CT Insider (Alan Marcus, who has worked with Walter Woodward, is mentioned)
Neag School Hosts Panel in Honor of 50th Anniversary of Title IX
To commemorate the 50th Anniversary of Title IX’s passage this June, the University of Connecticut’s Human Rights Institute, in collaboration with the Neag School of Education Sport Management Program, recently hosted a “Beyond the Field” roundtable discussing the past, present, and future of the landmark gender equity legislation.
Experts of Title IX were invited, along with women athletes and scholars holding different racial and sexual identities, to discuss what has worked and what should be celebrated about Title IX, while also challenging the Sport Management Program to consider that how they can work to make Title IX better serve all athletes who identify as girls and women.
Neag School Professor and head of the Department of Educational Leadership Laura Burton and instructor Eli Wolff moderated the panel. Panelists included:
- Carol Stiff, President of Stiff Sports Media Consulting;
- Carole Oglesby, Global Advocate and Former President of WomenSport International;
- Victoria I. Mealer-Flowers, Brown University Program Manager of Student-Athlete Support and Diversity & Inclusion Initiatives;
- Courtney L. Flowers, Associate Professor of Sport Studies at Texas Southern University;
- Tai Dillard, University of Houston Assistant Coach and Recruiting Coordinator; and
- Julia Bilbao, a graduate student and member of the softball team at Texas Southern University.
Why Title IX is Important to Recognize
“This year marks the 50th anniversary of the passage of Title IX,” said Laura Burton. “The UConn Sport Management program is committed to making positive and equitable changes in sport, so we felt it was important to celebrate all of the opportunities and accomplishments girls and women have made in sport due to the passage of Title IX.”
“However, we also want to continue to examine and critique the law’s shortcomings, as those with more race and economic privilege (white girls and women with higher socioeconomic status) have disproportionately benefited from the law,” Burton continued.
“The Sport Management program is committed to making positive and equitable changes in sport, so we felt it was important to celebrate all of the opportunities and accomplishments girls and women have made in sport due to the passage of Title IX.”
— Professor Laura Burton
Burton, born in 1970 as a white girl from a middle family where there were opportunities for her to participate in sports beginning in elementary school, is a direct beneficiary of the law. However, throughout her sports career, her experiences were never equitable compared to boys’ and men’s experiences. This is one of the reasons she decided to pursue her doctoral degree, as she wanted to “better understand where there continues to be such disparities between girls’ and women’s experiences in sport when compared to boys’/men’s.”
A Thought-Provoking Discussion
Title IX states that “no person in the United States shall, on the basis of sex, be excluded from participation in, be denied the benefits of, or be subjected to discrimination under any education program or activity receiving Federal financial assistance.”
“As noted in the thought-provoking panel discussion, there is still much work to be done to ensure Title IX dues support all athletes who identify as girls and women,” said Burton.
However, panelists point out that much work is still needed, despite Title IX having gone into effect five decades ago.
As the panelists discussed, this was made particularly evident after Sedona Prince, a member of the University of Oregon’s women’s basketball team, posted a video in 2021 comparing female and male facilities at the NCAA tournament.
“[Prince’s] is very vocal, and when she put out her statements in her tweets, you cannot deny it,” said the University of Houston’s Dillard.
Touching Upon History
While the implementation of Title IX has provided numerous opportunities to women nationally, it also has resulted in negative consequences, panelists said.
“Those in power will always be the first ones out of the gate to reap benefits,” said WomenSport International’s Oglesby. “So, with Title IX, it was mostly men, strangely, that initially were the great benefactors.”
“Looking at the administrative offices within athletics, it’s very skewed to white males, and then white females, African American males, and then African American females,” added Dillard.
Panelist Mealer-Flowers of Brown University spoke about the lack of gender equity at the college level and at the high school level and earlier. Growing up as an underprivileged Black youth on the south side of Providence, Rhode Island, she shared that her city had only one basketball court for its children.
“What else can we do at the grassroots level to make sure that we’re exposing young Black girls and young women of color to allow them the opportunity to explore [athletics]?” she asked. “Because our options are limited.”
If it weren’t for her father, brothers, and relatives advocating for her, Mealer-Flowers said, she does not know whether sports would have been an option.
Fellow panelist Bilbao, a student-athlete at Texas Southern University, said that she and her softball team must travel 20 minutes to a public park outside of campus.
“At this field, there’s temporary fencing,” she said. “We don’t even have a scoreboard out there, not a press box, just somebody who sets up everything for the games every day.”
Busting Revenue Myths
Many attributes unequal pay and unequal recognition between female and male sports to revenue differences. Male athletics are reported to generate more revenue; however, there is more to the story when broken down.
