Professional Development Academies in Education

Professional Development Programs in Information Studies

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.

UCLA Ed&IS faculty are at the forefront of their fields, addressing issues of equality, access and social justice in the fields of education and information. Their scholarship has an international reputation for excellence and commitment to addressing the most critical issues facing our society.

An ecosystem of K-12 teaching schools where UCLA partners to develop, study, share, and advance innovative best practices.

The work at UCLA Ed&IS is guided by the principles of individual responsibility and social justice, an ethic of caring, and commitment to the communities we serve. Learn more about our mission and values, our commitment to diversity, equity and inclusion in our faculty and students, our history and more.

Justice, Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion

Justice, Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion are defining features of UCLA Ed&IS and we embrace them as a source of strength.

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Elianny Edwards, a 2022 doctoral program graduate of the UCLA School of Education and Information Studies, has been named the recipient of the UCLA Academic Senate Graduate Student Diversity, Equity and Inclusion Award.

The award is given by the UCLA  Academic Senate on an annual basis to honor a graduate student who has embraced diversity, demonstrated a commitment to serving humanity through learning,  and has motivated other members  of  the University to strive for excellence, among other criteria.  Recipients of the honor receive an award of $2,000.

Edwards received a doctoral degree from the UCLA School of Education and Information Studies in June 2022. Her research interests include defining and promoting school safety to create safe learning spaces for youth, as well the psychosocial, emotional, and academic experiences and outcomes of low-income students of color in academic contexts. While at UCLA she was the lead author of a research brief, Keeping Students Safe in Los Angeles, examining student safety and school policing in the Los Angeles Unified School District. She also solo-authored a paper in a special series of School Psychology Review entitled Centering Race to Move Towards an Intersectional Ecological Framework for Defining School Safety for Black Students. Edwards is a certified K-6 educator and received her B.A in Clinical Psychology and Child Development from Tufts University in 2011. She is currently a Visiting Assistant Professor at the Boston College Lynch School of Education & Human Development.

Elianny Edwards Receives UCLA Academic Senate Graduate Student 
Diversity, Equity and Inclusion Award.

Julio Alicea, a doctoral candidate in the division of Urban Schooling, has been selected as a 2022 Dissertation Fellow, supported by the National Academy of Education and the Spencer Foundation. His dissertation titled, “From Every Shade of Brown and Back; That Includes Black”: A Critical Ethnographic Study of Racial-Spatial Politics and Pedagogies at an Urban School,” explores the relationship between shifting immigration patterns, political economic restructuring, and Black displacement as it creates an impact upon Black and Latinx students at a South Central Los Angeles high school. The fellowship, which is the most prestigious award for dissertation research in education, includes $27,500 to support Alicea's  final year of graduate school. 

“In my dissertation, I utilize ethnographic observations and in-depth interviews to show how coalitional racial politics are fraught with tension and contradiction,” says Alicea. “Such complexities speak to larger issues in diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) work in school spaces. Racial stratification takes place not simply between whites and people of color, but also between groups of color. Tackling such manifestations of racial stratification requires that schools move beyond a rhetoric of DEI to intentional acts of pedagogical and organizational change.”

Alicea’s ethnographic study includes participant observation, in-depth interviews, historical analysis, and qualitative spatial methods, utilizing data from four consecutive school years. With the data, he demonstrates how a school’s politics and pedagogies have evolved in response to the changing racial landscape and new crises that shift organizational priorities and dynamics.

In his dissertation, Alicea underscores the transition of the South Central Los Angeles population from 80% Black to nearly 70% Latinx. He offers a myriad of insights into school-based mechanisms of stratification between racially minoritized groups, including relational processes of opportunity hoarding and the decoupling of organizational values and practices. He also seeks to contribute to the sociology of education and reveals the limits of coalitional racial politics before and after George Floyd, and how those limits shape diversity, equity, and inclusion at the K-12 level.

“Anti-Blackness is a distinct system of physical, structural, and symbolic violence that renders those in the Black diaspora as an ontological other,” says Alicea. “In schools, anti-Blackness is present in curricula that minimize, misrepresent, or otherwise marginalize Blackness and Black peoples [and] in school climates that habitually conflate Blackness with inferiority, deviance, and nothingness. In short, anti-Blackness contributes to divergent and unjust movement through academic pathways, school-prison tracks, and career pipelines.”

At UCLA, Alicea is a member of the Edward A. Bouchet Graduate Honor Society and the recipient of several fellowships and grants, including the Eugene V. Cota-Robles Fellowship, the Graduate Dean’s Scholar Award, and the Shirley Hune Inter-Racial Studies Award. His scholarship has been published in several publications, including Sociology Compass, Urban Education, and the Handbook of Urban Education.

In addition to his doctoral studies at SEIS, Alicea graduated with his Master of Public Policy from the UCLA Luskin School of Public Affairs this year. He earned his B.A. in sociology and anthropology from Swarthmore College, where he was a Mellon Mays Undergraduate Fellow, and achieved a master of arts degree in the teaching of social studies from Brown University, where he was a Woodrow Wilson-Rockefeller Brothers Fund Fellow.  

“My experiences growing up in a working poor Latinx community and later teaching in a multiracial urban community greatly inform the research questions I ask, as well as the methods and theories that I take up to explore said questions,” says Alicea. “In particular, my own experiences as a Puerto Rican youth living in public housing inform the ways in which I conceptualize schools and the larger social contexts in which they are embedded and implicated.”

Urban Schooling PhD candidate conducts ethnographic study of sociospatial forces and organizational dynamics that impact Black and Brown high school students.

Julio Alicea Selected as a 2022 NAEd/Spencer Dissertation Fellow

Johanna Drucker’s newest book, “Inventing the Alphabet: The Origins of Letters From Antiquity to the Present,” has been lauded by Science Magazine as just, “… not another history – it is a historiography, addressing the intellectual history of this crucial topic for the first time.” The author, who is Martin and Bernard Breslauer Professor of Bibliographical Studies in the Department of Information Studies at UCLA, aims to dispel the misconceptions surrounding the existence of more than one alphabet – the myriad of letter forms throughout the world are actually considered as script – as well as the links between the original alphabet that was created around 1700 BCE and the alphanumeric notation that provides the infrastructure for the internet.

Drucker, a scholar whose research includes digital humanities and the history of the book, was honored with the 2021 Steven Heller Award for Cultural Commentary from the American Institute of Graphic Arts (AIGA). Her recent books include “Visualization and Interpretation: Humanistic Approaches to Display,” and “Iliazd: A Meta-Biography of a Modernist.” 

