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UCLA’s School of Education & Information Studies is home to two departments. Each is a leader in their field, helping to pioneer what's next in the Education and Information worlds.

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“Invisible Child: Poverty, Survival and Hope in an American City,” by journalist Andrea Elliott, tells the story of a bright, talented, and resilient girl by the name of Dasani, as she grows toward adulthood, poor and Black in New York City. 

But it is more than that.  As Elliott writes in the early pages of the book, “…to know Dasani Joanie-Lashawn Coates – to follow this child’s life from her first breaths in a Brooklyn hospital to the bloom of adulthood – is to reckon with the story of New York City, and, beyond its borders, with America itself.”

In doing so, Elliott trains a keen eye not only on the lives of Dasani and her family, but on issues of poverty and race, and on the disparate agencies and policies established to help children and families, which too often, fail to do so.

Elliott came to UCLA on January 23 to discuss her Pulitzer Prize-winning book and the issues and implications that it raises for the nation and communities, and for programs and policies intended to help children and families.  

Journalist Andrea Elliott discussed "Invisible Child," and the ways in which poverty and ineffectual - and often, generously funded - agencies fail to serve poor children and families. 

In writing the book, Elliott said, “I have come to question every assumption people make about the poor.” 

Hosted by the UCLA Pritzker Center for Strengthening Children and Families, the event gathered more than 150 academic researchers, advocates and those working in agencies and community organizations that serve low-income children and families in the Los Angeles area, to hear the story of Dasani and the lessons Elliott gleaned in its telling. 

“Race and poverty intersect with foster care and education every day and in every moment of too many children’s lives. For individuals working directly with children and families, the urgency of change is apparent—it is often right in front of you. ‘Invisible Child’ reminds us of the real people in critical need of change, and of the systemic hurdles they face in their daily lives,” said Taylor Dudley, executive director of the UCLA Pritzker Center for Strengthening Children and Families. “Our center strives to bring the campus and community together around reducing the need for foster care and reforming the system as it exists today, and the discussion of Andrea Elliott’s tremendously important book provided the perfect platform toward achieving these goals.”

Taylor Dudley, executive director of the UCLA Pritzker Center for Strengthening Children and Families

Elliott’s story about Dasani begins with poverty. She points out that more than 13 million children are growing up poor in the world’s richest superpower – a country with the highest child poverty rate of any wealthy nation -- and asks what that means for our future when poor children complete less schooling, are twice as likely to be incarcerated, to have children as single parents, and to suffer from health problems such as diabetes and asthma. 

“Our public discourse on the poor is usually about the adults, not the children, and more specifically about the poor choices those adults have made,” Elliott said.  “They are blamed for their conditions of their poverty, for their housing insecurity, for their inability to rise to the promise of America.  Maybe it's easier to take that position than to reckon with the barriers that define this population, things like segregated schools, polluted neighborhoods, inadequate health care, chronic food insecurity, little access to jobs that can pay a living wage… instead, it’s the adults that society blames for lacking self-reliance, or personal responsibility.” 

But what about their kids? Elliott asked. 

“You can't really argue that millions of American children are responsible for their own well-being, or for their own futures,” she said. “You can't argue that their poverty is a result of their own poor choices.” 

And so, in reporting for the book, Elliott focused on the children, and in particular, on children like Dasani who grow up experiencing homelessness. Last year, more than 104,000 children in New York City were homeless, a fact Elliott underscored by showing a slide of the Rose Bowl in Pasadena, noting that the homeless children of New York City would overflow its capacity. (Something to consider: “Students Experiencing Homelessness,” a research publication of the UCLA Center for the Transformation of Schools, reports that more than 269,000 children in California experienced homelessness in 2018-19, enough to fill Dodger Stadium more than five times.) 

When Elliott met Dasani in 2012, the girl and her family were living in a homeless shelter in Brooklyn near Bedford–Stuyvesant, an area known commonly as Bed-Stuy - a place Elliott describes as, “one of the most unequal neighborhoods in New York City… where townhouses were being renovated and flipped for millions of dollars … just blocks away the decrepit homeless shelter where Dasani lived.” All ten members of Dasani’s family lived there, in a cramped, 500-square-foot room overrun with mold and roaches and mice, in a shelter run by a city agency with what is currently a budget of more than one billion dollars. 

“Dasani was homeless because she was poor. But why was she poor?” Elliot asked. “The material reality of Dasani’s life, her lack of money, was really the point of departure for understanding her human condition. It was virtually impossible to separate Dasani’s poverty from everything else. It was the air that her family breathed that informed all parts of their life, housing, education, health, employment and parenting.

“And most especially for this family, there was no separating poverty from race from the daily assault of systemic and societal racism. The story of systemic racism and racial segregation in Brooklyn was pivotal to what happened to Dasani’s family,” Elliot said.  

Tyrone Howard, UCLA professor of education and director of the UCLA Pritzker Center for Strengthening Children and Families

Elliot’s remarks were followed by a panel discussion, moderated by author Leslie Gilbert-Lurie, a UCLA Law School graduate and member of the UCLA Foundation Board of Directors , with Demontea Thompson, UCLA SEIS doctoral student, Tyrone Howard, UCLA professor of education, and Christina Christie, Wasserman Dean of the UCLA School of Education and Information Studies. 

“What was so critical about what's displayed in this book is the impact of the historical generational racism and poverty and how it impacts the child who's sitting in front of you today,” said Dean Christie. “And you can't disentangle that from that child's lived experience. I think about the importance of the teacher. The children [in the book] absolutely found quiet with their teachers, not in their classrooms, but with their teachers. What does that mean for us as a school of education and information studies, who engages in the very important work of cultivating a sense of humanity and humility in our pre-service and in-service teachers?” 

Professor Howard, who in addition to being the director of the UCLA Pritzker Center for Strengthening Children and Families, leads the Black Male Institute at UCLA, said he had a range of emotions about the book, but his main emotion was anger. 

“How we can say we value children, but let the circumstances like this persist in the way that they persist? Because for me, probably like for many folks in this room, as you read the stories of pain in this book, many of them were not surprising,” Howard said. “No families, no children should live in circumstances much like this. And the sad part is that it has become so normalized in ways that we accept in a country's political system. 