“I think that you have a lot of wealthy owners now in the WNBA and the NBA so that they can double down,” said Stiff of Stiff Sports Media Consulting. “It comes down to whether or not they want to shell out the money for this product.”
Stiff spoke that many women professional athletes are often working in the off-season, too.
“We’re sending our players out of the country to make a living when they should be here, marketing their WNBA team during the winter and resting their legs,” she said. “No other pro-male player needs to compete for an entire year.”
The revenue garnered by men’s athletics also relates to the amount of money invested into their programs, panelists said.
“Let’s put a figure on the money that the universities and cities are investing in their men’s programs that they’re not investing [in women’s],” said Oglesby. “They don’t get as much because they’re not investing as much.”
Beyond the financial inequities in sport, Mealer-Flowers noted that there needs to be a shift on a conceptual level – one grounded in higher expectations, not just a sense of gratitude.
“Men have typically gotten to a place, and maybe some of our white counterparts have gotten to where they can expect certain things,” she said. “We’re just happy to be a part of the conversation and be present.”
Title IX in the Future
Title IX has improved the equity imbalance significantly, but it has not entirely fixed it. There is still much more advocacy and action that needs to take place.
Mealer-Flowers highlighted the structural support that must occur during individuals’ developmental years.
“And if we’re not supporting the people who are supporting these young children, male [or] female, in these underprivileged communities, if they’re not getting the skills that they need to make sure that they’re protecting them as they’re developing, what are we doing?” she asked.
“It’s building the scaffolding, the strong foundation of expectation of ‘We’ve got to collaborate; we’ve got to collaboratively do this,’ but we’ve got to hold people outside of our academic institutions accountable to the same standard,” she said.
While she acknowledges the importance of research surrounding Title IX, Mealer-Flowers emphasizes the action that must occur following the research.
“We have to turn our research into practice,” she said. “We have to get out there in the communities and use our research to make change.”
Educating youth and providing resources are among the ways to take action, Bilbao said. “I just know that there are younger black and brown girls who want to play softball, and it’s just not an option for them because it’s an expensive sport.” She said she hopes to see dues and fees decrease so that people in lower-income communities have the opportunity to discover sports that they otherwise would not have experienced.
Bringing missing voices to the table, expecting opportunities rather than being grateful for them, continually striving for more, all doing our part and recognizing daily progress is what is in store for the future of Title IX.
Organized through Neag School’s Sport Management Program, Beyond the Field events are facilitated conversations around current social and political issues as they intersect with sport, featuring esteemed practitioners and scholars. The series covers a variety of issues such as gender equity, activism, and racism, and expands understanding within the realms of sport and society. Watch the April 20 recording on YouTube.
Feel Your Best Self: Educators, Puppets Unite to Teach Kids About Emotions
Enduring the turmoil of a global pandemic for more than two years now, many of us have struggled. We can recognize the importance of self-care and wellness, but not everyone has necessarily adopted a daily meditation practice or quit their late-night doomscrolling. By now, though, perhaps we can admit to ourselves one thing: It’s OK to not be OK in every moment.
In our daily lives, “it’s not realistic to think all emotions should be positive,” says Sandra Chafouleas, co-director of the UConn Collaboratory on School and Child Health and Board of Trustees Distinguished Professor of Educational Psychology at UConn’s Neag School of Education. “But it is important to be able to evaluate when those negative moments are not helping you feel your best self and then ask what can you do to shift.”
A former school psychologist, Chafouleas is a renowned expert in such areas as social-emotional learning, trauma-informed schools, and behavioral assessment and intervention. Her research and writing have touched on everything from promoting well-being to improving youth sports culture.
In short, she knows what the research says about how we can most effectively handle stress, cope with uncertainty, and direct our emotions — the sorts of skills many of us likely wish we had mastered much earlier on in life.
Thanks to a pioneering interdisciplinary collaboration she is co-leading at UConn called Feel Your Best Self, elementary-aged children will soon have a chance to acquire those very skills in classrooms and childcare settings across the country — for free.
“It is important to be able to evaluate when … negative moments are not helping you feel your best self and then ask what can you do to shift.”
— Sandra Chafouleas,
Feel Your Best Self Co-Executive Producer
The Show Must Go On
The Feel Your Best Self project is unique in its breadth, bringing together a far-reaching network of UConn faculty, staff, alumni, students, and donors from fields as diverse as educational psychology, puppetry, health, and finance.