Professor Drucker will speak in conversation with graphic designer Louise Sandhaus at a book launch for “Inventing the Alphabet” on Saturday, August 13 at Hauser & Wirth LA Bookstore. 

To attend this event and for more information, visit Eventbrite. 

Why is the alphabet such an important invention?

The one thing that is important for people to understand is that the alphabet was only invented once in the ancient Near East, in a cultural exchange between cuneiform writing in the north and hieroglyphic writing in the south and amongst speakers of Semitic languages, sometime around 1700 to 1400 BCE.

When people think about different alphabets they'll say, “Like Arabic? That can’t be the same as our alphabet, right?” They are confusing alphabet and script. Script is the different letter forms. If you think about Cyrillic writing for Russian, that’s a script. But the sequence of letters, the names of letters, and what we call the powers of letters – that is, the sound that’s associated with them – are the same across all alphabetic scripts. 

The first letter in Arabic [script] is the alif, and that is the same as the alef [in Hebrew] which is the same as the “a.” The letters look really different. Part of that has to do with the way that the letter forms are made, what the technologies were, and so forth, and also, modifications over time. But there is only one alphabet.

What is mindboggling to me is that the alphabet that was invented around 1700 BCE undergirds the entire global communication system of the internet. That gives me chills. Alphanumeric notation - and that does include the Arabic numerals which were a later invention - that is what global communication depends on. 

The only other writing systems that are still in use today are character-based systems: Chinese, Korean, Japanese. and then a tiny little handful of idiosyncratic inventions that were made for a particular group at a particular moment. Chief Sequoyah saw that writing was power and so he  invented, a set of graphic signs for the Cherokee language that worked well to represent the sound [of their words] But that's a 19th Century invention. It’s very late, and it’s not widespread in use, so alphabetic scripts and character-based scripts are all the writing in the world. 

Character-based scripts are very complex in terms of the number of characters and how they represent, though you can show characters on the [computer] screen. Increasingly, we can use characters for search functions and so forth on the global Internet - http protocols, all code - that's all in alphanumeric numeric notation. Again, it gives me the chills to think about those little scribbles in the desert in 1700 BCE being the basis of contemporary life and communication.

Punctuation has its history as time goes on, [but] doesn't exist in the very early stages – there was not even word spacing. But there were various signs. The Semitic languages do not require explicit notation of vowels. Its consonants and consonant combinations, but they often have markings that indicate breath and sound. And so, as with many other modifications, punctuation came later. 

By the Middle Ages in the West, punctuation starts to be fully developed. The great Malcolm Parkes, a wonderful medievalist, wrote a book called “Pause and Effect,” that has a lot of the scholarship on those transformations. We could have a whole philosophical discussion about this - punctuation doesn't really have semantic value, but it has structural import that becomes meaning-producing.

How does the book address the alphabet from a global variety of cultures and traditions?

It’s such an important point, it's worth going over it again, I think, because of the confusion between alphabet and script. You know what a pair of pants is. You know it can be loose and wide-legged, it can be as tight as skin, it can buckle at the knees, it can go up to your waist or hang on your hips. So, think about scripts as style, and think about the letters as the set of categories of things. 

If I’m using the clothing analogy to get someone dressed, I might want to know how many categories I need. I might have headgear or what is worn on the torso, you can make the classification any number of things. You might use more vernacular: shirts, hats, underwear, pants, socks, shoes, right? If you wanted to dress somebody as an 18th Century buccaneer, those categories would be linked to a library, and what would come onstage would be the buccaneer who is dressed in this kind of pants, this kind of socks, this kind of shoes. So, the scripts are styles of letters. 

Now, some scripts have more characters, and some scripts have less. Again, that has to do with adaptations that are necessary for different languages. Some languages have different sounds and one of the amazing things about the alphabet and its creation is that it depends upon the capacity to distinguish sounds in speech, knowing how many there are, and which ones are meaningful. 

To me, this is an amazing intellectual achievement. If I said to you, “As a speaker, you know nothing about linguistics. I want you to analyze English as you use it and tell me how many sounds there are.” You couldn’t do that. I couldn’t do that. Could you, listening to a native Japanese speaker, know how many sounds though there were in that language that are meaningful? So, what happens in the ancient Near East around 1700 BCE is that there is a sufficient understanding of the sound structure of language to begin make a set of signs to represent those sounds.

This is why the history of the alphabet ends with Unicode, because Unicode is a meta-level description of the number of kinds of things (glyphs, not sounds, in this case) that you need to distinguish, in order to register any script for communication. It’s an information issue [that] gets really fascinating because Unicode inventories libraries of scripts. 

How do magical and angelic alphabets relate to an understanding of the more commonly recognizable alphabets?

This is such a fascinating subcategory. There are a lot of script forms that we think first emerged around the beginning of the Common Era that were used for incantations. And when the ancient Near East was beginning to be excavated by people like Henry Layard and other explorers, in the ruins of Nineveh and ancient Assyrian palaces and libraries they find incantation bowls [with] really interesting signs on them that are not associated necessarily with the actual alphabet. And then, it turns out they kind of are.

They’re magical alphabets called ring letters. Imagine if you had the letter “a” and on its feet you had open circles, and on its top too. It turns out that these ring letters are associated with magical properties, and by the Middle Ages, there's a whole mythology that says these ring letters are actually copied from constellations of stars which shows that the origin of letters was a gift from God, because these are natural signs in the heavens that have been used as the basis of letters.

And then there are all kinds of alphabets that have idiosyncratic histories. There’s one called Adam’s Alphabet and it was supposedly given to Adam by God. One is associated with Noah. One was supposedly given to Abraham by the Angel Raphael as he entered Canaan. 

There is a very limited set of these magical and angelic alphabets. They have a stable graphic form, but they're never used for writing texts, so they exist as exemplars. This is incredible because most of what we know about scripts comes from the fact that they are in use for documents, labels, texts, and inscriptions. Imagine that you have a set of 26 or 28 signs and they stay stable across hundreds of years just transmitted as images. These magical and angelic alphabets just get passed down as visual graphic examples. 

The ring letters are really part of Jewish Kabbalah tradition and they show up in that particular world. But the angelic alphabets show up in Christian cabala as well, and in medieval lore. There’s a mythic explorer named Aethicus Ister who supposedly traveled to the East and came back with this incredible alphabet that shows up in manuscripts all over Europe in the 9th, 10th, 11th, and 12th Centuries. It showed up in Germany and in the British Isles, incredible. Think about what it means to have had a copy of that in medieval Europe. 