“And I really appreciate that it’s not just a poverty story. It's also a racial story. It's a Black story. It shows the way that systems and structures have had a detrimental impact on Black people.”   

Thompson, who experienced foster care as a youth, said he was inspired by the book. 

“It reminded me of a lot about my history, about my family's history of coming from Arkansas, having ten siblings, standing in free food lines - these are things that was really described in the book. For me, that just took me back. And it inspired me to actually say, I need to tell the stories of these young people who are in the schools who oftentimes aren't visible.”

“I think L.A. County overall must lead to provide opportunities for young people to speak about their experiences, and then be able to correct some of the things that are happening,” added Thompson.  “One example is personal example. My parents were never given the type of support that they needed for us to return back into their care. They too, struggled with drugs and alcohol abuse, and they were never provided the steps and the tools that they needed to succeed. And I think that when you're a Black family, oftentimes its seeing that you made those mistakes yourself, you get yourself out of those, you pull yourself up by your bootstraps. But what do you do when you don't have any boots? Who do you look to when in the community around you, they're not even offering any boots? When you don’t know what boots are?”  

Parts of the conversation focused on the potential impact of the book and its implications for those working in systems that serve children and families, not only in New York, but in the Los Angeles area.  

“We put a lot on our teachers,” said Christie. “What is critical though is not to ask teachers to also be social workers, but to coordinate care for children and families, so that a teacher has a social worker right next to her when there is a child in crisis.  We need to ask how we can we shift the focus away from the family onto the child, to move from intervention to prevention. There are so many more children we don't see that teachers do see, and we need to help teachers by providing them with that system of support. Our community school effort is one way of thinking about how to do that.” 

“Schools offer a tremendous opportunity, but they can't do it alone,” concluded Howard. “We have to begin to help teachers, who are already overworked and already stretched beyond belief, to not put more under pressure on those teachers, but to give them support so they can be better support to the children. Because if we lose those beacons of shining light, those teachers in classrooms, we create even more disfavor [for children] and greater hopelessness in our schools. We need greater supports in schools or teachers to support students.”

Andrea Elliott shares perspective on her Pulitzer Prize-winning book.

UCLA Pritzker Center for Strengthening Children and Families Hosts Author of “Invisible Child”

UCLA alumna Naomi C. Broering (’66, MLS) died on January 11, in La Jolla, California. An elected fellow of the American College of Medical Informatics, Broering’s work has contributed greatly to developing computer systems for libraries and to medical information technology. Most recently, she served as Dean of Libraries at the Pacific College of Oriental Medicine (PCOM) in San Diego since 2001. From 1996 to 2000, Broering was the Executive Director of the Houston Academy of Medicine–Texas Medical Center Library - one of the largest in the U.S. – and provided services for ten medical schools and more than 21 hospitals.

Throughout her career, Broering was a strong advocate for the Network of the National Library of Medicine (NNLM), taking part in focus groups, helping to create exhibits and showcase NLM resources, and successfully applying for awards from the National Institutes of Health and NLM. These were to support significant projects focused on promoting public access to health information resources of the National Library of Medicine and the National Institutes of Health. Broering conducted a series of projects involving extensive outreach to various communities in San Diego County, targeting both health care professional and consumer audiences and developing collaborations with many community organizations, including public libraries, churches, community centers, veterans centers, and HIV/AIDS clinics. Broering’s work benefited San Diego’s underserved communities of Hispanics, African Americans, Native and Pacific Islander Americans, as well as population areas of high HIV incidence. 

Broering’s efforts with the “Senior Health Project: Access to Electronic Health Information in San Diego” led to the PCOM Library being named one of the top ten finalists for the 2006 U.S. National Commission on Libraries and Information Science (NCLIS) Health Information Awards for Libraries. She also received an NLM Disaster Health Information Outreach & Collaboration Award in 2012, for a project reaching out to San Diego County’s Community Emergency Response Teams (CERT). Broering highlighted these significant outreach projects through numerous scholarly articles as well as presenting papers and poster sessions. She is credited as an author or co-author for several articles for the Journal of Consumer Health on the Internet, on topics including seniors’ access to online health information, and HIV/AIDS outreach in San Diego.

Prior to her work in Houston, Broering was the Director of the Dahlgren Memorial Library at Georgetown University School of Medicine from 1978 to 1996. She was the principal investigator of the Georgetown University IAIMS Program, an NLM grant program, and oversaw development of the Georgetown University Library Information System, which included a “Mini-MEDLINE” Search System component. 

Throughout her career, Broering also paved the way for future medical library professionals through her teaching as adjunct faculty in health informatics and library and information departments at Georgetown University, the University of Texas Houston-Health Science Center, Baylor College of Medicine, Texas Women’s University, and the Uniformed Services University of Health Sciences. Broering also supported students directly through her endowed scholarship for students in the UCLA Department of Information Studies and the Medical Library Association’s (MLA) Naomi C. Broering Hispanic Heritage Grant. Broering also served as the Director of NNLM for the Greater Houston area. 

Broering served as president of MLA from 1996-1997; she is considered the organization’s first president of Hispanic heritage; she was the 21st editor of the MLA’s Bulletin. Her extensive list of awards includes the MLA’s 2003 Marcia Noyes Award, the association’s highest professional distinction. She was named an MLA Fellow in 1995, and a Distinguished Member of MLA’s Academy of Health Information Professionals. In 1986, Broering received MLA’s Frank Bradway Rogers Information Advancement Award, and in 2015, she was honored with MLA’s first Hispanic Heritage Award, in recognition of her past accomplishments in medical librarianship and library informatics. 

In service to the National Library of Medicine, Broering was a member of a planning panel for the NLM Long Range Plan (2000-2005), a member of the NLM Biomedical Library and Informatics Review Committee, and was a co-founder of the Friends of NLM, serving as secretary of the board of directors.

Broering was secretary and board member of the American Medical Informatics Association (AMIA) from 1992 to 1996 and was elected a Fellow of the American College of Medical Informatics (ACMI) in 1989-90. Other honors include the Special Libraries Association (SLA) 1999 Winifred Sewell Award, the SLA 1987 Professional Award, and the Vicennial Award from Georgetown University in 1995. 