Through 12 simple strategies bearing such memorable names as ‘shake out the yuck’ and ‘float your boat,’ Feel Your Best Self will teach children aged 3 to 12 how to identify and manage their emotions, good and bad. Better yet, kids will learn these bite-size lessons in emotional well-being from their three newest friends — lively, endearing puppets named CJ, Mena, and Nico.
It was through the Ballard Institute and Museum of Puppetry at UConn that these lovable puppets came to life. Amid the pandemic, John Bell, director, and Emily Wicks, manager of operations and collections, had been seeking ways to carry on the Ballard Institute’s traditional programming via an online format.
“We were trying to adapt our workshops into a virtual environment, and we wanted to make sure to reach out to UConn’s school of education, to think about best practices,” says Wicks, co-executive producer for the project with Chafouleas.
When she and her team learned about Chafouleas’ work, including her research on simple wellness strategies, Wicks says “that’s when we put our heads together and thought that puppetry would be a really good method of engaging kids in these strategies.”
“We’ve known these strategies work. They’re things that we already use in school psychology,” Chafouleas says. “We’re packaging them into a really fun and engaging way.”
Each Feel Your Best Self strategy episode, plus the introductory video, stars the three puppets. Captured this spring, the episodes are slated to release beginning in June in select school districts and expand nationwide over the coming months.
Beyond the episodes themselves — which promise to be comical, fun, and engaging — the Feel Your Best Self project includes a comprehensive educational toolkit featuring numerous hands-on resources.
Facilitator guides offer educators and caregivers guidance on how to help children talk about their feelings and reflect on how the strategies work. Simply illustrated cards, available in English as well as Spanish, give kids a quick overview of each Feel Your Best Self strategy. Facilitator materials also detail how to incorporate puppet-making and journaling into activities.
The variety of tools, which to date have been piloted to more than 200 preschool and elementary-aged students over the past year, allows educators to use whichever resources work best in their space.
“Teaching and practicing social-emotional learning doesn’t have to be a set curriculum,” Chafouleas says. “Educators already have the skills that they need to build positive relationships and strengthen emotional well-being in their students. Using this toolkit is not scripted – it’s about how it fits for you. We’ve given lots of options to pick and choose from, doing whatever works in your setting.”
At the same time, Feel Your Best Self lets kids explore what strategies they like the most.
“It’s not that everybody has to master all 12 of the strategies we include in the toolkit,” Chafouleas says. “We want kids in classroom and families to try it out and find the ones that really fit best. The hope is that every person will find a couple of strategies that they really resonate with and can have ready in their back pocket to use in different situations.”
‘The Perfect Combination’
To create the Feel Your Best Self lessons, Chafouleas and her team, led by alumna and current postdoctoral research associate Emily Iovino ’15 CLAS, ’16 MA, ’20 Ph.D., reviewed the research literature, distilling strategies for managing emotions into three overarching categories: calm yourself down, connect with others, and catch your feelings.
“We took all the things that we know or that we’ve used and figured out which are the top 12 that can work for elementary students – and that could be taught easily by anybody – a classroom teacher, a family member, a bus driver,” Chafouleas says.
“Using puppetry is the perfect way to engage audiences in these wellness strategies,” Wicks says. For example, “with the puppets, the kids are able to see how we do belly breathing, see how we can make our puppet breathe and then have the kids come up and show each other.”
To Wicks, Feel Your Best Self stands out as “the perfect combination” of UConn’s School of Fine Arts and Neag School of Education.
“This project really shows the strength of this kind of interdisciplinary work,” she says. “I think it’s an amazing collaboration that has been a really fun way to meet a need.”
“Using puppetry is the perfect way to engage audiences in these wellness strategies.”
— Emily Wicks, Feel Your Best Self Co-Executive Producer
Building a Scaffolding
Feel Your Best Self came to fruition despite, and because of, the pandemic, but also with the support of donors contributing more than half a million dollars in combined funding.
Jo Christine Miles, director of the Principal Foundation and Principal Community Relations, the philanthropic arm of Fortune 500 company Principal Financial Group, learned of the project through Chafouleas.
“The Foundation’s mission is to advance financial security for all, and we endeavor to fund innovative programs that help people build the scaffolding needed to pursue financial security on their terms,” Miles says. From her perspective, helping people create pathways to financial security can very well go beyond such traditional avenues as asset management, 529 plans, or annuities.
“This program addresses many of the issues that are front and center today for people,” Miles says. “Having emotional health, education around self-regulation [is] an important part of moving one towards financial security, however he/she may define that.”
Feel Your Best Self, she adds, “allows us to prepare children to be a better version of themselves, to know that it’s OK to not be OK, and hopefully achieve a higher form of their potential, while being able to put these resources out for free expands access.”
