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Courses Research and Teaching Interests My main teaching interests are in the fields of urban education and educational policy, where I employ the perspectives of sociology, anthropology, political science, economics and history to examine the challenges for creating and maintaining the supports necessary for equitable, democratic, and multicultural educational practices and policies. Both courses explore the larger social, economic and political contexts in which education is embedded as well as focus on issues of teaching and learning. In Urban Education, students observe and assist in classrooms in Chester and Philadelphia on a weekly basis. In Educational Policy, students complete internships with a variety of policy-related organizations in Philadelphia. Introduction to Education, a course that I initially developed and have been teaching for almost thirty years, continues to energize me; it provides an exciting opportunity for about one-third of all Swarthmore undergraduates to critically reflect on and analyze the educational structures and processes that have played a central role in their lives. In 1999, I was honored to receive the Lindback Award for Outstanding Teaching at Swarthmore College. My research interests and academic writing about education have been fairly eclectic and have changed over the course of my career at Swarthmore. Extending research for my doctoral dissertation, I did a longitudinal interview study of women's personal and political development, starting when the women were in high school in 1970 and concluding in 1987. During the early 1990's during the democratic transition in Hungary, I spent several months there doing field research on the challenges for civic education and the teaching of history. Policy issues related to teacher quality and the role of teacher education in liberal arts colleges have been topics about which I have both written and in which I have been involved through committes at the national level and the Consortium for Excellence in Teacher Education. CETE is an organization of selective institutions of higher education in the Northeast that have teacher certification, of which I am a founding member. Currently I am participating in a longitudinal study of the radical reorganization of the Philadelphia School District under Pennsylvania state takeover that is being conducted by Research for Action, a research organization with a long history of documenting and analyzing eductional reform efforts in Phiadelphia. I am involved in two strands of research on this project, "Learning from Philadelphia Reform: A Civic Engagement and Research Project," that utilizes both qualitative and quantitive research methods: 1. documenting and analyzing the diverse provider model mandated for the 70 lowest performing elementary and middle schools in the district in which private educational management organizations (both for profit and not for profit), university partners, and the district's own restructured model have been implemented in an attempt to determine which, if any, model(s) contribute significantly to the improvement of educational achievement; 2. analyzing the attempts by the district to improve teacher quality through initiatives for recruitment, retention and professional development. The work I am doing at RFA is integral to my teaching in both Urban Education and Educational Policy. It also offers me the opportunity to complicate the dialogue on key issues of policy and practice in what I see as an increasingly problematic national direction in education under the mandates of No Child Left Behind. Representative publications Travers, E. Articles on standardized testing and the diverse provider model in the Philadelphia Public School Notebook, ( "an independent quarterly newspaper--a voice for parents, students, classroom teachers and others who are working for quality and equality in our schools"), Spring and Summer issues, 2003. Travers, E. The challenges for civic education in Hungary. Oxford Studies in Comparative Education. Vol. 5 (1), 1996. Travers, E. Women of Riverside High: Personal and political development (1970-87). In K Hulbert and D. Schuster (eds.) Women's Lives Through Time: Educated Women of the Twentieth Century. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 1993. Travers, E. and Sacks, S. Joining teacher education and the liberal arts in the undergraduate curriculum. Phi Delta Kappan. February, 1989. |