Broering was an active member of the American Library Association (ALA), serving on committees and programs, and was a lifetime member of ALA, MLA, and a retired member of AMIA/ACMI. Broering authored more than 200 scholarly journal articles, two books, and has presented at national and international library conferences.

Broering earned her master's degree in Library and Information Science at UCLA, and she had a yearlong postgraduate fellowship in medical librarianship at the UCLA Biomedical Library, supported by the National Library of Medicine and the National Institutes of Health. In addition, she completed her coursework for a doctorate in history at UCLA. Broering received her bachelor's degree in social sciences and a master's degree in history at California State University,  Long Beach. In addition, she completed a year of law school from West LA University in 1970-71, while serving as hospital librarian at Children’s Hospital of Los Angeles. She earned a Government Management Certificate from George Washington University in 1973.

Born in New York City, Broering lived throughout her career in Los Angeles, Georgetown, Houston, and finally, La Jolla. She is survived by her husband Gregory Chauncey and two nieces, Emily Albrecht and Jaye Meyer.  

In lieu of flowers, the family asks that donations be made in Naomi Broering’s honor to the Gregory A. Chauncey and Naomi C. Broering Engineering Veterans Scholarship at UC San Diego or to the Moores Cancer Center at UCSD Health. 

Broering’s work benefited San Diego’s underserved communities and disaster preparedness. 

Naomi C. Broering: MLS Alumna Was First President of Hispanic Heritage of the Medical Library Association

Today, we honor the life and vision of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.—our nation’s revered social and racial justice leader. 

There remain pressing challenges in education and information—including changes that impact our schools, communities, and nation—and they require renewed energies and fresh research from our faculty and students. The pandemic continues to levy real damage on schools and students and has made clear the need to contend with the racial and economic divisions that undermine opportunities to learn. From efforts to promote and protect civil rights to projects designed to strengthen teaching and learning, our UCLA Education faculty are actively working to address these issues. Likewise, as students continue to face growing danger from social media disinformation, our UCLA Information Studies faculty are already working at the forefront of these critical issues. 

Today is a new beginning. There is so much we are doing, but so much more needs to be done. The hill we climb is steep. My hope is that we turn a new page and begin to heal as we move toward real change based on dialogue, harmony, and unity—work that is focused on achieving the promise of education, health, and economic well-being, not just for some, but for all. 

As the talented Ms. Amanda Gorman recited in her stanzas at the presidential inauguration, “We are striving to forge a union with purpose, to compose a country committed to all cultures, colors, characters, and conditions of man. And so we lift our gazes not to what stands between us, but what stands before us.” These words continue to ring true today.

What stands before us is nothing less than Dr. King’s ever-present vision of a beloved community and all that it stands for. In his aspirations for realizing this community, he had hoped that the right kind of spirit and the right kind of love would “transform the deep gloom of the old age into the exuberant gladness of the new age.” My hope is that together we can move closer to this noble and exuberant vision of peace, unity, and harmony amongst all people through real and lasting social change.

MLK Day: A Message from Christina Christie, Wasserman Dean

Christine L. Borgman, distinguished research professor at the UCLA School of Education & Information Studies, and Amy Brand, director and publisher of the MIT Press, have conducted a new study exploring the complex challenges universities face in the capture and use of data. “Data blind: Universities lag in capturing and exploiting data,” published in the December 23, 2022 issue of the journal Science, finds a pervasive lack of data infrastructure and strategy in North American higher education, and argues that most universities lag behind industry, business and government when it comes to leveraging data for strategic decision-making and planning.

“They are struggling to capture and exploit the true value of their data resources and reluctant to initiate the conversations necessary to build consensus for data governance,” says Professor Borgman.

We talk with Professor Borgman here about the study’s findings and implications. The full article is available free on her website and in Science.

UCLA ED&IS: In your view, what's most important about this research? 

Christine L. Borgman: The goal of our study of university leaders was to identify both pain points and innovative solutions to data-informed decision-making. We identified individual perspectives on opportunities and challenges they face in exploiting their data. We found few data-informed planning successes and a greater void of infra­structure thinking than we expected. 

Our findings offer several paths forward to invest in infrastructure thinking, governance, and innovative solutions to data-informed decision-making in universities.

Ed&IS: What do you hope the study helps people to understand?

Borgman: Research universities are drowning in administrative and research data. They need better data, and better ways to exploit those data for strategic decision making, rather than more data, per se.  Failures to invest in data management and data governance are costing universities money and other forms of value – these gaps are an invisible tax on an organization’s efficiency.

Improving data exploitation in universities is more a matter of governance and policy than of technology per se. Our findings suggest the need for more investment in interoperability of systems and more coordination across organizational units.

Investing in siloed corporate solutions within individual operating units can lead to duplication of systems and effort, barriers to interoperability across the university, and can constrain an institution’s ability to take an infrastructure perspective across all aspects of teaching, learning, research, and operations. 

Ed &IS: What do you hope the study will help to make happen? 

Borgman: We hope that university administrators and faculty will work together to improve the governance of data resources and exploit these resources in strategic and ethical ways.  Administrators, faculty, researchers, students, and other university stakeholders all can benefit from more data-informed decision making. Better governance and coordination can reduce various administrative burdens, reduce duplication of effort, and yield more useful and timely information. 

Many benefits can be gained by training staff in data skills, by employing more of the data science professionals now graduating from research universities, by pursuing simple innovations identified by other universities, and examining data governance and policy related to the use of data in decision making. We encourage university leaders to embrace more objec­tive and transparent data-informed approaches to decision making.

A summary article exploring the study’s findings is available on the UCLA newsroom website at https://newsroom.ucla.edu/releases/universities-struggle-to-leverage-data

New research published in Science shines a bright light on the ways in which universities are data rich and data poor — and sometimes intentionally data blind

ED&IS Interview: Christine L. Borgman discusses new study, “Data blind: Universities lag in capturing and exploiting data"

The UCLA Pritzker Center and UCLA School of Education and Information Studies will co-host, “On-Campus with Andrea Elliott, Author of “Invisible Child,” on Monday, January 23, 11:30 a.m.- 2 p.m.