Runes are an alphabetic form. They were invented in the early centuries of the Common Era and their form is taken from carving in wood, so they're very simple straight lines.

But the Germanic Futhark, like the Anglo-Saxon Futhorc, both runic alphabets, follows the alphabetic letter order. There is fantastic scholarship on runes by a man named René Derolez, who wrote the definitive inventory of all runic manuscripts and their relationship to each other. Runes are fascinating, but they're part of the alphabet family. There are a couple of variants of runic alphabets – again, we would say runic scripts rather than alphabets. 

Runes are also related to ogham, which is an Irish innovation. What’s interesting is ideas can be transmitted, as well as forms. The idea of the alphabet, the idea of writing gets transmitted, so in some ways, the Futhark is building on the idea, but it does have an alphabet structure. 

How do you hope to open your readers’ eyes to the origins of the alphabet and the importance of this history? 

The book is also a history of knowledge [about] the alphabet. There are fantastic scholars of Semitic epigraphy, which is the study of inscriptions in Semitic languages, incredible archaeologists who recover remains [of language]. They can find some little scrap of ceramic that has one and a half signs on it, and they can identify the place, the date, the source of this particular pair of signs [to] help reorient the history of the alphabet. It’s like finding some little piece of DNA that says, “Between this chimp and this orangutan, there was this piece in between.” 

Incredible scholarship, but what no one has done is to trace the intellectual history. In other words, it would be like if you studied the history of education and you knew that there were principles that had to do with child-centered education, child psychology, development, and learning abilities. You had all the principles of education, but you never heard of Paulo Freire, you never heard of John Dewey. It’s as if the knowledge of the field has been lifted out of its history. 

What I’ve done is to go back and look at that whole, and all these intellectual lineages of knowledge, production and transmission. That’s why it took 40 years. (laughs) The amount of research just finding the references is so intense that I had been some of them tracking for years and years and years. What I said to a friend earlier today was that when I found the two-volume work by Isaac Taylor from 1899 on the shelf in Doe Library at Berkeley titled “The Alphabet.” I thought, “The one thing I want to do in my life as a scholar is to be sure that this intellectual lineage is brought forward to another generation, because it’s just all lost.” 

No one knew who Isaac Taylor was when I was working at the Beineke Library a couple years ago at the tail end of the research for this project. A very sophisticated knowledgeable curator of 18th Century studies who was working there had never heard of Thomas Astle. He was the Keeper of the Records in the Tower of London, and he wrote an amazing book, “The Origin and Progress of Writing,” and he’s another example of a figure whose work deserves to be known.

These are my intellectual forbears, this is my intellectual lineage. I want their work to be brought to light and passed forward. There’s a big emotional part of it for me in that sense. 

Visit these links for reviews of “Inventing the Alphabet: The Origins of Letters From Antiquity to the Present,” in Science Magazine and BBC History Magazine.

New book by Breslauer Professor of Bibliographical Studies explores the the alphabet’s many versions in the world and throughout history. 

Johanna Drucker: The ABCs of “Inventing the Alphabet”

Limited data collection and analysis during the 2019-2020 pandemic-shortened school year masked the fact that many school districts in California were on course for substantially higher rates of school suspension and larger racial disparities among those suspended, had in-person education continued for the full year, according to a new study released today by the Center for Civil Rights Remedies at the UCLA Civil Rights Project/Proyecto Derechos Civiles. 

“When schools closed during the pandemic, many school districts in California were already struggling to make progress toward reforming discipline practices and reducing out-of-school suspensions,” said Dan Losen, Director of the Center for Civil Rights Remedies and lead author of the report. "Too little attention has been paid to the discipline data, even as districts, that had already meted out more suspensions by March of 2020 than they had for the entire prior year, flew under the radar!" 

“Equally important, because the data from 2019-2020 are from a year when in-school education only lasted 70% of the school year, many may have arrived at the false conclusion that substantial progress toward reducing school suspensions was being made." 

The study, Unmasking School Discipline Disparities in California: What the 2019-2020 Data Can Tell Us about Problems and Progress, tells a different story, one of stagnating progress toward reducing suspensions pre-pandemic statewide, and worsening school climate for many students of color across California, once the suspension rates are adjusted to reflect the closure of schools. The findings suggest that for many districts the unadjusted data, and suspension of the state's dashboard coding system, served to mask higher rates of suspension and larger racial disparities. It also points out that several districts made misleading claims in their Local Control Accountability Plan, stating they had met their suspension reduction goals that inappropriately relied upon 2019-2020 data from the shortened in-person year.  

The study uses the available data to examine suspension rates and trends on a statewide and individual school district basis, by projecting what the full year suspension rates would likely have been had schools remained open and continued to mete out punishment at the same rate. The report shows that across the state of California, for example, low-income students with disabilities, especially Black and Native American, were on track to have higher suspension rates in 2019-2020 than in the prior school year, although the raw data without adjustments suggested that the suspension rates had declined. The same was true for Foster youth who were Pacific Islander. 

At the district level, the report notes that districts with high rates, and that meted out more suspensions by March of 2020 than they had for the entire prior school year, were not coded red in the states monitoring system, while many others that had not yet exceeded the prior year's rate were on track for sizeable increases. 

In addition, the report raises concerns about inaccuracies and under-reporting on the use of police to address school discipline and reveals evidence of inappropriate district expenditures. Funds earmarked for improving the academic outcomes of high needs students were spent instead on additional police and security. Unfortunately, the County Offices of Education, who are responsible for all LCAP oversight (including school climate) as well as running many alternative schools, are among the highest-suspending educational agencies in California. 

The report also discusses preliminary findings regarding all student stops on school campuses by police that are collected pursuant to the Racial and Identity Profiling Act (RIPA). This initial review documents a great deal of racial disproportionality. The share of Black students stopped by police far exceeds their share of the enrolled students, which is more disproportionate when police initiate the stops compared to when the stops result from calls for service from the schools. Further, rarely do police fill out the code of conduct information specifying the misconduct at issue which could range from disruption to assault, often reporting nothing beyond the phrase "reasonable suspicion." 

Furthermore, the review of data also suggests a serious problem with under-identification by police of students with disabilities who they stop at school for misconduct. A comparison with data collected by the U.S. Department of Education suggests that the police either don't realize when they are stopping a student with disabilities, or officers are regularly failing to collect and/or report the information on disability status. This reporting issue is problematic. When schools report referrals to law enforcement, the data show that they refer students with disabilities to law enforcement at 2-3 times the rate of non-disabled students. Yet the RIPA data suggests that students with disabilities are 5 times less likely than their non-disabled peers to be stopped, including when the police are responding to a call from the school. Altogether, the available RIPA data raise serious questions of whether large numbers of police who stop students while in school are complying with the Act's comprehensive reporting requirements for student stops. 

