Alumni – Page 10 – Institute for Recruitment of Teachers

Godo-Solo, IRT ’91 Exploring Digital Humanities this Summer

Leislie Godo-Solo, IRT ’91 will be heading to Nashville at the end of June to attend a Summer Institute Towards a More Equitable and Inclusive Digital World in Latin America: A Workshop for K-12 Educators at Vanderbilt University.

This institute is part of a four-year series in collaboration with the Stone Center for Latin American Studies at Tulane University and the Center for Latin American Studies at the University of Arizona. This summer’s institute will be hosted by the Center for Latin American, Caribbean, and Latinx Studies (CLACX) at Vanderbilt University, taking place on campus in Nashville, TN.

IRT Alumni Committee Update

Dear IRT Alumni,

On behalf of the Alumni Committee, we extend a warm welcome to our robust alumni network of over 3,000 educators, scholars, and professionals. We are thrilled to have you as part of our passionate community of change-makers!

As alumni, you have a wealth of knowledge, experience, and expertise that can be invaluable to our IRT Scholars. We invite you to get involved in the alumni network and share your insights and perspectives with the next generation of educators and thought-leaders.

One way to get involved is to join the Alumni Committee. The Alumni Committee is a group of dedicated volunteers who work to strengthen the connection between our alumni. Committee members help to plan and organize events, provide mentorship to students, and advocate for the interests of alumni.

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.

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!