About the Authors
Manuel N. Gómez began his work in education with the Oakland Public Schools. He is the architect of STEP: A Partnership for the Advancement of Learning. The project represents an effort to reconstruct relationships between higher education and secondary schools to address academic preparation, professional development, and community participation. His publications include a coauthored book entitled To Advance Learning: A Handbook for Developing K-12 Postsecondary Partnerships.
James Herbert's experience with school-college collaboration began in 1983 with the College Board's Educational Equality Project. He worked with the Board's Academic Advisory Committees which included teachers from higher and secondary education and with EQ's Models Program for School-College Collaboration. Since 1989, his experience has been extended to include summer institutes, large-scale local collaboratives, small study groups for teachers and other forms of collaboration supported by the National Endowment for the Humanities.
Edward C. Kisailus is Director of the Biology Interaction Group/Partnership In Education (BIGPIE), a school-college collaborative established in 1983. BIGPIE works to enhance and update science content and curriculum for K-12 classroom teachers in Western New York. The collaborative effort has been a two-way interaction as the development of strategies for content and teaching implementation has had a positive impact on the college faculty partners and their approaches to undergraduate science education.
Antonio C. Lasaga teaches the introductory geology course for undergraduates at Yale. His research focuses on the physical chemistry of geochemical processes. He has been involved with the teaching of science at the pre-college levels, working with the science teachers at the Vincent Mauro elementary school. He led a Teachers Institute seminar on "environmental science." He is a co-principal investigator of a Partnership in Minority Student Achievement grant from the National Science Foundation to the city of New Haven.
Thomas E. Persing has been a Superintendent of Schools since 1968 and is currently Superintendent of Perkiomen Valley School District in Collegeville, Pennsylvania. He was one of the original founders of the Lehigh University Faculty Partnership.
Norine Polio has been an educator in the New Haven school system for sixteen years, ten as an English to Speakers of Other Languages teacher at Roberto Clemente Middle School and the past six as the Curriculum Developer at Betsy Ross Arts Magnet Middle School. She assisted in organizing the 1986 Yale conference, "Strengthening Teaching through Collaboration: A National Conference of Teachers and Administrators from Schools and Colleges."
Henry A. Rhodes has been a teacher in the New Haven public school system since 1977. The last three years he has served as a Facilitator for Social Development and Curriculum. Being a teacher in the New Haven system has afforded him an opportunity to participate in the Yale-New Haven Teachers Institute and develop curriculum units for his students.
Jay Robinson has been involved in university-school projects for
more than two decadesmost organized to improve student literacy,
both functional and advanced. The projects he considers most successful
and satisfying have joinedschool and university teachers working together
to design curricula that meet particular and local needs of students, who
also join the collaboration effort. Such projects serve the aims of
professional development: teachers learning together for the benefit of
students.
Since 1979, Thomas R. Whitaker has led seminars for the Yale-New Haven Teachers Institute on a variety of topics, from "The Process of Writing" and "American Fiction" to "Contemporary American Poetry: Expanding the Canon" and "Twentieth-Century Multicultural Drama." He contributed an essay, "The Play's the Thing," to the Institute's first publication, Teaching in America: The Common Ground;edited its second publication, Teaching in New Haven: The Common Challenge;and wrote the report on its 1991 national conference, School-College Collaboration: Preparing Teachers and Curricula for Public Schools.