Stories by Andrew Bauld

We expect the Ed School to produce the next generation of great teachers, education entrepreneurs, and policymakers, but for Leah Waldo, Ed.M.'15, her time on Appian Way, including one foot-stomping, memorable event, led her on an unexpected journey from Cambridge to Nashville to become a country musician. It was truly a life-changing afternoon for Waldo as she sat in the audience of Askwith Hall in January 2015, listening to country legends Garth Brooks and Trisha Yearwood share stories of their own careers. At one point, Brooks described how after all his years performing he still got...

Play is an integral part of a child’s development according to traditional research mostly conducted in Western societies, but what role does play serve and what does it look like for children in indigenous communities? Ed.D. candidate Lynneth Solis, Ed.M.’10, is determined to better answer that question.  Solis’ research focuses on children’s cognitive development, specifically how young children play with each other and with objects to understand and build theories about the world around them, and how this is shaped by their cultural context. After completing her master's in the Mind, Brain...

For Alec Lee, Ed.M.’85 (right), summer isn’t a time for students to escape school. Since 1986, Lee has championed the power of summer learning for students through his organization, Aim High, a free summer learning and enrichment program that brings high-quality classroom experiences to low-income middle school students in the San Francisco Bay Area. Lee, who at the time was teaching high school history, focused on this population because, he says, “there was a lot of emerging research that middle school was really a critical juncture, especially for kids with limited experience. Also...

As odd as it sounds, the students in Jenny Kostka’s high school physics class were expecting an out-of-this-world announcement from their teacher when they started school this part September. And they were almost right. “The first day, students came up to say they were really excited,” Kostka, Ed.M.’15, says. “They saw the word NASA on the school’s web page and thought I might be going to Mars.” While their teacher won’t be traveling to a distant planet any time soon, Kostka will be bringing outer space to her students, thanks to a new partnership between NASA and WGBH, Boston’s PBS station....

“Don’t touch that!” “Settle down!” “Shhh!” For some students, these are the common refrains during a museum field trip that at times must feel more like an extended punishment than a chance to explore great art. And these trips are often no treat for teachers and chaperones who, already feeling the stresses of organizing the day and wrangling students, have little chance to model their own curiosity. Throw in a lecturing museum guide, and the day can seem a total loss. But at many museums across the country, the traditional field trip has become ancient history. “One of the fundamental shifts...

How can the arts best be used to create educational programs and multidisciplinary partnerships? That was the focus of the symposium held earlier this month as part of the Social Integration Through the Arts (SITA) initiative, a collaboration between HGSE’s Arts in Education (AIE) Program and the David Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies. The two-day event, entitled “Snapshots of Practice,” brought cultural leaders from Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, and Mexico, together with faculty and students at Harvard to discuss strategies. “The goal [of the initiative] is to create a...

While HGSE master’s and doctoral students were busy wrapping up final projects and making plans for commencement this past May, many in the HGSE faculty were preparing for a whole new set of students to take over the classrooms of Appian Way through their engagement with Professional Education at HGSE. “Our summer executive education programs represent some of the highest impact work done by HGSE faculty in both K–12 and higher education,” says Senior Lecturer James Honan, educational co-chair for the Institute for Educational Management. “During the summer months we work with hundreds of...

One thousand years in the future, the America we know today is a very different place. Ruled by a dystopian monarchy that has shut down all democratic institutions, a small group of dissenters struggle to keep historical records intact, but they possess only bits and pieces of the important writings that once made up the foundations of American government. The group sends a young girl, Briana, back in time to the beginnings of the American Revolution to try and restore democracy for the future. Her only aid: fragments of a long-forgotten and misunderstood document she must piece back together...

For the opener of the story, "Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of a Video Game," we used an iconic painting called the Declaration of Independence by John Trumbull, which hangs in the U.S. Capitol Rotunda and is on the back of the two-dollar bill. We clearly manipulated the art. As it turns out, we weren't the first — Trumbull himself took liberties with the scene, as Emily Sneff recently explained in a post on Danielle Allen's Declaration Resources Project website. Sneff, the project's research manager, started her piece with the lyrics from a song about Trumbull that were eventually cut from...

The careers that HGSE alumni pursue in education once they have graduated are varied. And, for many new alums, their next steps begin to take shape long before they have left Appian Way. In this new series, Up Next, we check in with several alumni from the class of 2016 — all working on new projects that were born or developed at the Ed School — as they innovate, build, and create. When Conrad Macalalad, Ed.M.’16, arrived on Appian Way as a member of the Technology, Innovation, and Education cohort, he was already well aware of the fact that this generation of students is the wired generation...