"When police fail to comply with the reporting law, it not only masks over the degree to which students are profiled by race and disability status, it further breaks down trust and robs educators, policymakers and the community of the critical information they need to evaluate the impact of police presence on the student body,” Losen said. 

Although the study highlights the need for increased investments to help improve school climate and reduce rates of disciplinary exclusion, the analysis also suggests that districts on track for significant reductions might not receive the attention they deserve. 

"Ultimately, we need the data to tell us what is working, not just to unmask serious problems,” Losen added. “I hope this report encourages the state and districts to invest more in reforming school discipline practices, in ways that support teachers and expand the most effective alternatives. Given widespread inaccuracies in the policing data, the data we have now should be carefully analyzed, so that the areas of greatest need are not being over-looked, hampering efforts to expend resources where they are needed most.” 

The report includes recommendations for improving the accountability for school climate, including more comprehensive discipline data reporting and ending non-compliance with required reporting on school policing in California’s school district report cards. 

A spreadsheet detailing discipline trends for every school district in California is available on request and will be posted for downloading on the release date.

Visit K-12 Dive for recent coverage of "Unmasking School Discipline Disparities in California: What the 2019-2020 Data Can Tell Us about Problems and Progress."

Stalled pre-pandemic progress easily escapes attention. 

Unmasking School Discipline Disparities in California: What the 2019-2020 Data Can Tell Us About Problems and Progress

The UCLA School of Education and Information Studies has entered into a research partnership with the Organization for Social Media Safety (OFSMS), a Los Angeles-based nonprofit dedicated to protecting consumers, especially K-12 students, from social media-related dangers, including cyberbullying, hate speech, human trafficking, and self-harm. This spring, Wasserman Dean Christina Christie signed a MOU for the partnership with Marc Berkman, the organization’s CEO.   

"We are very much looking forward to working together with OFSMS on issues of singular importance surrounding digital media safety,” says Dean Christie. “Our partnership with OFSMS is significant on several fronts. It will enable us to undertake much-needed research on how social media, and the digital platform in general, affects children and young adults. 

“Though the digital platform is pervasive in the contemporary world, we know very little about its actual impact on children. The partnership will help fill this dire gap in scholarship. This scholarship will, in turn, help us develop more effective curricula for our schools to help our children and young adults cope better in the digital environment.” 

Berkman says that as the first and only consumer protection organization focused exclusively on social media, OFSMS relies on evidence to inform its programming, which includes education, advocacy, and technology development. He says that the partnership with UCLA SEIS reflects an intersection of his organization’s aims and the University’s commitment to public service.

“This work significantly advances the public interest by adding to the world’s understanding of social media safety through top-notch research,” says Berkman. “Our partnership with SEIS represents a fortuitous alignment of organizational interests, since social media is demonstrably impacting K-12 students.”

Mitsue Yokota, academic director of undergraduate programs at SEIS, says that the partnership with OFSMS will provide opportunities for SEIS students to work with researchers at the School of Education and Information Studies and its affiliates.

"With the new partnership, OFSMS is committed to conducting studies that will help fill the holes in the existing literature and find links between social media usage and various outcomes," says Yokota. "I think this is a particularly exciting development for the students in our undergraduate program as we’ve discussed ways in which they might collaborate with researchers in the school to help support data collection and analysis efforts. Furthermore, for any of our students pursuing a career in teaching, it would help inform them of ways that they can keep their future students safer while utilizing various social media platforms. I think this is a much needed partnership and excited to see the potential research projects that are launched."

Berkman says that by producing “urgently needed scholarship” in the field of social media safety, the partnership will have local, national, and even international impact. Leveraging its existing infrastructure, OFSMS can put the lessons learned through the partnership into immediate use in classrooms, legislatures, and technology companies.

“There are a number of questions that we simply do not have the answer to, that are really basic, fundamental questions,” notes Berkman. “How long should a child be using social media for? Do school phone and social media policies impact educational achievement? Do they impact the risk of or susceptibility to other dangers?

“UCLA SEIS will design research to provide reliable, practical answers to these lingering unknowns. The Organization for Social Media Safety is going to be able to use our existing operations in K -12 schools across the country to conduct this research in a way that hasn't been done before.”

The Organization for Social Media Safety was established in 2016, when Jordan Peisner - who was then 14 years old -  was suddenly and viciously assaulted by another teen he did not know, outside a fast food restaurant. During and after the attack, witnesses and friends of the perpetrator filmed the assault on their phones and then quickly uploaded their videos to social media. 

While Jordan slowly recovered from his severe and ultimately lifelong injuries, his father Ed Peisner resolved that no other child or family should endure such an ordeal. He began meeting with local legislators to explore solutions, and eventually partnered with Berkman, a senior staffer with the California State Assembly. Together, they learned that incidents of what is now called social media-motivated violence, attacks committed for the purpose of filming and sharing on social media, had doubled every year since 2006. To stop this trend, Berkman ultimately drafted Jordan’s Law, the nation’s first state law to deter social media-motivated violence. 

With Peisner’s fierce advocacy, Jordan’s Law was signed into law in California within only a year of its introduction. In the process of advocating for Jordan’s Law, Peisner and Berkman had immersed themselves in the world of social media. Their newfound and painful awareness of the long and rapidly expanding list of social media-related dangers, like cyberbullying, hate speech, sexual harassment, and propaganda inspired them to create the Organization for Social Media Safety. The work of OFSMS has been featured in The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, and NBC News. The organization has been selected by the State of California as the 2022 Nonprofit of the Year.   

“One of the things about our origin story and social media-motivated violence is that a lot of people haven't considered it,” says Berkman. “Yet when we teach about it or when Ed shares his story, they immediately know what it is. They immediately know that they've seen it - there just wasn't the language for it. By being able to point to credible research and specific cases, we can raise awareness of what the specific dangers are that families are facing on social media.” 

OFSMS’ educational programming consists of presentations for students, workshops for parents, and social media safety consulting for schools, as well as foster youth programs, family consultations, and corporate presentations.  OFSMS’ extensive experience in K-12 schools will inform programs at SEIS’s community schools, Mann UCLA Community School and UCLA Community School RFK, in the area of social media safety and information and media literacy more broadly. 