“Invisible Child,” which won Elliott the Pulitzer Prize in General Nonfiction in 2022, follows Dasani and her family as they navigate the child welfare system. It is an astonishing story about the power of resilience, the importance of family and the cost of inequality—told through the crucible of one remarkable girl.

“Through Dasani, “Invisible Child” makes visible the suffering and resilience of families experiencing poverty and the effects of systemic racism,” says Taylor Dudley, executive director of the UCLA Pritzker Center. “Ms. Elliott’s reporting urges us to truly look at these challenges head on with courage and a resolve to make right the wrongs of foster care. We are honored to host Ms. Elliott at UCLA.”

Elliott is a prize-winning author and journalist for The New York Times whose work has been received many honors, including two Pulitzer Prizes, a George Polk award, the J. Anthony Lukas Book Prize, and an Overseas Press Club award. “Invisible Child” was chosen by former president Barack Obama as a “Favorite Book of the Year,” and by The New York Times as one of the “Top 10 Books of 2021.”

A panel discussion will be moderated by Leslie Gilbert-Lurie, a lawyer, author, community leader, philanthropist, and former television executive. She is a founding board member and past Board Chair of the Alliance for Children's Rights, and previously served as the Vice Chair of the Los Angeles Blue Ribbon Commission on Child Welfare. For over a decade, Gilbert-Lurie served on the Los Angeles County Board of Education. In July 2022, she was appointed to the California State University Board of Trustees by Governor Gavin Newsom. She is also a member of the UCLA Foundation Board of Directors, and a member of the Board of Advisors to the Ronald Reagan UCLA Medical Center and the UCLA School of Law.

Panelists include UCLA Wasserman Dean Tina Christie, UCLA Professor of Education Tyrone Howard, director of the UCLA Pritzker Center, and SEIS doctoral student Demontea Thompson. 

A lunch and book signing will follow the discussion, and copies of “Invisible Child” will be available for purchase. Admission to this event is free; please register via Eventbrite.

Author of “Invisible Child” and UCLA Education scholars will discuss the child welfare system through Elliott’s Pulitzer Award-winning book.

UCLA Pritzker Center Presents Conversation with Andrea Elliott

Nine faculty members in the UCLA School of Education and Information Studies have been named to the Edu-Scholar Public Influence Rankings for 2023. Published annually since 2010, the rankings highlight the top 200 education scholars whose work influences academic research and scholarship and impacts the nation’s public conversation about education. The rankings are compiled by Frederick M. Hess, director of education policy studies for the American Enterprise Institute and published in Education Week.  

UCLA School of Education and Information Studies faculty included in this year’s rankings (pictured, from top, left to right) include  Eva L. Baker, Eddie R. Cole, Megan L. Franke, Tyrone C. Howard, Sylvia Hurtado, Louis M. Gomez,  Jeannie Oakes, Gary Orfield and John Rogers.  H. Samy Alim, a UCLA professor of anthropology and African American studies, (not pictured) is also included. 

“Our faculty, staff and students are deeply engaged in research and the development of practice that opens the doors of learning and opportunity for all.  From efforts to strengthen the teaching of mathematics for low income students – to the fight against attacks on schools and efforts to ban books and limit teaching about the full history of race and racism in our nation, our people are engaged in complex work that is making a difference, “ said Christina Christie, Wasserman Dean of the UCLA School of Education and information Studies. “These rankings, while only one measure of impact, shine a light on the importance of public scholarship, and we are pleased to have our faculty members recognized as influential scholars that are making a difference.” 

The 2022 Edu-Scholar Public Influence rankings are published in Education Week.  For more information please visit https://www.edweek.org/policy-politics/opinion-the-2023-rhsu-edu-scholar-public-influence-rankings/2023/01

Nine UCLA Ed&IS Faculty included in Annual Edu-Scholar Public Influence Rankings

Researchers at the UCLA School of Education & Information Studies and the MIT Press  published  “Data blind: Universities lag in capturing and exploiting data,” Thursday, December 22, 2022, in the journal Science.

Co-authored by Christine L. Borgman, distinguished research professor at the UCLA School of Education & Information Studies, and, Amy Brand, director and publisher of the MIT Press, the study explores the complex challenges universities face in the capture and use of data, and argues that most universities lag behind industry, business, and government when it comes to leveraging data for strategic decision-making and planning.

“This new research shines a bright light on the ways in which universities are data rich and data poor — and sometimes intentionally data blind,” said Christine L. Borgman, distinguished research professor at the UCLA School of Education & Information Studies and one of the study’s authors. “They are struggling to capture and exploit the true value of their data resources and reluctant to initiate the conversations necessary to build consensus for data governance.”

A  summary of the research  article is available online on the UCLA Newsroom website at https://newsroom.ucla.edu/releases/universities-struggle-to-leverage-data.

The research article is published on the  Science website and available here  

UCLA–MIT Press research finds pervasive lack of data infrastructure, strategy in U.S. higher ed

Universities rich in data,  struggle to capture its value

For too long, education policy has often ignored a growing body of evidence of how factors outside of school can impact learning and life chances for young people before they even get to the classroom.

A new book makes the case that a national education agenda must center on community conditions to address structural racism like air quality, housing, public health, community safety, segregation and other issues as essential to improving learning opportunities, academic outcomes and the health and wellbeing of students. “Our Children Can’t Wait: The Urgency of Reinventing Education Policy in America from Teachers College Press,” is edited by Joseph P. Bishop, executive director of the UCLA Center for the Transformation of Schools, An accompanying podcast with the same name is now available on Spotify and Apple Podcasts with new episodes being released. 

“Our Children Can't Wait,” urges readers to rethink and reconsider education policy bridging scholarship, ideas, and original thinking by a wide ranging network of scholars from over 17 universities and organizations. The book presents a new equity focused roadmap for a comprehensive effort to enhance opportunities to learn and a redemptive path forward for reckoning with race in America.