The Neag Foundation, which funds projects in such areas as education and healthcare, is another integral partner in bringing Feel Your Best Self to life.
“I love this project because it gives concrete tools to children to put a name on their feelings, to understand that feeling badly at times is normal, but there are ways that we can cope with it,” says Sally Reis, Board of Trustees Distinguished Professor of the Neag School and a co-founder of the Neag Foundation.
“I love this project because it gives concrete tools to children to put a name on their feelings, to understand that feeling badly at times is normal, but there are ways that we can cope with it.”
— Sally Reis, Board of Trustees Distinguished Professor
An internationally recognized scholar in the realm of educational psychology, Reis is also the niece of the late Ray Neag ’56 CLAS and his wife, Carole, after whom the Neag School of Education is named. She and Carole Neag established the Foundation following Ray’s passing in 2018.
“The Foundation feels there’s nothing that we can invest in that is more important than childhood well-being,” Reis says. “Ray would’ve been delighted, and we are very excited to see where this will go in the near and far future.”
Also involved is UConn’s Institute for Collaboration on Health, Intervention, and Policy (InCHIP), which supports similarly interdisciplinary collaborations and is handling Feel Your Best Self’s fiscal management.
Behind the Scenes
Meanwhile, even UConn alumni and students are lending a helping hand with Feel Your Best Self. Among them are graduate assistant Yanniv Frank, who worked to create the original stories and characters, as well as puppetry alumni Heather Asch ’90 SFA, Sarah Nolen ’16 SFA, and John Cody ’17 SFA, the project’s supervising producer, director, and puppet builder, respectively. A large team of UConn undergraduate and graduate students from a variety of disciplines also have joined the project, getting firsthand experience.
“We tried to bring in the best people we could find,” says Asch, executive director and producer at nonprofit No Strings USA, a production company that makes educational puppet films for at risk children worldwide, as well as an Emmy Award-winning puppeteer whose résumé includes work with Jim Henson and Sesame Street.
“UConn has all the research, all the subject matter needed to be able to create work like this and really set a standard in the field of making educational content for kids in a really unique way — that also sets the grads up, when they leave the program, with life skills,” Asch adds. “A project like this is really a game-changer.”
Learn more about Feel Your Best Self at feelyourbestself.collaboration.uconn.edu.
2022 Commencement At a Glance
UConn Today (Neag School of Education’s Undergraduate Commencement ceremony is mentioned)
Study: VR Better Than Video for Student Performance, Engagement
K-12 DIVE (Michael Young is quoted about a virtual reality study)
Class of 2022 Senior Profile: Xinhai “Toby” Wei
Editor’s Note: As Commencement approaches, we are featuring some of our Neag School Class of 2022 graduating students over the coming days.
Major:
Mathematics Education
Hometown:
Zhongshan, China
An interest in both teaching and human rights brought Wei “Toby” Xinhai to UConn from his home in China, but he hopes to stay in Connecticut after graduation to work as a teacher – bringing the “joy of productive struggles in math” to future generations of students.
Why did you choose UConn?
UConn was a good mix of what my parents wanted and what I wanted. My parents wanted high-ranking universities, and I wanted a dedicated education program and was very interested in human rights. After learning this is where the Dodd Center and Neag were located, it was a no-brainer choice for me.
What’s your program of study and why did you choose it?
My program of study is the Integrated Bachelor’s/Master’s (IB/M) at the Neag School of Education for secondary mathematic education. I chose this program because I want to make an impact in the future generations and spread joy of productive struggles in math. (Yes, math can be hard and fun at the same time!)
What are your plans after graduation?
Hopefully, I will be able to teach somewhere in Connecticut.
What activities were you involved with as a student?
I was the student director for the Human Rights and Actions House for two years while working with the Community Outreach Office. I also participated in the UConn Gaming Club, which was a blast. Of course, a lot of tutoring programs and educational outreach organizations.
“Meeting different people and exchanging cultural experience helped me to get a feel of encountering the diversity that exists in the world.”
How has UConn prepared you for the next chapter in life?
Meeting different people and exchanging cultural experience helped me to get a feel of encountering the diversity that exists in the world. Not to mention that Neag guided me to get a teaching certificate!
Any advice for incoming first-year students?
Be open to ideas and experiences. And start thinking about financing if you haven’t already.
What’s one thing every student should do during their time at UConn?
Ask professors about their projects or research! Seeing their excitement about knowledge is inspiring.
Who was your favorite professor and why?
Megan Staple, she is my Connecticut mom. Since I’m so far away from home, I don’t get to go back home just for a short holiday break. So, I partake in holiday traditions here through her family!
