2013 – DML Hub

Elizabeth Babcock

jpond — Fri, 14 Jun 2013 15:57:03 +0000

As Chief Public Engagement Officer and Roberts Dean of Education, Elizabeth C. Babcock, Ph.D. is responsible for creating and implementing engaging exhibits, public engagement and education programs for the California Academy of Sciences. She seeks to ignite a lifelong curiosity about—and love for—the natural world among all of the visitors, students and educators who come in contact with the institution.

The first person to fill the Academy’s newly-endowed Dean of Education role, Babcock is responsible for ensuring that the Academy’s current and future exhibits remain fresh and engaging for approximately 1.5 million visitors of all ages each year from the Bay Area and around the world. The Academy is home to an aquarium with 38,000 live animals, a planetarium featuring award-winning shows produced by an in-house science visualization team, and compelling natural history exhibits on the evolution and sustainability of life on Earth.

In addition, Babcock’s team of educators develop and deliver a variety of innovative programs within and beyond the museum’s walls. Key education programs include the Teacher Institute on Science and Sustainability, the Careers in Science intern program, and the Enhanced Museum Visits for Students Program for 4th and 5th graders in San Francisco. Dozens of daily and monthly programs for museum visitors, and public lectures offer people opportunities to dive deeper into critical issues such as sustainability, conservation and human health on a person-to-person level. Babcock also guides the development of new digital learning initiatives which allow the Academy to reach audiences beyond the Bay Area, and to engage youth in creating their own science stories.

Babcock was recognized in 2011 as one of the Most Influential Women in Business by the San Franisco Business Times. Before joining the Academy in 2010, she was the Vice President of Education and Library Collections for the Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago.

Babcock has taught K-12, undergraduate, graduate, and adult students in a range of content areas, including music for special needs students, environmental anthropology, sustainable development, introductory anthropology, and adult literacy. She holds a Ph.D. and M.A. in Cultural Anthropology from Indiana University, where she studied international migration and Belizean voluntary associations. She also holds a B.A. in Psychology and a B.M. in Music Education from Northwestern University.

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Adar Ben-Eliyahu

jpond — Tue, 07 May 2013 17:29:02 +0000

Adar Ben-Eliyahu is a current post-doctoral fellow in the Connected Learning Network (2012-current). Prior to becoming part of the MacArthur Foundation, she was a post-doctoral fellow in the Science Activation Lab (2011-2012), Learning Research and Development Center at the University of Pittsburgh. In both of these positions, Dr. Ben-Eliyahu was part of a multi-disciplinary team of scholars focused on overcoming challenges related to speaking across disciplines and connecting academic research to practical work aimed at improving youth’s lives. She was a recipient of the American Psychological Association Dissertation Research Award. Trained in the Psychology and Neuroscience Department at Duke University, Dr. Ben-Eliyahu applies a developmental lens to understand how relationships scaffold and shape motivation and self-regulation towards learning. In particular, she focuses on social relationships (e.g., teachers or mentors) as well as relationships with the environment (e.g., content or activity). Digital media serves as a tool through which educators can relate to learners, and also shapes the learning environment by presenting content and activities. Trained in Experimental Psychology from Bar Ilan University (Israel), Dr. Ben-Eliyahu thinks critically about how to plan and conduct research to inform educators and policy makers on adaptive ways to support learning through shaping motivation and self-regulation.

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Milton Chen

jpond — Mon, 10 Jun 2013 10:33:55 +0000

Dr. Milton Chen is senior fellow and executive director, emeritus at The George Lucas Educational Foundation (GLEF), a non-profit operating foundation in the San Francisco Bay Area that utilizes its multimedia website Edutopia.org and documentary films to communicate a new vision for 21st Century schools. He served as executive director of GLEF for 12 years from 1998 to 2010. During his tenure, GLEF and its media brand, Edutopia, greatly expanded their editorial publishing efforts, including the award-winning Edutopia magazine. Edutopia.org is known as a destination Web site for educators and others interested in educational innovation and has won numerous honors, including the 2009 Webby People’s Voice Award for best education website. Edutopia.org has grown in traffic to more than 700,000 unique visits per month.

Dr. Chen’s career has spanned four decades at the intersection of preK-12 education, media, and technology. Prior to joining GLEF, he served for 10 years as the founding director of the KQED Center for Education (PBS) in San Francisco. In the 1970s, he was director of research at Sesame Workshop in New York, helping develop Sesame Street, The Electric Company, and 3-2-1 Contact. Dr. Chen has been an assistant professor at the Harvard Graduate School of Education and, during 2007-08, was one of 35 Fulbright New Century Scholars conducting research on access and diversity issues in schools and universities. He received an A. B. in social studies from Harvard College and an M.A. and Ph.D. in communication from Stanford.