“’Our Children Can’t Wait’ is the right book at the right time,” writes Becky Pringle, president of the National Education Association, in the books’ foreword. “It provides an unapologetically clear-eyed view at the way in which racism has shaped both our nation and its public school system, and supplies detailed roadmaps for navigating the way forward, toward a future in which every student—Black, White, Brown, Indigenous, and Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders, LGBTQ+ and differently abled—can step boldly into their brilliance.”

We talk briefly about “Our Children Can’t Wait,” with Joseph Bishop here.  

Joseph Bishop: This book makes a strong argument of why the narrow, standards-based conceptions of education policy that have dominated Congress, state houses and school boards have mostly overlooked what matters for student health and development. More importantly, it lays out a plan of action at the local, state and federal level for moving towards more youth and community led policy change that centers on equity and justice in school and outside of school.  

“Our Children Can’t Wait” was written based on my experience training elected officials and working with civil rights groups, youth organizers, educators and philanthropy, seeing a need for a book that brought more comprehensive thinking on policy together in one place. 

UCLA Ed&IS: What do you hope it will help people to understand?

Bishop: This is a critical moment for our country to reckon with our relationship with race and racism, defined by harmful patterns of enslavement, discrimination and the largest justice system in the world.  I hope this book helps connects the dots for readers, helping them understand that an entire playbook of prevention and strategic investments exists that will allow us to move away from policies that often replicate inequality in our country. We just haven’t had the foresight or courage to think more boldly about what education policy is, who it’s for and what it can achieve for our young people and families. 

UCLA ED&IS: What do you hope the book will make happen?  

Bishop: I’ve been contacted by administrators, educators, policymakers, civil rights organizations and philanthropic groups who want to use “Our Children Can’t Wait” as an organizing framework for mobilization and transformation.  I hope the book can act as a catalyst for people across the country to spark new conversations or to find affirmation in the ideas and scholarship packed in each chapter. Just because policies don’t prioritize issues or people doesn’t mean they don’t matter.  Rather, just the opposite is true.  

New book edited by UCLA’s Joseph P. Bishop sets forth a bold national education agenda 

Our Children Can’t Wait: The Urgency of Reinventing Education Policy in America

Jeff Share, a lecturer with the UCLA Teacher Education Program and Undergraduate Education Program, has been teaching a class on environmental justice for the last two years to undergraduates in the new Education and Social Transformation major. He was so delighted with the work his students turned in for an assignment on “ecowriting” – namely, creative, non-academic writing about environmental justice, climate change, and related topics – that he thought the results would make a great book. Share edited the end product, “For the Love of Nature: Ecowriting the World,” to be released by Peter Lang in early 2023.

Share, a scholar of critical media literacy, is the co-author of "The Critical Media Literacy Guide: Engaging Media and Transforming Education," with UCLA Distinguished Research Professor Douglas Kellner. 

A former photojournalist and classroom teacher, Share has taught in bilingual classrooms at Leo Politi Elementary School in L.A.’s Pico-Union community and served as Regional Coordinator for Training at the Center for Media Literacy where he wrote curricula and led professional development. Share continues to provide professional development in critical media literacy for LAUSD teachers as well as for educators throughout the United States and internationally. In 2015, Share published a second edition of his 2009 book, “Media Literacy is Elementary: Teaching Youth to Critically Read and Create Media.” 

In October, Share chaired a keynote session on “Critical Media Literacy & Environmental Justice,” during the International Symposium on Democracy, Global Citizenship and Transformative Education, presented by the UNESCO Chair of Democracy, Global Citizenship and Transformational Education. His co-presenters were Theresa Redmond, professor of curriculum and instruction at Appalachian State University, and Antonio López, chair and associate professor of communications and media studies at John Cabot University in Rome. Share, Redmond, and López contributed a chapter on “The Global Perspective on Ecomedia Literacy, Ecojustice, and Media Education in a Post-Pandemic World,” in “The Routledge Handbook of Media Education Futures Post-Pandemic.” 

What is ecowriting and how did it inspire “For the Love of Nature”?

Jeff Share: A couple of years ago, our Department let me design a class on environmental justice. I used the framework from critical media literacy to focus specifically on the environment, and how media and the messages we get about our relationship to the natural world are constructed and disseminated, as well as how various organizations use media to create strategic narratives about environmental justice and climate change. I also discuss how we can use media to challenge these types of messages and feel a sense of empowerment, in the midst of such overwhelming dangers that we're seeing with the climate crisis. 

Each time I teach this class, I focus more on the power of creating writing and media about our relationships to the environment. The students have been responding really well to this and some of the material they created is very impressive. I was blown away by what I was seeing them do.

My focus on ecowriting began after I read a great article by ecolinguist Gavin Lamb about ecowriting - writing about the natural world - and I used that as the inspiration for my students. They all read his article, and then had to create their own type of ecowriting. It was such a positive experience, and the students talked about how meaningful it was for them. They created poetry. They wrote letters, stories, fiction and non-fiction. One person wrote a short screenplay. It was powerful.

After the class I decided I would like to publish my students’ work and started checking around with different people I know around the world who are doing work in the same area. I asked them if I were to put together a book, could they send me an essay that would go along with this idea about the importance of ecowriting, and I received wonderful responses. 

Antonio López in Rome, who is a pioneer in ecomedia literacy, sent me a chapter about creating environmental video essays. A colleague in Australia, who does powerful work with storytelling about our relationships with nature, sent me a fabulous chapter. I've been collecting their essays, and my students’ writing. I took it to a publisher, and the publisher loved the idea, and said, “You know, it'd be really great if we also had lesson plans.” So, I asked my former TA Andrea Gambino if she would be interested in writing lesson plans. She loved the idea, and with a former student of hers, wrote a series of excellent lesson plans. 

It all came together beautifully and now we are creating a book of essays about different types of ecowriting by academics from around the world, examples of ecowriting by students who have gone through the class, and a whole collection of resources and lesson plans for teaching ecowriting. We’re also looking at the possibility of doing a collaborative publishing with the National Council of Teachers of English and Peter Lang. I'm in conversations right now with NCTE editors about whether we could co-publish this like we did with the last book that I co-wrote with Richard Beach and Allen Webb on teaching climate change to adolescents. We co-published that book with Routledge and NCTE.It gets better distribution when it has more people involved in this way.

