements. The university is working on a partnership with the Neag School of Education for an ASL concentration within the world language teacher certification program.

But Douglas Kaufman, a literacy professor at UConn’s Neag School of Education, said the test is not culturally responsive and inclusive. In other words, it doesn’t consider the variety of ways that teachers connect to students or other hard-to-quantify measures.

Of the programs that do exist in California and elsewhere, there is no statewide quality control. A recent survey from the University of Connecticut found that most gifted classes in 2,000 schools in three Midwestern and Southern states didn’t actually provide much accelerated content.

“Why do dignity and justice go hand in hand? Because teaching for justice requires that we love the children we teach. And to love young people, we have to fundamentally believe that they matter. Mattering isn’t a feeling; it’s an action. It’s respecting the richness of young people’s identities and acting in the best interest of their humanity.”

“You don’t want to be hostage to even the well-meaning generosity of a philanthropists,” said Casey Cobb, an education policy professor at UConn’s Neag School of Education. “You don’t want to be held hostage to their vision or their way of getting there.”

Suzanne Wilson from the University of Connecticut and Mike Shaughnessy from Portland State University discuss their work on the forthcoming NAEP Mathematics Assessment Framework, courtesy of WestEd.