Center Event: Helping Children Thrive in an Age of Uncertainty
Helping Children Thrive in an Age of Uncertainty
2:30 - 4 p.m., April 16, 2024
Moderator: Jackie Mader, Hechinger Report
Panelists: Vivian L. Gadsden, University of Pennsylvania Graduate School of Education; Richard J. Murnane, Harvard Graduate School of Education; Aisha Khizar Yousafzai, Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health; and Henrik Daae Zachrisson, University of Oslo Faculty of Educational Sciences.
Invited Boston College Student and Faculty Responses: Katarina Sauter, Elementary Education & Applied Psychology and Human Development, class of 2024; Catalina Rey Guerra, Applied Developmental Psychology, class of 2024; Earl Edwards, Educational Leadership and Higher Education
Our esteemed panelists are international leaders in the fields of child development, economics, education, and public health. Together, they bring a wealth of knowledge as presidents of premier research associations, directors of large research centers, members of national science academies, and principal investigators for large research projects. Each also brings years of experience consulting with local, regional, national, and international education leaders and government officials.
The panelists will use this collective wisdom to answer a question of deep concern to families, communities, educators, researchers, and policy makers: “In this time of historic uncertainty and challenge, what does it mean for children to ‘thrive,’ and what will it take to promote thriving in enduring and equitable ways?”
The conversation -- moderated by award-winning education journalist Jackie Mader -- will bring together insights from developmental science, economic and labor force considerations, policy drivers, educational innovation, international perspectives, and the critical role of family and community assets in the face of structural inequities. The forum will provide a new understanding of the challenges before us and pathways forward, pathways that ensure many more children have chances to thrive.
Meet Our Panelists
Jackie Mader, Hechinger Report
Jackie Mader covers early childhood education and writes the early ed newsletter. In her ten years at Hechinger, she has covered a range of topics including teacher preparation, special education and rural schools. She previously worked as a special education teacher in Charlotte, North Carolina, and trained new teachers in Mississippi. Her work has appeared in The New York Times, The Atlantic, USA Today, TIME and NBC News and has won several awards.
Vivian L. Gadsden, University of Pennsylvania Graduate School of Education
Dr. Vivian Gadsden’s research, scholarly interests, and writing focus on learning and literacies across the life-course and address issues of equity, access, and change for young children and families in historically marginalized communities. The work highlights the intergenerational and cross-cultural nature of learning, literacy, and identity within families and the relationship between family members’ beliefs and practices around learning, educational access, and educational persistence. Her conceptual framework, family cultures, focuses on the interconnectedness among families’ political, cultural, and social histories and racialized identities.
Richard J. Murnane, Harvard School of Education
Dr. Richard Murnane, an economist, is the Thompson Research Professor at the Harvard Graduate School of Education and a research associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research. With Greg Duncan, Murnane has examined the respects in which the growth in family income inequality in the U.S. has affected educational opportunities for children from low-income families and the effectiveness of alternative strategies for improving life chances for these children.
Aisha Khizar Yousafzai, Harvard School of Public Health
Dr. Yousafzai's work focuses on developing new interventions and approaches to promote early child development with a particular interest in how to strengthen child and caregiving related outcomes through existing health, nutrition and education systems, understanding the implementation structures and processes for early childhood interventions to achieve sustainable impact at-scale, and promoting capacity development in local communities, services and systems for the effective delivery of interventions to promote early child development.
Henrik Daae Zachrisson, University of Oslo
Dr. Zachrisson is a developmental psychologist and professor at the Center for Research Excellence CREATE--Center for Research on Equality in Education at the University of Oslo. His work focuses on consequences of poverty and social inequality for children’s development, and on compensatory policies—in particular early education—in a progressive welfare state.