This new book is very much a UCLA product, inspired by our own students, undergrads and grad students, and by what I've been learning from working with the students, teaching the class.

What do you feel are the most significant impacts of the pandemic on the environment and how can they be addressed?

The pandemic has done numerous things. I think one of the big things it's done is showing us the possibilities of change, because a lot of people were very quick to say, this is not possible, that will never happen. And what the pandemic demonstrated is, yes, it can. We can shut down the entire society in a day, if we decide there is a serious crisis. This is something that Naomi Klein has been writing about for years before the pandemic. She would refer back to World War I and World War II, about how people made changes when there was a crisis. 

What we need to do now is change the narrative and help people understand that the issue today is not climate change - the issue today is climate crisis. The more we can change the language behind this, the more likely we can start to shift people's mindsets to recognize the severity of our current time.

With your career in photojournalism to the present, what are the changes you’ve seen in public perception, in regard to the environment, across generations and among all walks of life?

Anecdotally, from what I've seen and been hearing from my students and my son, is that the young people today are far more aware and concerned about this than old fogies like me.  I think that's a really important piece to recognize: that the youth are more serious, more understanding, and more active about this problem than anyone else. So many of the activists are young who are pushing different issues in terms of the environmental crisis around the world, from Greta Thunberg to the youth who filed the lawsuit against the U.S. government over the climate crisis, to activists in Africa, Latin America, all around the world - some of the strongest activists are our kids, our youth. That’s an important lesson for us to recognize. We need to be partnering with the youth, and we need to stop this kind of expert adult talking down to them and start working in collaboration with them. 

The other group who I've been seeing and learning a lot from is the Indigenous folks in many parts of the world, who have for a long time been on the front lines of environmental issues and have been living sustainably with the land for thousands of years. We need to be looking towards them for leadership. We need to be supporting them, working in solidarity with them as allies, with the Indigenous communities who have been doing this work much longer than us, who know what they're doing, and who have been struggling against the destructive forces of colonialism and capitalism for so long. We have a lot we can learn from them about disrupting our colonial ideologies and practices, repairing our disconnections from the natural world, and recognizing our interdependence with nature.

What do your students’ writings reveal to you about their hopes and fears around nature and the environment?

That they're very concerned. They're passionate about this and for many of them the climate crisis is the number one issue. Even in classes where I'm not teaching environmental justice, that always comes to the forefront. Students bring in questions about, “what does this mean for the environment?” I am more and more trying to bring environmental justice into every class I teach, because I think it's a theme that can't just be looked at as a separate subject. In reality, it’s connected to everything. 

In a few years, everyone is going to be feeling the impact that many of the southern hemisphere island nations and poor areas are already feeling today. The climate crisis is not just a thing of the future. One of the big issues that I explore with my students is the inequality of the environmental crisis, it's affecting everybody, but not equally. Some people are highly impacted right now, and other people won't be impacted for a while. It is essential that we understand that inequality is a social and environmental justice issue, it is all connected. 

It is also important to consider the myth of universal responsibility, as if we are all equally responsible for this crisis. While it is good for all of us to be conscientious about our own carbon footprint and our individual impact on the environment, it is much more important to hold our government and corporations responsible for all they have done and continue to do or not do that is causing this environmental emergency. Our own military burns more CO2 than most countries around the world. Fossil fuel companies continue to make astronomical profits while they have known for decades the scientific evidence about their culpability for global warming. So, there are certain entities that that have tremendous responsibility and enormous power, that if they decided to stop burning fossil fuels or change their extractive policies we could change the future.

One of the things we're seeing more often is people who were denying climate change are now starting to say, well, yeah, okay, it is real, but it's only because of overpopulation. This is a way of shifting the blame from us in the northern hemisphere, who are using far more fossil fuels and emitting much more greenhouse gases than any of the people in the southern hemisphere. Even though they are having more children, they are not contributing more to global warming. And so, this attempt at blaming overpopulation is really a racist trope that's just trying to deflect responsibility from the ones who are benefiting the most while they have been contributing the greatest amount of CO2 into the environment.

How has social media changed these perceptions, whether they're among the young or people, our age, or even older people?

We are seeing a lot of the youth using social media for activism. And I think that's one of the shining lights here: since it is the youth who are pushing forward so much of the critical work in terms of environmental justice, they're using the tools they know. Many young people know how to use social media much better than us older folks. I go to my son all the time for help, to teach me how to do things with my phone and access all the different apps. I think that’s also a tremendous help in terms of organizing movements towards changing society in a way where we can be more sustainable and more just. 

Another place we are starting to see change is in the environmental movement. In the United States it has been isolated, very White and middle class. In fact, there were times when the environmental movement would go up against the working class, against unions. And now we're seeing a big shift in terms of bringing social justice and intersectionality into our understandings of environmental justice, and more people of color are at the forefront of the environmental movement.  

There’s a great article that my students read every year, written by Hop Hopkins in the Sierra Club, and it's titled, “Racism is Killing the Planet.” He writes powerfully about White supremacy and sacrifice zones, how there are certain places we know we can dump our trash or put our polluting industry, and that's always in areas with large concentrations of people of color and poverty. He argues well that environmental justice is intimately connected to social justice.

Upcoming publication by Peter Lang pushes out of the academic box with creative “ecowriting.”

Jeff Share: New Book Highlights Students’ Perspectives on Environmental Justice

The UCLA Center for the Transformation of Schools (CTS) will release  “A Funding Guide to More Diverse Schools in California 2022–23,” Friday, December 15, 2022.  

Compiled by a team of researchers, educators and advocates led by Kai Mathews, director of the California Educator Diversity Project at CTS, the guide serves as a public resource for educators, schools and districts striving to provide equitable access to inclusive learning environments for all students. This guide spotlights how funding can be used to prioritize efforts to increase the diversity of the educator workforce and humanize the teaching profession. The authors hope is that if used with intentionality, the allocations outlined in the guide can expand access and opportunity for all TK-12 educational partners.

"The state is providing millions of dollars to ensure we have a K-12 system that is diverse, welcoming, and affirming for students and teachers,” said Kai Mathews of UCLA CTS. “Our hope is that this guide will make it easier for school districts and educators to access these funds by saving time and reducing the guesswork. We know that knowledge is power and that for some districts with limited capacity figuring out the application process can prove to be a barrier and gatekeeper."