Two Fifth-Graders from Darien Write Award-Winning Essays for Contests, and More
The Hour (Letters About Literature contest, sponsored by the Neag School of Education, is mentioned)
Class of 2022 Senior Profile: Micaela Collins
Editor’s Note: As Commencement approaches, we are featuring some of our Neag School Class of 2022 graduating students over the coming days.
Major:
Spanish Education
Hometown:
Glastonbury, Connecticut
Micaela Collins’ UConn connection started back when, as a pre-mature baby in the neonatal intensive care unit at St. Francis Hospital, she was visited by the UConn Women’s Basketball team members Morgan Valley and Diana Taurasi. She says though it is a great story, what really drew her to UConn was the Neag School of Education where she will be graduating with a degree in elementary education and a minor in Spanish.
Why did you choose UConn?
I chose to come to the University of Connecticut because of the esteemed education program! I have wanted to be a teacher since I was five years old and UConn provided me with the best opportunity to fulfill that dream. Also, I have always loved watching UConn sports, and it felt like a natural fit for me.
What’s your major and why did you choose it?
I am an elementary education major with a concentration in English and a minor in Spanish. As I said above, I have wanted to be a teacher since I was five years old. I was the kid who spent summer vacation playing school with her old books and teaching her stuffed animals how to add, subtract, read, and write. Therefore, being an elementary education major has been a lifelong dream that I have finally gotten the chance to fulfill. I am a Spanish minor because I have always loved the Spanish language. My grandmother exclusively spoke Spanish when I was little, so I always felt a connection to the language. After high school I wanted to continue to develop my skills, so I decided to add a minor to my coursework, and that was one of the best decisions I made at UConn. The Spanish minor, and the experiences I gained from the coursework, have proven to be useful in my education and future profession.
What are your plans after graduation?
After graduation I have one more year of school to gain my masters degree. While I plan on spending the first semester of my masters year in London, England, I will be back at UConn for one more semester. After that, I plan to be an elementary school teacher in Connecticut!
What activities were you involved with as a student?
As a student I tried to be involved in many organizations. Some of my favorite organizations to be involved in were the WOW program, Community Outreach, PATH, and Leadership in Diversity. Each opportunity taught me something and has given me something that I will take with me wherever life takes me. WOW taught me how to make connections with people who you are only going to see for a weekend. Community Outreach reaffirmed the importance of volunteering and helped me develop into a more organized leader. PATH gave me the chance to give back to fellow Honors students and share advice based on my experience. Finally, Leadership in Diversity has provided me with the opportunity to grow individually and professionally through all of the work that I have been able to do with that organization. While all of these organizations have taught me so much more than I could include in one paragraph, the above sentences are some of the main takeaways that I will take from my time in these organizations.
How has UConn prepared you for the next chapter in life?
UConn has prepared me for the next chapter in my life in more ways that I can count. UConn has taught me the importance of hard work, determination, and pushing myself out of my comfort zone. From classes, to finding things to get involved in, each and every experience at UConn has prepared me for the next chapter in my life.
“UConn has taught me the importance of hard work, determination, and pushing myself out of my comfort zone.”
What’s one thing that surprised you about UConn?
The community! Although UConn is a huge campus, it rarely feels like that. Any time you are on campus, you will see someone wearing the blue and white and will be greeted with a smile. You really can make this 18,000 person campus feel like a place where you belong!
Any advice for incoming first-year students?
Get involved!!! One of the biggest pieces of advice that I always give incoming first-year students is to find their people. It can be in sports, volunteering, or even the moon appreciation club! It really helps ensure that UConn becomes as much like a second home as it can be. I would also say to enjoy your time here because it really does fly by! These four years have flown by even faster than high school.
What’s one thing every student should do during their time at UConn?
Every student should try to go to at least one basketball game in the student section. That atmosphere will really make you believe that we are the basketball capital of the world. Also, make sure to try as many Dairy Bar flavors as possible!!
Who was your favorite professor and why?
It is hard to pick a favorite professor! I have had the pleasure of being able to learn from so many amazing professors, but if I had to pick one I would say that the professors in the Neag School are unlike any other professor here at UConn. They are some of the most supportive, knowledgeable, and approachable people on campus. If you have any desire to be a teacher, I would highly recommend asking any of the professors in the Neag School of Education to sit down for a chat.
What’s one thing that will always make you think of UConn?
The name Jonathan will forever belong to Jonathan the Husky!
UConn Professors Elected to American Academy of Arts and Sciences
UConn Today (Suzanne Wilson is one of two UConn professors named to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences)
Episode 96: Schoolhouse Showdown
UConn 360 (Preston Green is interviewed about his work and research)
