As a member of the National Science Board, I occasionally have the privilege of hearing firsthand accounts of recent scientific advances. Often the best new ideas result when people with different backgrounds and specialized knowledge are thrown together in unexpected ways and places. Peabody College has its own unique history of fostering innovations in the realms of education and human development.

Children or Goats? I read with interest our summer edition of the Reflector and noted several references to “kids.” However there were no references to goats, who are the progenitors of kids. While observing a high school teacher, who was also a football coach, I learned that he always referred to his students as Mr. or Miss and always [...]

Camilla Benbow, Patricia and Rodes Hart Dean of Education and Human Development at Peabody, has been appointed to the board of directors for the Washington, D.C., think tank Education Sector. Education Sector is a nonprofit, nonpartisan organization committed to achieving measurable impact in education, both through improving existing reform initiatives and by developing innovative solutions [...]

Peabody’s Stella Flores, assistant professor of public policy and higher education, was one of 21 researchers nationwide who developed an amicus brief summarizing key research on affirmative action in anticipation of the case, Fisher v. University of Texas, which went before the U.S. Supreme Court in October. The document was submitted by the Civil Rights [...]

Gary T. Henry, professor of public policy and education in the Department of Leadership, Policy and Organizations, comes to Peabody from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Joe Rodgers, professor of psychology in the Department of Psychology and Human Development, comes from the University of Oklahoma. Melissa Gresalfi, associate professor of math education [...]

A five-year, $7.5 million grant from the U.S. Department of Education’s Office of Special Education Programs will continue funding of the IRIS Center at Peabody. The IRIS Center develops coursework and teacher training materials to help students with disabilities achieve their academic potential. Director Naomi Tyler, associate professor of the practice of special education, says [...]

The National Center on Scaling Up Effective Schools at Peabody announced the next phase of their partnership with Broward County Public Schools to study and “scale up” effective practices of these Florida high schools. As part of an ongoing, five-year study funded by the U.S. Department of Education’s Institute on Education Sciences, researchers first studied [...]

Randall K. Harley, (MA’54, PhD’62) professor emeritus of special education, who taught at Peabody for over 29 years, was honored with a reception on campus in September during which he was presented with a stone to be placed in the Hall of Legends at the American Printing House for the Blind. During his tenure at [...]

Former teachers may be an important source for the teacher labor supply, with as many as 30 percent of this population re-entering the field at some point, but who is most likely to return to the classroom after a hiatus? New research from Peabody examines what factors affect teachers’ decisions to re-enter the teaching profession [...]

Magdalene House: A Place about Mercy, (Vanderbilt University Press, 2012) by Sarah VanHooser Suiter, PhD’10, is a participant-observation account of the history of this remarkable community founded in 1997, its structure, its Thistle Farms beauty products operation, and Reverend Becca Stevens’s communal and spiritual vision. The book was developed from Suiter’s doctoral dissertation. Strength in [...]

An acclaimed young adult novelist is now applying her vision, talent and Peabody connections to engage young readers with Shakespeare.

Thomas H. Powell, EdD’82, currently in his 10th year as president of Mount St. Mary’s University in Emmetsburg, Md., has led the nation’s second-oldest Catholic university to new heights.

Selected works were exhibited and artists were recognized at the 31st Annual Awards Celebration of the Mayor’s Advisory Committee on October 25.

The Annual Farm to Fork Dinner on the Peabody mall has become a fall tradition on campus, highlighting locally harvested food and bringing students together to pass around bowls of the best grub around. It’s debatable whether one could actually call “rosemary roasted pork loin with spaghetti squash and figs” grub, but it is definitely [...]

Continued accolades might go to any institution’s collective head. Yet Peabody College’s place atop the rankings of education schools nationwide has made the school’s faculty and leadership anything but complacent. The forward-looking approach that helped to build the college continues to infuse its institutional culture: At Peabody, innovation has become standard operating procedure.

In 2011, Tennessee welcomed 1,236 refugees from 17 different countries, most of them settling in Nashville. For a refugee, the first order of business is survival, and the key to survival in the United States is learning English. Angela Harris, MEd’10, is establishing the ESL to Go program to help Nashville area refugees learn the language.

The G.I. Bill changed the way the state and its citizens thought about one another in the postwar period. This was seen especially in regard to higher education, which quickly emerged as one of the institutional embodiments of the G.I. Bill.

When you find something good, something worthwhile, you recommend it. If it’s really good and really worthwhile, you take it to the next level and share it. That’s what Allison Poarch, BS’07, and her family have done by establishing the Allison A. Poarch Scholarship. The gift is made in conjunction with Allison’s five-year class reunion [...]

With a donation from YingLian Helen Du, a native of China who splits her time between Beijing and Nashville, Peabody has established the Peabody-Asia Center for Education or PACE Fund. The new funding will allow Peabody to expand existing programs and partnerships already in place in China and to explore new possibilities. Recently, the Peabody [...]

Department of Human and Organizational Development faculty and students played a key role in securing a Promise Neighborhood Planning Grant awarded to Nashville’s Martha O’Bryan Center. The grant is one of only 15 nationwide, including just three in the South. The Nashville Promise Neighborhood Initiative plans to provide effective cradle-to-career services for the 6,000+ school-age [...]

Current students show that Peabody still draws the best for their student body.