Dr. Debra Clark, Ph.D

Area: FLA

vita [pdf]

I received a B.A. from Mount Union College in 1984 and my M.A. in 1986 from Bowling Green State University. I worked for seven years in student affairs. My last position in this field was Director of Residence Life at Cleveland State University, where I also began my doctoral studies in Urban Education. After leaving Cleveland State University as an administrator I decided to transfer to Kent State University to pursue a degree in Cultural Foundations of Education. I received my PhD from Kent in May, 2003. My current research interests are the intersection of moral education, multicultural education, history of moral education.

David Dees

Area: FLA

vita [pdf]

My path to the study of education has been an interesting expedition. Having earned a B.S. in Communications and an M.A. in Theatre from the University of Kentucky, I began a journey of "self-discovery" which included coaching college football, working as a rock-n-roll disc jockey, and teaching theatre. I came to Kent State to earn a Ph.D. in Theatre History. It was during this experience I realized the focus of my journey had always centered on the question "What is quality teaching?" As a way to answer this question, I found a home in educational foundations. My Ph.D. is in Cultural Foundations from Kent State University. My research and publications have centered on the aesthetic dimensions of teaching and the development of quality teaching through transactional/aesthetic awareness. Recently, I have been exploring rural/Appalachian issues in higher education as a way to study both my students' experience at the Salem Campus and my own voyage through higher education as a "country" person from Kentucky. I have been recognized for my own teaching through two student-nominated teaching awards (Outstanding Teaching Award, Kent State University and Teacher of the Year, Gannon University), but have yet to answer my life's question.

Walter Gershon, Ph.D

Area: TLC , CI, CULT

Laurie Hines

Area: FLA

vita [pdf]

Dr. Natasha Levinson, Ph.D.

Area: FLA

I have been at Kent State since 1997. I teach graduate courses in philosophy of education, with an emphasis on the kinds of normative political theories that help culturally and religiously diverse societies learn to live amidst differences. Democratic theory, civic liberalism and civic republicanism are three approaches I've been exploring of late in my scholarship and in my graduate courses. I am interested in the different demands each of these approaches to political and social life place on educational institutions and practitioners, as well as on ordinary citizens. I also teach a master's level course in ethics for educators and human service professionals. I teach an undergraduate course in foundations of education that explores the development of public schools, the context of current school reform initiatives, and the challenges of teaching in a time when schools have never been asked to do quite so much in quite so distrustful a climate. My work tends to focus on educational concerns in the U.S., but I was born and raised in South Africa, and I travel to Ireland fairly regularly. I am told that I bring an international perspective to my teaching, which is helped by the occasional opportunity to teach the undergraduate foundations of education course to Kent State students in Ireland during the summer intersession.

Dr. Averil McClelland

Area: FLA - TLCS

vita [pdf]

My academic life has been the happy (and more-or-less unplanned) result of walking through a series of doors opened to me by teachers in various places. At Hiram College, where I was a legacy student, I discovered sociology, majoring in it, as well as in social science and history. Marriage, and three children later, I entered a master's program in educational administration (community education) at Kent for the purpose of enhancing a growing career as an educational consultant with school districts, the Greater Cleveland Superintendent's Association, Cuyahoga Community College, and the Cleveland Federation for Community Planning. I discovered cultural foundations at Kent, and earned a Master's degree and a Ph.D. in that field in 1979 and 1986. My interests have similarly evolved, and have included the nature of community, the nature and processes of social change, the role of education in the lives of women (The Education of Women in the United States: A Guide to Theory, Teaching and Research, 1992), the ways in which human beings acquire a cultural identity (Human Diversity in Education: An Integrated Approach with Ken Cushner and Phil Safford, 5th ed., 2005), and the nature and structure of social networks (dissertation, 1986). My most recent interest (and passion!) lies in the area of the impact of public policy on education in a democracy, including, but not limited to education as it occurs in schools.

Tricia Niesz

Area: FLA , CULT

vita [pdf]

I completed my Ph.D. at the University of Pennsylvania, where I specialized in anthropology and education, ethnography/critical ethnography, and urban schooling. I came to Kent State in 2004 as an assistant professor of qualitative research methodology. My methodological interests are in how contemporary social and cultural theory raise new questions and challenges for qualitative research, and how methodologists and researchers are responding to these challenges. Multisited ethnography, in particular, is one approach that I am exploring in my current work. I am also interested using ethnographic methods to explore the role of schooling in social stratification and social change. More specifically, I am interested in the ways in which equity-oriented educational discourses--and more broadly, social critique--inform the meanings, identities, and cultural practices that youth and educators produce in schools. My current research focuses on teacher professional networks that take up questions of diversity, equity, democracy, and social justice. In this work, I am exploring how the social processes of networks-as-inquiry communities influence educators' identities, agency, and contributions to school change.

Dr. Vilma Seeberg

Area: FLA

I have been a member of the Kent State University community since 1989 as professor for international-multicultural education. I completed my PhD in Comparative International Education at the University Hamburg, Germany, in 1990, which was preceded there by my MA in Education with a minor in Sinology in 1983. Long before that, in 1970, I received my B.S. in Foreign Language Instruction, German and Russian at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. Eight years of experience founding and serving as principal and director of a "street academy" (private secondary school) serving middle and high school drop-outs in Madison, WI, had lead me back to academia for advanced studies. This included a year teaching at China University for Science and Technology, and conducting my dissertation research in China. While writing the dissertation, I worked at the World Bank and a think-tank in Washington, D.C., taught in International Studies at the University of South Florida, and foundations of education courses at Cleveland State. I also substitute taught in three districts in the greater Cleveland area. My interests in education have always been in exploring the inequalities in access to knowledge, whether that be in advanced industrial areas with pockets of poverty, or poor regions and nations with pockets of wealth. My primary line of inquiry and publishing has been in education in China using socio-political and anthropological perspectives in order to frame egalitarian and multicultural policy in China and in the U.S. Recently I have been collaborating with a Chinese institution on developing higher education academic degree program. I am active in the Comparative International Education Society, National Association of Multicultural Education, and AERA.