jbonasera

College Access and Equitable Outcomes in Higher Education

Ezra Sergent-Leventhal, IRT ’20
Post Secondary Navigator,
City Colleges of Chicago

I have long known I wanted to work in education specifically working in a career that is geared towards access and equity. After graduating college, I began working at a college access non-profit and a few years later applied to be an associate with the IRT and earned my Master’s in Higher Education. I became interested in working at the community college level after taking a course titled, “The Comprehensive Community College” taught by Northwestern sociology professor James Rosenbaum.

First Book by Ariana Mangual Figueroa, IRT ’00 Challenges “Myth of Ignorance”

Ariana Mangual Figueroa, IRT ‘ 00 shares commentary on her first book KNOWING SILENCE: How Children Talk about Immigration Status in School published by the University of Minnesota Press.

There is a persistent assumption in the field of education that children are largely unaware of their immigration status and its implications. In Knowing Silence, Ariana Mangual Figueroa challenges this “myth of ignorance.” By listening carefully to both the speech and significant silences of six Latina students from mixed-immigration-status families, from elementary school into middle school and beyond, she reveals the complex ways young people understand and negotiate immigration status and its impact on their lives.

Debut Book Provides Intersections of Passing and Psychoanalysis by Donavan Ramon, IRT ’07

Donavan Ramon, IRT ’07 shares commentary on his first book, Striking Features: Psychoanalysis and Racial Passing Narratives published by Mercer University Press. He is currently an Assistant Professor of English at Southern Illinois University Edwardsville.

How does psychoanalysis animate racial passing and how does racial passing inspire psychoanalysis? Despite long-held beliefs that the two have nothing in common, I assert that psychoanalysis is relevant for understanding the reasons behind jumping the color line. Beginning with the premise that Sigmund Freud created psychoanalysis to contend with his own anxieties about race, I explore canonical and non-canonical passing narratives using psychoanalytic perspectives. By closely reading narratives by Charles Chesnutt, James Weldon Johnson, Nella Larsen, Alice Dunbar-Nelson, Jessie Fauset, Anita Reynolds, Danzy Senna, Vera Caspary, Anatole Broyard, and Philip Roth, I advance several provocative claims about the intersections of passing and psychoanalysis. Chief among them are the youthful trauma and psychological consequences of racial passing. For instance, while the death drive motivates fictional racial passers to hasten their own deaths, those who pass in real life often seek their own immortality through print despite hiding their Blackness. This interdisciplinary work threads psychoanalysis and other theoretical perspectives through persuasive close readings of twentieth and twenty-first-century racial passing narratives, concluding with a meditation on today’s ineffective language of race. Scholars of race, African American Literature, American Literature, and psychoanalysis will find my book compelling.

Alumni Accolades, March 2024

Shani Mott, IRT ’97
Our deepest condolences go out to the family and friends of Dr. Mott who passed away earlier this month. Shani was a lecturer in Africana Studies and the Department of History at Johns Hopkins University. An obituary is posted on the university’s website. To learn more about Dr. Mott’s legacy read the NYT article.

In Memoriam – Shani Mott, IRT ’97

Heather Moore Roberson, IRT ’01/’10
Heather is recognized by the PA Chamber for Black Owned Business in their compilation of 100 Black Trailblazers in the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania.

JT Roane, IRT ’08
Roane’s book Dark Agoras: Insurgent Black Social Life and the Politics of Place (New York: NYU Press, 2023) won the Pauli Murray Book Prize. Roane and other winners were honored at the 2024 AAIHS conference, hosted by The Carter G. Woodson Institute for African-American and African Studies at the University of Virginia.

Aesha Mustafa, IRT ’16
Mustafa has been nominated for the 2024 Washtenaw Community College/Parkridge Black Business Community Impact Award. She is a co-owner of Integrative Empowerment Group, PLLC.

GJ Sevillano, IRT ’18
GJ is a recipient of the Philip Amsterdam Graduate Teaching Assistant Award by The George Washington University. This is one of the university’s highest teaching honors and recognizes GJ’s work in the classroom and contributions to the educational process at the university.

IRT Alumni Author Request

Many times throughout the year, the IRT acknowledges donors and volunteers, who are both IRT alumni and non-alumni thanking them for their service. As we continue to see so many of our esteemed alumni contributing to their fields as published authors, the IRT thought including a signed copy of an alumni book with these acknowledgments would be a powerful way to further the connection of IRT supporters.

If you are an alum and have a published book that you are interested in sharing in this way, please send a signed copy or two to the IRT office. We will be accepting signed copies on an ongoing basis and sending them to the many wonderful individuals who help the IRT community in their own unique and important ways.

Institute for Recruitment of Teachers
c/o Phillips Academy
180 Main Street
Andover, MA 01810

irt@andover.edu

A list of IRT Alumni Publications can be found on the IRT Blog!