Arif Amlani, SEIS director of new initiatives, points out that the partnership is not designed to vilify social media or the use of it. He cites the work of UCLA colleague Jeff Share, faculty lecturer in SEIS and co-author of “The Critical Media Literacy Guide – Engaging Media and Transforming Education.”

“Jeff puts it very nicely: the digital platform with all its capabilities is fundamentally a tool, and you can use it for the betterment of humanity or abuse it to the detriment of humanity,” says Amlani. “Now, what are its noble uses? What are its nefarious uses? We’ve seen the enormous potential of the digital platform for human betterment, but we haven't really looked very deeply at its misuse and its negative effects. Those are things that we’d like to study. The scholarly community has just scratched the surface on researching these issues.

Berkman hopes that the collaborative research undertaken by SEIS and OFSMS will support his organization’s three-pronged approach to social media safety by providing evidence-based answers to the many unanswered questions that educators and families may have.

“The range of social media- related dangers that we work on leaves no one untouched, from misinformation and disinformation, to the issues that are impacting students across the world: cyberbullying, the mental health impacts, and the potential educational impacts,” says Berkman. As a foundational matter, we consider social media safety to be a high priority issue for the public.”

Collaboration will produce vital research to inform and protect users of social media, particularly K-12 students.

UCLA SEIS Enters Partnership with the Organization for Social Media Safety

The UCLA School of Education and Information Studies is honored to announce a $1.25 million grant by the Mellon Foundation to support the creation and implementation of the Radical Librarianship Institute and an accompanying community press. 

As its name suggests, the Radical Librarianship Institute represents a break from traditional librarian training. Led by Principal Investigator Robert D. Montoya, UCLA assistant professor of information studies and director of the California Rare Book School (CalRBS) at UCLA, as well as Gregory Leazer, UCLA associate professor of information studies and Sean Pessin, information studies doctoral student and lecturer in the CSU Northridge departments of liberal studies and English, the Institute will exist to redefine the role of librarians, centering principles of inclusion and social justice as it convenes working librarians from across the nation. The grant also will partner with Skye Patrick, UCLA IS doctoral student and Los Angeles County Library Director, who will serve as the public library expert and core member.

“It is truly an honor to be recognized by the Mellon Foundation for this project. I’ve long hoped to implement a project of this scale and scope,” says Professor Montoya. “The Mellon Foundation grant will help create a space where libraries can support strategically excluded communities toward the aim of pushing against these structural injustices, especially by providing publishing avenues to amplify social concerns and work for a more humane collective future.

“The UCLA Libraries, Ethics, and Justice Lab believes deeply that ‘print culture’ wielded ethically and broadly, is a core tool in the push for social change,” he says. “It is our intention to democratize and widen access to these arenas of knowledge and communication in support of a global community that moves forward with an ethic of care for human equality, a belief in the power and beauty of difference, and a foundational belief that an environment destroyed destroys humanity wholly. After all, it is the collective that will promote a more just world, especially when the few in power work concertedly to quash this potential.”

A key part of this program will be the articulation of a radical and transformational library curriculum articulated by some of the leading librarians in the country. The problem these participants will confront is simple but deep-rooted. Based on race, ethnicity, or income status, too many people live in information deserts, excluded from the knowledge wealth that exists in libraries, special collections, databases, and the public sphere. Additionally, many of these communities are also excluded from formal librarianship, spaces of knowledge production, and publishing avenues that allow ready distribution of their knowledge, creativity, and activism, which is a key element for community and collective solidarity and organizing. 

“In no uncertain terms, the globe is experiencing the harsh realities of human neglect on the environment, as well as an erosion of ethical principles in most all of our political and social domains,” says Montoya. “Because these problems are systemic, the inevitable result is that poor, minoritized, and vulnerable populations take the burden of society’s injustices. Specific communities are overtly and strategically barred from arenas of political representation; minoritized communities are unfairly targeted by the justice system under the false promise of social order and the collective attainment of peace; and they are unable to access quality medical, educational, and social infrastructure. The benefits of our social systems are dependent on one’s access to wealth, favorable social identification, legacy systems, and other forms of capital. On top of this, these same communities have no consistent, fair, or easily accessible public venues to express — and potentially remedy — their suppressed positionalities and experiences of these injustices. This is especially important since most of our social systems are failing to work in the favor of all, but to the benefit of the few. Formal publication platforms such as books, magazines, and others, suffer from the same inequities we see in everyday society, and thus socially-excluded populations are unable to access these sources of public discourse. Specific populations are being overtly silenced. Yet, reaching the goal of collective equity and freedom depends on the ability of the individual and collective to feel represented in the public and social sphere, and thus more able to advocate and push for social change. 

“All communities deserve to share their stores, to be earnestly heard, and to—and this is important—find others with similar experience such that they can organize and contribute to the improvement of their circumstances,” says Montoya. “It is my deep belief that libraries—especially public libraries—are spaces that can work with communities to help them organize collectively to demand social equitability. Librarianship’s professional potential to ameliorate the root problems of our society is what excites us and motivates us in this project. The future of our field is one with a global view with global concerns and aims for justice.” 

Libraries and librarians help facilitate access to much of this information; unintentionally, some of their methods and practice may perpetuate barriers. The Institute will identify those barriers and propose remedies. Importantly, librarians also have the unique ability to build and promote spaces that can amplify community voices in the public sphere. The institute will invite upward of 20 librarians to the UCLA campus, and – in concert with CalRBS – will engage in an intensive training and workshop session to craft community book-making projects that will be developed at their home institutions.

An integral aspect of the Institute will be the community publishing press, run in partnership with the Book Arts Lab of California State University Northridge, led by Pessin. The community press is established in recognition that printed communication is alive and well, lasts longer than social media, and often has greater impact. As part of this initiative, UCLA will establish a substantial fine press printing lab, with a number of historically significant printing presses, type specimens, and bookmaking supplies. CSUN will obtain an adequate amount of modern printing equipment, situated to produce community book objects on a large scale. 

The Institute will seek to realign the role of librarians in relation to the communities they partner with, giving library users the power to “speak” and join the information economy directly and durably, with expert guidance. The goal here is also to provide avenues for community members to disseminate their own experiences navigating a deeply unequal and discriminating social sphere. The UCLA fine press printing equipment will also be tightly integrated into the MLIS curriculum to enhance the education experiences of students pursuing work in librarianship, print and visual culture, and history of the book.

The Radical Librarian Institute is a division of the Library, Ethics & Justice Lab that is directed by Professor Montoya at UCLA. It will begin in July 2022, and its first iteration will culminate 36 months later.

