Two Neag School faculty members in the Department of Educational Leadership have recently received funding — totaling more than $2 million — from the U.S. Department of Education’s Institute of Education Sciences (IES), as part of the latest round of grants issued by the National Center for Education Research (NCER)’s Education Research Grants Program.

What if we, as instructional leaders, supported creativity in teaching and learning? I mean really supported it. In short, we would see ourselves taking beautiful risks. Creativity expert and professor Ron Beghetto pens this blog post.

With 80 students currently majoring in the University’s human rights undergraduate program and another 40 to 50 enrolled as human rights minors, UConn stands out as one of just a handful of universities in the nation offering a degree program in the field of human rights.

But educating students in human rights issues need not be exclusive to college campuses, as Glenn Mitoma, assistant professor of human rights and curriculum and instruction, can attest.

As you watch this year’s summer Olympics, pay attention to the athletes from smaller countries. There’s a good reason why some countries manage to produce elite athletes consistently, even though they’re drawing from populations much smaller than those of China, Brazil, or the U.S. They cultivate them differently.

“We have spent billions, passing endless pieces of reform legislation at the state and national level — yet still we have not succeeded in supporting and enhancing the teaching profession to the degree we must if we are to achieve the lofty goals all of us have for our nation’s schools,” says Richard L. Schwab, former dean of the Neag School and a longtime commissioner for The National Commission on Teaching and America’s Future (NCTAF).

Middle and high school teachers are on campus this week learning how to use genocide and human rights education to address complex historical and current issues. The program – The Upstander Academy: Intellectual Humility in Public Discourse Summer Institute – was developed by the Thomas J. Dodd Research Center and the Upstander Project, with assistance from secondary educators in Connecticut.

Neag School alum Amanda Slavin ’08 (ED), ’09 MA has taken the skills she learned in the Integrated Bachelor’s/Master’s program and is now applying them in a career in marketing as CEO and founder of Las Vegas-based startup Catalyst Creativ. This month, Teach.com — an educational web resource for information on becoming a great teacher in any state across the country — features Slavin in its “8 Questions” series, which showcases teachers who have transitioned their classroom skills into new and exciting careers in, and beyond, the field of education.

Like other programs, our teacher preparation program at the University of Connecticut Neag School of Education has long struggled to recruit as many students of color as we’d like. That’s why we joined AACTE’s networked improvement community (NIC) in 2014 to collaborate with other institutions on strategies to bring more Black and Latino men into our programs. Already, we have nearly doubled the percentage of students of color in our program, going from roughly 12% of students to 20% of our entering cohort this fall.

This fall, the Neag School is joined by the second cohort of Dean’s Doctoral Scholars. The Dean’s Doctoral Scholars Program at UConn’s Neag School of Education provides full tuition for four years plus a stipend to promising Ph.D. candidates.

In this new series, the Neag School will be catching up with students, alumni, faculty, and others throughout the year to give you a glimpse into their Neag School experience and their current career, research, or community activities. Recent Neag School alum Josué Lopez ’15 MA will be returning this fall as a Ph.D. student and as part of the second cohort of Dean’s Doctoral Scholars at the Neag School.