The new guide offers information about availability and access to a variety of programs and resource to support educators and further teacher diversity.  For example, information is provided about California’s Educator Workforce Investment Grant, including the amount of funding available, who and what it’s for, and how and when to apply. 

- Integrated Teacher Preparation Programs

- Golden State Teacher Grant Program and more 

- The National Board for Professional Teaching Standards Certification Incentive Program

 - California Classified School Employee Teacher Credentialing Program

- The California Prekindergarten Planning and Implementation Grant Program 

 - 2022 Antibias Education Grant Program

The new guide will be published and available online on December 15 at  https://bit.ly/3V6HVQd

In addition to the Center for the Transformation of Schools, partners in the project include WestEd, The Education Trust West, Public Advocates, California Council on Teacher Education, UC Merced Extension-Teacher Education Programs and TeachPlus. 

UCLA CTS to Publish New Funding Guide for More Diverse Schools

Jennifer Nguyen Bernal has been honored by the American Library Association (ALA) with the David H. Clift Scholarship. The $3,000 scholarship is awarded to a person pursuing a master's degree in library and information studies.

Bernal, a first-year MLIS student in the UCLA Department of Information Studies, looks forward to a career that will provide communities with information sources to understand issues such as race, class, and identity as they relate to marginalized voices. Her current research interests connect her undergraduate work in ethnic studies with a focus on open access to information sources for all communities. 

Bernal was also selected as a member of the 2022-2024 Kaleidoscope cohort by the Association of Research Libraries (ARL). The Kaleidoscope program strives to diversify the profession by providing generous funding for MLIS education and a suite of related benefits, including mentoring, leadership and professional development, and career placement assistance.

Bernal, who earned her bachelor’s degree in Asian American Studies, and  Chicanx Studies at UC Davis, has been a longtime intern at the university’s Bulosan Center for Filipino Studies, and as such, recently co-curated the exhibit, “California is in the Heart,” now at the California Museum in Sacramento. The exhibit, which runs until April 9, 2023, was created in partnership with the Bulosan Center, with support from the Filipino American National Historical Society Museum, the California Nurses Union, the UC Davis Library, and the Filipino American Educators Association of California. The exhibit highlights Filipinos’ influence in California, from their first landing at Morro Bay in 1587, through the labor and civil rights movements of the 1960s, to present-day roles in local and statewide office.  

Working with the local community, Bernal and her co-curators worked to gain access and to share community artifacts such as family photos and materials related to the work of Filipino nurses during the COVID-19 pandemic, and women’s role in the Filipino American community.

A native of Stockton, California, Bernal first became involved with the Bulosan Center while attending San Joaquin Delta College. She says that there is a rich history in Stockton connected to the Southeast Asian, and Filipino community and that she was inspired to major pursue her bachelor’s degree in Ethnic studies while an intern for the city’s chapter of the Filipino American National History Society (FANHS). That experience compelled her to help marginalized communities with an exploration of their histories and to share them with others. 

Bernal was attracted to the UCLA MLIS program because of the variety of libraries at the University and their connections to ethnic studies across campus. 

“I wanted to be able to connect with students doing research within ethnic studies, and to be able to contribute and update sources within that field,” she says. “Working with FANHS, I saw how community members were able to come together and collect information sources within their own community, when established institutions are not really helping them. I want to engage with community members and show that [their] history is … really important, that [with] this knowledge, they will be able to have this historical context of their history to help their community to the best of their ability.”

By sharing one such history through “California is in the Heart,” Bernal hopes that viewers of the exhibit will be compelled to learn more about Filipino American communities in the state and about the myriad contributions of these communities to California’s economy, wellbeing, and culture. 

“I wanted the communities themselves to see their history within these exhibits, [which] institutions have never shown before, and see how they are part of California history,” says Bernal. “They will be able to share their voices, see themselves within California history and continue to reflect that there is so much they will be able to contribute in the future. 

“While learning the history of the Filipinx community, I mainly saw them in agriculture and health care work, but as you can see, they’re coming out of those fields,” notes Bernal. “They're able to follow their passions that they want to follow and contribute to their community that way. Being in academia myself, I see a slow increase of Filipinx archivists, librarians and professors. There are so many potential fields out there, and I feel like they're able to now enter those fields, though it would be challenging.”

Bernal says that being an ARL Kaleidoscope Scholar is a great advantage to help students meet the challenges of previously unexplored fields, with practical advice and support from mentors who are not unlike themselves. 

“The Kaleidoscope cohort is a fellowship, and it helps people from marginalized backgrounds to enter the library and archive field,” says Bernal, whose Kaleidoscope mentor is Xaviera Flores, a librarian and archivist at the UCLA Chicano Studies Research Center. “I can meet archivists and librarians of color throughout the United States, and we can talk about what struggles and obstacles we're facing within our program, and opportunities to find jobs or join conferences.

“To be able to have a community with the Kaleidoscope cohort was really helpful too, because we’re sharing the ways we are struggling financially and struggling to navigate this field. Even though we have experience, we don’t have the terminology or the knowledge of other students who are in their second year. So, we are sharing advice back and forth and ways to uplift ourselves.”

Bernal thanks her UCLA IS mentor Kim Nguyen (’22, MLIS), a recent graduate of the MLIS program who is now  a public librarian in Los Angeles County. Bernal also credits the UC Davis Asian American Studies department and Roberto Carlos Degadillo, a student services librarian at UC Davis, who has served as another mentor. In addition, she thanks her colleagues at the Bulosan Center, including Robyn Magalit Rodriguez, UC Davis professor of Asian American studies and the center’s director; Stacey Salinas, senior historian;  and Jason Sarmiento, director of archives and public history.

Bernal says that her initial interest in libraries was sparked by her aunt, who worked as a librarian. 

“I view the library as a form of economic support and community engagement,” she says. “Many marginalized communities can depend on libraries and archives for resources and program development that you really don't find anywhere else.”

First-year MLIS student receives ALA’s David H. Clift Scholarship and is selected to the 2022-2024 ARL Kaleidoscope Program.