This grant is the latest in a number of major initiatives partnering the Mellon Foundation with UCLA in ways that synergize each organization’s commitment to greater opportunity for marginalized people. At UCLA, the Mellon Foundation has previously supported social rights initiatives, such as “Archiving the Age of Mass Incarceration”; urban humanities; arts and culture; archives and collections; and more. It would be an understatement to say that the Mellon Foundation has played a major role in enabling UCLA to aim higher in educating some of the best minds in our culture.

The Mellon Foundation is the nation’s largest supporter of the arts and humanities. Since 1969, the Foundation has been guided by its core belief that the humanities and arts are essential to human understanding. The Foundation believes that the arts and humanities are where we express our complex humanity, and that everyone deserves the beauty, transcendence, and freedom that can be found there. Through our grants, we seek to build just communities enriched by meaning and empowered by critical thinking, where ideas and imagination can thrive. Learn more at mellon.org. 

For more information on the Radical Librarianship Institute at UCLA, please contact Robert D. Montoya at montoya@gseis.ucla.edu .

Robert D. Montoya will serve as PI to establish and implement inclusive and socially-just librarian training and an accompanying community press.

Mellon Foundation Grants $1.25 Million to Create the Radical Librarianship Institute and Community Press at UCLA

Wasserman Dean Christina (Tina) Christie and Eileen Strempel, inaugural dean of the UCLA Herb Alpert School of Music, have written an op-ed on the impact of the overturning of Roe v. Wade, as published in Inside Higher Ed. 

“Those of us in the California higher education community support reproductive rights, and at this critical juncture we must pause and reflect upon what this means for women and their right to educational access nationwide,” Christie and Strempel write. “As mothers and as educators, we understand what is at stake.

“Nearly 60 percent of America’s college students are women, and without access to safe reproductive health care, their admission, enrollment and graduation becomes that much more precarious.”

Strempel and Christie point out that more than half of women who opt for abortion are in their 20s and are likely to be pursuing higher education, citing studies that show one in seven who had an abortion did so to continue their education. They also emphasize that the Supreme Court ruling will impact less privileged women of color and from lower socioeconomic backgrounds. 

“The writer Sheelah Kolhatkar recently summarized what is at stake by describing the effects of the legalization of abortion in the 1970s: ‘Women who were able to delay motherhood through legal access to abortion were much more likely to finish college, pursue higher degrees, spend longer in the labor force, and enter higher-paying occupations; they were much less likely to fall into poverty later in life,’” state Christie and Strempel. “This comes at a time when parent students are already struggling with astounding levels of basic needs around food and housing insecurity, challenges the pandemic has only exacerbated.

“Despite the hopeful stories, only 8 percent of single mothers who enroll in college manage to earn a degree within six years. Put another way, 92 percent of single-mother students do not graduate with a life-transforming, income-enhancing credential. Without access to safe and affordable access to abortion, career options are largely erased for our society’s most vulnerable citizens.”

To read, “Abortion Decision Takes Aim at College Students,” visit the Inside Higher Ed website.

Wasserman Dean writes op-ed with Eileen Strempel, inaugural dean of the UCLA Herb Alpert School of Music, on the overturning of Roe v. Wade. 

Christina Christie: Reproductive Rights and Higher Education

As a member of the largest graduating class from the UCLA’s then-School of Library Science (’90, MLS), Monica Hagan built her career on her innate curiosity, her expertise in linguistics and psychology, and her skills and talent as a librarian. 

Hagan earned her MBA at the Pepperdine Graziadio Business School in 2005, which included training at the IAE Business School in Buenos Aires. She has served as a board member of the UCLA Library & Information Studies Alumni Association (LISAA) since 2015 and in 2021, was nominated for UCLA Librarian of the Year. 

Retiring this year from her positions with the UCLA School of Education and Information Studies and the UCLA Anderson School of Management, Hagan – whose first introduction to the University was as a young student at what was then the University Elementary School (now UCLA Lab School) - takes a look back at her service as a librarian, the key role that UCLA Education played in collecting and storing national scholarship on community colleges, and how research plays a part in the work of SEIS students and their goals of furthering equity and access in K-12 to higher education.

As a UCLA librarian, what has a typical day on the job been like for you? 

I wear a couple of different hats currently, in terms of jobs that I cover and schools that I serve at UCLA. This was my 15th year. I initially was hired to work at the Rosenfeld Library through the Anderson School of Management, which serves Anderson students and programs. I had experience as the agribusiness and business librarian at Cal Poly San Luis Obispo, and I had also earned an MBA degree at Pepperdine.

A typical day runs the gamut. Anderson only serves graduate students, and the programs are quite varied in terms of length. Some can be nine months long or three years long, whether they are held remotely or in person, or even in a hybrid situation, so it’s always challenging. There are a lot of different requests. Part of what we do as librarians is the sales pitch - getting out to people an understanding of what we actually do, and getting students involved with the resources to help support whatever their program is. There are many masters’ students and a PhD program as well, so we work one-on-one with students or with teams – the majority of the masters’ groups do team-based work. 

How did you also become the librarian for UCLA Education?

A couple of years ago, when the then-education librarian retired, she was someone I had gone to library school with: Gabriella Gray. When Gabi retired, they were looking for somebody that could fill her shoes. It was sort of a crunch time because of things like the pandemic and so forth. The UCLA Library wasn’t really hiring [more staff]. 

When I was in my [library school] program at UCLA, I did a six-month internship at the former Education Psychology Library that used to be at the top of the Powell Library building. I served for nine years as a graduate-level education and psychology librarian at Pepperdine University following UCLA.  And, so, it seems that education has always been second nature to me. It seemed like a natural fit, so I volunteered to take on the education library position. I didn't move away from my office at at the Anderson School, but by that time, with COVID, we were [working] remotely. 

How do you guide students to what they need?

Education is particularly challenging in that we have lots of undergrads and then we have masters [students], teaching credentials, and PhD programs. It really depends on what the requirement is for the student. Part of it is always just to make people feel comfortable with the resources we have.

A lot of times, if I meet with a student or even a small group of students, I may suggest and show some key resources. But then, sometimes I switch roles with them so that somebody takes the lead and uses the resources on their own, so that I'm just like a bird on their shoulder [who steers] them towards things that I know from my experience would play out better for the questions that they're asking. 

Once they start seeing that they get results, they're tied to that process. Yet they know that they can always come back and ask whatever questions they have because they now have a solid foundation for understanding the kinds of materials we have at UCLA and how to get the information that they're looking for.