Dr. Chen serves as chairman of the Panasonic Foundation in New Jersey, which supports superintendent leadership and district improvement, and is a member of the board of directors for Sesame Workshop, the San Francisco School Alliance, and ConnectEd: The California Center for College and Career. He chairs the Games and Learning Publishing Council for the Joan Cooney Center at Sesame Workshop, a Gates Foundation-supported activity. He is also a member of advisory boards for the National Park Service, appointed by Interior Secretary Ken Salazar to advance their work in STEM and history/social studies education, and the Fred Rogers Center for Early Learning and Children’s Media at St. Vincent College.

Dr. Chen’s career has been honored by the Elmo Award from Sesame Workshop, the Fred Rogers Award from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, the Congressional Black Caucus, the Association of Educational Service Agencies, and two science centers in the Bay Area, The Exploratorium and the Lawrence Hall of Science. His 2010 book, Education Nation: Six Leading Edges of Innovation in our Schools, was named as one of the 10 best education books of the year by the American School Board Journal. He is a frequent speaker at education conferences in the U. S. and abroad, presenting close to 100 keynote addresses based on the themes of his book.

Dr. Chen lives in San Francisco with his wife, Dr. Ruth Cox, faculty liaison for academic technology at San Francisco State University. Their daughter, Maggie, is embarking on a career in medicine and public health at UCLA.

Perhaps most importantly, on his 50th birthday, Dr. Chen was named a Jedi Master by George Lucas!

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Leshell Hatley

jpond — Wed, 08 May 2013 09:08:39 +0000

Leshell Hatley is a passionate computer engineer, educator, and researcher who continuously combines these three attributes to create innovative approaches to teaching students between that ages of 3 and 73. She has logged over 15,000 hours teaching African-American and Latino elementary, middle, and high school students in science, technology, engineering, mathematics (STEM) concepts throughout NY, NJ, and DC. She also created an educational animation and digital learning series called ‘Myles & Ayesha,’ which features two young African-American learning companions who explore the world and concepts related to STEM, reading, and history, while simultaneously teaching their audience through interactive games and activities. Overall, this project and other professional aspirations are especially enhanced by her being a PhD student at George Mason University in the Learning Technologies Division.

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Glynda Hull

jpond — Mon, 10 Jun 2013 10:32:33 +0000

Glynda A. Hull is Professor of Education in Language, Literacy, and Culture at the Graduate School of Education, University of California, Berkeley, and Visiting Research Professor in Steinhardt School of Culture, Education, and Human Development at New York University. She began her career in education by teaching middle and high school English in two small towns in Mississippi. A recipient of UC Berkeley’s Distinguished Teaching Award, Hull offers undergraduate, graduate, and teacher education courses on literacy and media. Over the years her research has examined the teaching of writing; digital technologies and new literacies; adult literacy and changing contexts and requirements for work; and community/school/university partnerships. Her books include Changing Work, Changing Workers: Critical Perspectives on Language, Literacy, and Skill (SUNY Press); The New Work Order: Education and Literacy in the New Capitalism (Allen & Unwin; with James Gee and Colin Lankshear); and School’s Out! Bridging Out-of-School Literacies with Classroom Practice (Teachers College; with Katherine Schultz). She has recently collaborated with educators in several countries, with support from the Spencer Foundation, to create and study an international social networking project for youth. In California over the last ten years, with support from the US Department of Education and other agencies, she has created and studied after school programs for K-12 youth that emphasize digital media. Her current research focuses on designing innovative online spaces for learning and exploring the burgeoning phenomenon of global schools.

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Lindy L. Johnson

jpond — Tue, 07 May 2013 17:40:41 +0000

Lindy Johnson is a doctoral student in the Department of Language & Literacy Education at The University of Georgia. Before pursuing her doctorate, she taught high school English in Boston Public Schools. Lindy’s research focuses on helping educators integrate new media literacies into their teaching. Specifically, she draws on methods from ethnography, sociolinguistics, and discourse analysis to study how digital storytelling and multimodal literacies can encourage adolescents toward civic engagement and other activist projects. With funding from the Teacher Quality Grants Program, she is undertaking dissertation research on participatory professional development with middle and high school teachers as they infuse digital and media literacies into their writing instruction. Currently, she serves as Principal Editor of the Journal of Language & Literacy Education (JoLLE) , an online, peer-reviewed, open-access journal (http://jolle.coe.uga.edu), and served as Co-Chair of the 2013 JoLLE Inaugural Conference: Activist Literacies. Lindy has published her research in English Teaching: Practice and Critique, and has chapters forthcoming in Exploring Multimodal Composition and Digital Writing, and Critical and New Literacies: Teaching toward Democracy with/in/through Post-modern and Popular Culture Texts.