Jennifer Nguyen Bernal Recognized with Student Honors by ALA and ARL

When Walter Allen was a high school student in Kansas City, Mo during the era of widespread racial segregation, he had teachers at Manual High and Vocational School who broadened students’ horizons and inspired them to do more. 

“They were teaching these lower-income, inner city kids who had been written off by a society that didn’t expect anything of us,” said Allen in a 2016 interview. “We had classes like ‘Shoe Repair’ and ‘Environmental Sciences’ – aka ‘Janitorial Service.’ There was the notion that a good number of us would be dead or in jail or drugged out or burnt out on the street before we hit 25. And at that time also, a good number of us were being shipped off to Vietnam. You would barely graduate from high school before they shipped you off because of the draft.

“But I had these teachers who were remarkable. They would discuss ideas and ask us what we were going to do about our futures. [They] refused to accept that we weren’t capable of achieving whatever goals and dreams we set, and they refused to allow us to settle for lower standards. They took us canoeing, exposed us to theatre, and for me, planted dreams of college.”

Today, Allen, who is a UCLA Distinguished Professor of Education, Sociology and African American Studies, works to make those dreams possible for students in Africa and in South America, as director of the UCLA Capacity Building Center. Founded in 2019, the Center brings the expertise of UCLA to institutions such as the University of Ghana, Addis Ababa University, the University of Rwanda, the Association of African Universities, and the Colombia System of Higher Education, to ensure access and diversity with self-assessments of student services and technological innovation, as well as enhancing these institutions’ fundraising and development efforts.

Professor Allen came to UCLA in 1988 as a professor of sociology after serving on the faculty of the University of Michigan from 1979 to 1991. He is currently the Allan Murray Cartter Professor of Higher Education in the Higher Education and Organizational Change (HEOC) division of the UCLA School of Education and Information Studies. 

The UCLA Capacity Building Center is a reboot of the UCLA Choices Project, which Professor Allen founded in 1998. His expertise includes the comparative study of race, ethnicity, and inequality; diversity in higher education; family studies; and the status of Black males in American society. 

Allen is the recipient of numerous honors, including key awards from the American Educational Research Association (AERA), namely, the AERA Fellows Award (2009) and the Scholars of Color Distinguished Career Contribution Award (2016). In 2018, Professor Allen delivered the W.E.B. Du Bois Lecture at AERA’s annual meeting, highlighting the historical segregation of both faculty and students, the social and economic impact of a college degree upon Black communities, and the hopes represented by the Civil Rights Movement and Black Lives Matter. Recently, Allen received the  Dr. John Hope Franklin Award from Diverse: Issues in Higher Education (2020). 

Professor Allen is a member of the National Academy of Education, and earlier this year, was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. At UCLA, Allen was the 2011-12 Fellow of the Sudikoff Family Institute of Education & New Media, an initiative for the public engagement of SE&IS faculty. 

Professor Allen has served as an expert witness in affirmative action and higher education desegregation cases before the U.S. Supreme Court, including Grutter v. Bollinger and Gratz v. Bollinger (for Student Intervenors); and U.S. v. Fordice (MS). He has also testified on race, education, and inequality before the United Nations in Geneva and the U. S. House of Representatives.

Allen is a sought-after commentator in international media and has been interviewed by numerous outlets including The Oprah Winfrey Show, The MacNeil-Lehrer Report, 60 Minutes, the BBC, NBC Evening News with Tom Brokaw, GLOBO- Brazilian Television Network, Jet Magazine, Le Nouvel Observateur, The Chicago Tribune, Black Enterprise, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Chronicle of Higher Education, and U.S. News and World Report. In 2017, Professor Allen served as an advisor and appeared in the documentary “Tell Them We Are Rising: The Story of Historically Black Colleges and Universities.”

Professor Allen’s recent publications include forewords to “Behind the Diversity Numbers: Achieving Racial Equity on Campus”; “High Achieving African American Students and the College Choice Process: Applying Critial Race Theory”;  and the preface to “Measuring Race: Why Disaggregating Data Matters for Addressing Educational Inequality,” co-edited by UCLA professor of education Robert T. Teranishi, and UCLA Education alumni Bach Mai Dolly Nguyen, Cynthia M. Alcantar, and Edward R. Curammeng. In addition, Allen co-edits the Palgrave Macmillan series, “Neighborhoods, Communities, and Urban Marginality,” and has contributed to “From Ivory Towers to Ebony Towers: Transforming Humanities Curricula in South Africa, Africa, and African American Studies.”  

Allen earned his Ph.D. and his M.A. in sociology at the University of Chicago, and his bachelor’s degree in sociology at Beloit College. He did his postdoctoral studies in psycho-social epidemiology while on the faculty at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill.

The Latest: How did you create the Center for Capacity Building?

Walter Allen: The UCLA Capacity Building Center focuses on working with universities generally, but specifically under-resourced universities. That would be Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs), for example – in the United States. And then, across Colombia and South America, and the universities in Ghana that I’ve been working with… the University of Cape Coast, the University of Ghana, and a couple of smaller private institutions. 

What we are doing with those institutions is, in a nutshell, helping them to work through the issues, challenges and benefits that come from a continuing focus on academic excellence, and at the same time, broadening participation [and] ensuring diversity and inclusion. 

No one ever has enough money, but academia is notoriously inefficient in terms of spending the money and resources that we have. We work with them to do an assessment of their strengths and the resources that they have, make some determinations about how those resources can be deployed more effectively, consistent with the goals that the institution is setting for itself, and then at the same time, working to help them identify new funding sources.

It's an evaluation to improve, rather than prove. The traditional evaluation either proves that you accomplished what you set out to accomplish, or you didn’t. Our evaluation approach is more along the lines of the institution sharing its goals, and us then giving them feedback to adjust course, so that they can more effectively pursue their goal, as opposed to waiting until the end of the evaluation, to tell them what they could have been doing to save money or increase participation.

Walter Allen, director of the UCLA Capacity Building Center, speaks with administrators at Corporación Universitaria Minuto de Dios in Bogotá, Colombia. Courtesy of Walter Allen

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