We have so many students who want to have issues of equity and diversity more broadly represented. It is tremendously important to look at how to really teach with greater understanding and better representation for folks in terms of culture, and validation of who they are.

Who has been instrumental to your education and your career at UCLA?

My faculty advisor was Mary Maack, now an emerita faculty member. Mary was just coming in at about the same time I came in, so she was new to UCLA in 1987. She had done a lot of work in Africa, and I was quite interested in a lot of the research that she had done. Her dissertation related to Senegal, where she had spent time. She did a lot of work in Paris as well, on more of the African stuff, but also with French literature and women writers. 

Christine Borgman was just outstanding. A Stanford grad, ahead of her time. She was so involved with technology in ways that people were not. Chris was always very warm, she remembers people. John Richardson was there, he was a good presence in the program, and  Barbara Tillett. At the time, she taught one year of cataloging after completing her PhD, and I was able to get into her class.  She was then hired at the Library of Congress, and later went on to be instrumental in RDA development.

The person that I worked largely with and under was Diane Childs. A new mentorship program was established to pair an existing librarian with a library school student. As a first-year student, I was paired with Diane. I also ended up doing my ed psych internship where Diane worked. So, we worked together for those six months, and I’ve known her even since. We continue to get together for breakfast or lunch, or send each other things, she’ll save clippings for me. But the fact that she was the education librarian at UCLA and that she did her job so well – I was able to learn a lot from her. It’s been a great experience, knowing that I’m following in her footsteps.

How were you and Diane involved with what was then the national Educational Resources Information Center (ERIC)? 

I worked at Pepperdine University for nine years following graduation in 1990. During that time, I also co-presented with Diane a couple of times on educational research issues, including ERIC. Diane had worked at the community colleges clearinghouse before working as a librarian at UCLA.

ERIC started in 1966 and was funded by the U.S. government. The idea was that there was a central location for education materials of all types that formed a database. They had, for example, a subject clearinghouse for higher education research. Rural education was a clearinghouse. So, the folks from rural ed would identify leading experts in the field and the leading industry associations. They would very often attend those sessions, or would get the proceedings for the conferences and then would contact presenters who had written a book or paper and solicit them to include [their materials] in ERIC. So, the authors would approve that, and send their work to the clearinghouse. 

The job of the clearinghouse staff was to maintain the connections between the clearinghouse and its various authors and entities, as well as serve as a publishing unit, to make sure that the material arrived safely and was transitioned into the database, and then was available for people [to] search. 

One clearinghouse that existed, and was housed at UCLA in Moore Hall, was the clearinghouse for community colleges.  The staff was to be involved with community colleges throughout the U.S., with the researchers studying them, and with the literature about those colleges.

ERIC works slightly differently now but, for about 30 years, it functioned in that clearinghouse model. In the early 1990s, ERIC held a series of three-day meetings throughout the United States. One of them was held at UCLA, a formal government hearing, where people would testify as to what value ERIC served to present and future researchers. I went for two of the three days that they had it, and the room was packed. It was really a plus for UCLA to have that clearinghouse while it existed and to serve as a focal point for the debate as to how ERIC should best be governed.

How did you choose UCLA’s library program for your advanced degree?

While earning my BA, one of the final courses was a graduate course in linguistics at Cal State Dominguez Hills. It was a small seminar with the objective being to work on a language that was not your own native language and to thoroughly analyze it according to a specific formula. I picked Swahili, and the information I was able to get through the Dominguez Hills library was supportive and representative of a lot that was going on in African languages and literature. The prime book that I used had beautiful pen and ink drawings of local scenes in Kenya and Tanzania and was written by a UCLA author.

I wasn't a person who originally wanted to be a librarian, but I liked the aspects that would enable me to get in and work on things that related to classification and problem solving. So, I applied to the program and got in, and then I immediately signed up for a year of Swahili and got to meet a lot of the people that were involved with the book that I had been working with. 

Part of the reason I came to UCLA was that my father, Roy L. Smith, graduated from UCLA, earning his bachelor's degree in English in the 1950s and his master's degree in education in 1960. His thesis was on critical reading skills.  He was a first-generation college student, married, and with three children during his time at UCLA. He worked for LAUSD as a teacher, a master teacher, and a principal. He later moved north in 1966 to the Kentfield School District, where he retired as principal of two schools simultaneously in 1986. And of course, he remained a proud Bruin throughout his lifetime.

I was enrolled at what is now the UCLA Lab School, and was previously the Corinne A. Seeds Elementary School, later UES (University Elementary School). My dad knew Corinne Seeds. And now I feel that I've come full circle, as my office cubicle at the Anderson School has a full-length window that faces the playground of the Lab School, so I can see where I played when I was six years old. 

UCLA librarian for SEIS and the Anderson School of Management shares serendipitous journey to her career at the University.

Monica Hagan: MLS Alumna Guides UCLA Education Students Through Their Research

This article was originally  published June 17,2021

On Jan. 1, 1863, President Abraham Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation declaring “all persons held as slaves” within the rebellious states “are, and henceforward shall be free.”

The reality though was that the Emancipation did not end slavery. Freedom for many would be won state by state in battles across the remnants of the Confederacy, with the help of nearly 200,000 Black soldiers who joined in the Union effort after Lincoln’s proclamation.

Even as enslaved Black people in some Confederate states at midnight on Dec. 31, 1862, watched and waited for their freedom, many others did not know they were free. And as the war waged on thousands of confederates fled to the frontier state of Texas, taking thousands of enslaved Black people with them. It would be two-and-a-half years, more than two months after Robert E. Lee surrendered to Ulysses S. Grant at the Appomattox Courthouse in Virginia, that 250,000 enslaved Black people in Texas would learn of their freedom.

In Galveston, Texas, on June 19th, 1865, Union Major General Gordon Granger issued General Order Number 3:

“The people of Texas are informed that in accordance with a Proclamation from the Executive of the United States, all slaves are free.” Reactions ranged from shocked amazement to outbreaks of spontaneous celebration. The day would come to be known and recognized as “Juneteenth.”

Unfortunately, too few of us know this history. And our ignorance is connected to the very real erasure that results from the institutional racism woven into this country’s history.

“Let us be clear, Juneteenth has been taught in some American classrooms and there have long been individual teachers who offer a complex, carefully considered nuanced history of Juneteenth and slavery,” said Eddie Cole, an associate professor of higher education and organizational change at the UCLA School of Education and Information Studies. “But they often do so without relying on school textbooks. They may explore historical texts from a century ago, or other primary sources. Those teachers provide their students with a more holistic truth and a glimpse at Black liberation and triumph.