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Grace MyHyun Kim

jpond — Wed, 08 May 2013 09:07:38 +0000

Grace MyHyun Kim is a doctoral student in the Language, Literacy, and Culture program in the Graduate School of Education at the University of California, Berkeley. As a former high school English teacher, Grace is interested in adolescents’ engagements with multimodal texts, both in and out of school. Her current research examines informal, multilingual learning environments that ethnic and linguistic minority youth seek to help them navigate their lives. For her dissertation, she explores an online affinity space in which young people appropriate transnational media for their own learning purposes as well as the complex identity politics they enact within this connected learning. Along with her research, Grace concurrently works on curriculum development and teacher professional development for the Stanford Program on International and Cross-Cultural Education. She holds a bachelor’s degree in Rhetoric and Art History from the University of California, Berkeley and a master’s degree in Education from Stanford University.

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Alicia De León

jpond — Wed, 08 May 2013 09:06:15 +0000

Alicia De León is a doctoral student in the Department of Education, Culture & Society (ECS) in the College of Education at the University of Utah. She grew up to the southeast of downtown Los Angeles, CA of immigrant Mexican and Guatemalan parents. Having studied in Guadalajara, Mexico Ms. De León is bilingual, speaking/writing Spanish and English fluently. In 2005, she earned her bachelors degree in Psychology with a minor in Ethnic Studies at Arizona State University (ASU) and pursued a Master’s Degree at the University of Los Angeles, CA (UCLA) in the department of Social Science and Comparative Education (SSCE) in 2007. Currently, as a fourth-year doctoral student, Ms. De León is committed to critically examining the role that racism (and other intersecting forms of oppression) plays in shaping college access, retention, and graduation for students of color. Alicia has worked primarily as a co-research/mentor with Chicana/o and Latina/o youth and is a co-director at the Mestizo Arts & Activism (MAA) program (2012-present). Her research is interested in knowing more about informal spaces of teaching and learning and how critical research communities are fostered in these spaces. With funding from the Ellen Christina Steffensen Cannon Scholarship Fund, she is engaging in dissertation work that reflects participatory action research, grounded in Borderlands and Critical Race Theory frameworks, with high school youth as they utilize digital media tools to leverage their civic and/or political activities. She is the first in her family to pursue a doctorate degree.

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Peyina Lin

jpond — Fri, 10 May 2013 09:02:36 +0000

Peyina Lin is a PhD Candidate at the University of Washington Information School (degree expected June 2013). Her research is driven by a commitment to further our understandings about the socio-technical barriers that prevent equitable participation in learning, civic, and media contexts. She aims to find ways to diminish such inequalities via media-rich environments. For example, in her dissertation, she examines how opportunities for extracurricular participation are perceived by students; which social types (e.g., Jocks and Nerds) are perceived to have central leadership opportunities; whether such perceptions shape students’ self-imposed norms on activity choices; and how the organization of social types based on friendship and mediated interaction patterns helps envision resource redistribution and strategies to increase youths’ leadership and civic extracurricular opportunities. She finds that there are possibly optimal social structures for teens’ social development. This work won a UW Graduate School Presidential Dissertation Award (2012) and a NSF Sociology Doctoral Dissertation Improvement Grant (2009).

Lin has worked at Microsoft Research (research intern), the Value Sensitive Design Research Lab, Intel Research’s former People and Practices Research Lab, and Dean Emeritus Mike Eisenberg’s projects on information literacy. Through these, she has acted as a researcher, grant writer, project manager, mentor, and instructor on research methods. She employs diverse methods including interpretive inquiry, critical inquiry, video ethnographies, social network analysis, and mixed methods research. Her former degrees are in Digital Media Arts & Technology (MA), Information Management (MS), and International Business (BA). You may find more information about her research on her website.

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Jabari Mahiri

jpond — Fri, 14 Jun 2013 15:58:34 +0000

Dr. Mahiri received UC Berkeley’s inaugural Chancellor’s Award for Advancing Institutional Excellence, the Chancellor’s Community Service Award, and the American Educational Research Association’s Outstanding Mentorship Award. He is author of Digital Tools in Urban Schools (2011); ut of Bounds: When Scholarship Athletes become Academic Scholars (2010); and, Shooting for Excellence: African American and Youth Culture in New Century Schools (1998). He is editor of What They Don’t Learn in School (2004), and Urban Teachers Researching Their First Year of Practice (Forthcoming, 2014). He is also completing Virtual Literacies of Global Youth and has published a children’s book, The Day They Stole the Letter J. Before coming to Berkeley, he helped found and chaired the inaugural board of New Concept School in Chicago that has been in existence more than 30 years. He also was a credentialed English teacher in Chicago Public Schools for seven years.

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