Left to right, top row: Pérez-Granados, Schwartz, Goldman, Grossman
Front row: Nasir, McFarland

During 1999-2000, the School of Education continued on the path chartered over the previous few years by making new faculty appointments in key areas. Interim Dean Denis Phillips summarized the changes that have taken place.

"This past year we finished the process of bringing the Social Sciences, Policy, and Educational Practice area up to strength in the wake of some major faculty retirements, and we focused next on making new appointments in the areas of Curriculum and Teacher Education and Psychological Studies in Education. We also began shaping the Learning, Design and Technology area into a cutting-edge program, a task we expect to complete during the coming year. We are entering the new millennium with an absolutely stellar team-probably the best at Stanford in terms of balance of age, experience, talent, and diversity of background. Now we face the immediate but very pleasant challenge of getting to know each other better! The arrival of Dean Deborah Stipek in January will give us further cause to celebrate." SUSE welcomes the following new faculty members:

PAMELA GROSSMAN, professor, received her PhD in education at Stanford in 1988. For 12 years she taught at the University of Washington, where she was named the Boeing Professor of Teacher Education. Her research interests focus on issues of teacher learning that span the careers of teachers. Most recently, she conducted a four-year longitudinal study of beginning language arts teachers, following them from teacher education programs into their first three years of teaching. With her colleague, Sam Wineburg, she helped create and study a department-based learning community of teachers in an urban high school. Their edited book, Interdisciplinary Curriculum: Challenges to Implementation, will soon be published by Teachers College Press.

DANIEL McFARLAND, assistant professor, received a PhD in sociology from the University of Chicago in 1999. His research focuses on the social organization of schools and classrooms. Dr. McFarland has studied how the patterns of course-taking, extra-curricular affiliations, and friendship networks affect mobility and status inequality within high schools. In addition, he has looked at how friendship loyalties and types of instructional methods used in the classroom guide students' decisions to either engage in the learning process or rebel against it.

NA'ILAH NASIR, assistant professor, received a PhD in education from the University of California, Los Angeles. Her research focuses on the intertwining of cultural, social, and cognitive processes in development, particularly with regard to African-American students and other students of color. Dr. Nasir has studied middle and high school basketball players and their understandings of mathematical concepts related to basketball statistics. She has also studied the development of strategy in the game of dominos, popular in African-American communities. A second line of research concerns Muslim schools as a context for learning and development.

DEANNE PÉREZ-GRANADOS, assistant professor, received a PhD in developmental psychology from the University of California, Santa Cruz in 1996. For the past four years she has been an assistant professor in the Department of Child Development and Family Studies at Purdue University. Her research centers on language and conceptual development of toddlers and preschool-aged children, particularly those from low-income families and linguistically and culturally diverse backgrounds. She is currently studying how children use language skills in home and school contexts, and how toys embedded with computer-related technologies - such as the life-like "virtual pet" toys which can interact with and respond to children - impact young children's early development.

DANIEL SCHWARTZ, associate professor, comes to SUSE from Vanderbilt University, where he has been a faculty member since 1992. He received his PhD in human cognition and learning from Columbia University. For many years he has examined cognitive and classroom models that foster learning in mathematics and science. His interest in this area of research stems from eight years of teaching secondary school in Kenya, the inner city of Los Angeles, and a Native Alaskan village. He is currently designing and testing instructional methods and software that can be used in traditional and innovative classrooms.

And finally, SHELLY GOLDMAN, associate professor, joins SUSE in January for an initial three-year appointment after ten years at the Institute for Research on Learning in Menlo Park, CA. An elementary teacher and founding director of an alternative, inner-city middle school, she received a doctorate from Teachers College in 1982. She is currently researching and designing text, broadcast, and Web resources for parents and multimedia and Web environments for teacher learning. Goldman was a principal investigator and the director of the Middle-School Mathematics Through Applications Project (MMAP), a standards-based curriculum that emphasizes real-world applications. She is co-editor with James G. Greeno of Thinking Practices in Science and Mathematics Learning (1998).