“That said, Juneteenth is not taught in most American classrooms because it is not a feel-good story,” Cole continued. “It is an exemplifier of the truth. It is a stunning example of how racism and capitalism have stained the idea of an American democracy. It does not fit the mainstream narrative that centers the nation’s independence. Instead, it highlights the misdeeds, or at least the negligence, of many so-called national heroes. That alone is why it is not taught in many schools.”

Celebrations of Juneteenth date back to 1866. Gathering at churches, festivals, barbeques and other events large and small, formerly enslaved Black people would come together to pray, meet with family and honor the day. The events spread from Texas across the South, and into northern states as Black people moved across the nation, taking their stories with them.

Recognition of the event declined in the early 1900s as memories of the Civil War faded and families of former enslaved Black people migrated north. Still, Juneteenth continued to be celebrated, with the Texas state fair and other events drawing tens of thousands during the 1940s and early 1950s.

Texas officially recognized Juneteenth as a state holiday in 1980, becoming the first state in the nation to do so. Today, Juneteenth is officially recognized by 47 states. Today, President Joe Biden signed a law designating Juneteenth a national holiday to be observed every June 19.

A 2016 survey conducted by the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture estimated that less than 10% of total class time is devoted to teaching Black history. And according a 2017 Southern Poverty Law survey of the 10 commonly used textbooks and 15 sets of state standards, textbooks treated slavery in superficial ways, and state standards focused more on the “feel-good” stories of abolitionists than on the brutal realities of slavery.

Additionally, a 2020 investigation by CBS News examining how Black history is taught across the United States found seven states do not directly mention slavery in their state standards and eight states do not mention the civil rights movement. Only two states specifically mention white supremacy, while curriculum in 16 states list “states’ rights” as a cause of the Civil War.

Cole underscores that textbooks have long been politicized because the truth about slavery was a political, as well as a racial, social, moral, and economic issue.

“As long as public school system budgets have been tied to elected officials, there has been significant state interference with incorporating Juneteenth, and slavery for that matter, into school textbooks,” Cole said. “This has perhaps been the easiest way to ensure that generations prioritize the narrative that centers national triumph over the more truthful narrative of national wrongdoings and missteps alongside triumph.”

The teaching of Black History and slavery is currently under attack by some political leaders. According to Education Week, as of June 14 of this year, 21 states, including Texas, where Juneteenth originated, are considering measures restricting how teachers can discuss racism, slavery or the teaching of critical race theory. Florida and other states have moved to ban the use of the New York Times 1619 Project, which explores the role of slavery in the history of the United States, from being used in school classrooms.

Despite the efforts of some, there is also renewed public support for teaching about Black History and racism through the exploration of Juneteenth and other experiences and events. The killings of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor and others resulted in the protests across the nation and sparked a renewed interest in civil rights, freedom and Black history in the United States. And this year, the Juneteenth Foundation hosts the Juneteenth Freedom Festival and is asking corporations and others to celebrate Juneteenth as a national “Day of advocacy and involvement,” and to support social justice, civil rights and education organizations.

“We would all be better served if we acknowledged that our challenges today are not something unique to our current experience,” Cole said. “We would better understand how to navigate the moment by studying how those before us have resisted and taught in spite of the effort to limit these discussions in classrooms. Because to fundamentally mislead the youth after Juneteenth or other racialized moments in history is to do them a grave disservice on their road to becoming, hopefully, fully engaged citizens of the world who understand the legacies of the past and how it shapes our present.

“Juneteenth is an important reminder that freedom has not always been actualized simply because laws have been passed in the United States,” Cole said. “Juneteenth is a reminder of promises made and promises broken, and it’s important for students to learn the full, complex truth about the United States as ‘the land of the free.’”

This article was featured in UCLA Newsroom.

That it’s not a ‘feel-good’ story is why it should be an essential part of history classes, says Eddie Cole.

Why schools haven’t taught about Juneteenth, and why they should

On June 19th, 1865, in Galveston, Texas Union Major General Gordon Granger issued General Order Number 3:

“The people of Texas are informed that in accordance with a proclamation from the Executive of the United States, all slaves are free.” 

That day, more than two years after President Abraham Lincoln had issued the Emancipation Proclamation declaring “all persons held as slaves” within the rebellious states “are, and henceforward shall be free,” marked the end of slavery in the United States.  Since then, the day has been recognized and celebrated by many across the nation as “Juneteenth.”

In 2021, President Joseph R. Biden, in recognition of the importance of the events ending the enslavement of Blacks in the United States and the celebration of Black culture and accomplishment, signed legislation establishing Juneteenth as a federal holiday. 

On Monday, UCLA and the other Universities and offices of the University of California will close in observance of this our newest national holiday.  

One way we can celebrate Juneteenth is to offer our congratulations to our talented and diverse recent class of graduates.  In 2022, 18 Black students graduated from doctoral programs in the UCLA School of Education and Information Studies.  

But as we celebrate, we recognize that our work to support the full participation of Black Americans and other students of color in the opportunities our university and other institutions of higher education can provide, remains unfinished. There is more to learn and more to be done. 

As so as we mark this new holiday, we hope that our students, staff, faculty and friends will take some time to learn and think more about the importance of Juneteenth and the ongoing battle for racial equity and justice. 

One place to start is with an article we published last year, Why Schools Haven’t Taught about Juneteenth, and Why They Should, offering some important insight and perspective from Eddie Cole, an associate professor of higher education and organizational change at the UCLA School of Education and Information Studies.

The UCLA Office of Equity, Diversity and Inclusion also offers at toolkit for learning about Juneteenth.

 And if you are looking for resources for   teaching about Juneteenth, the UCLA History and Geography Project at UCLA Center X suggests resources available from Learning for Justice.  

In addition, Assistant Professor of Education Jessica Harris suggests a list of resources for us to explore, work toward, and learn about race, racism, and anti-racism in the context of the United States. 

We hope that you will also take time to celebrate the Juneteenth holiday.  Here are a few suggestion of events and activities in the Los Angeles area.  Enjoy!

Juneteenth: A Global Celebration of Freedom: An All-star Juneteenth concert at Hollywood Bowl will feature first all-Black orchestra in the  Bowl’s 100-year history. The June 19 concert will be broadcast live at 5 p.m. on CNN. Or attend live. Tickets and more information here.  

2022 Liberation: A Festival of Arts & Culture Honoring Juneteenth https://socalgrantmakers.org/liberation-2022

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