Institute for Recruitment of Teachers

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.

Associate Director & Manager of Programs Update, March 2024

Dear IRT Community,

As we welcome the arrival of Spring, a time of renewal and reimagination, I would like to take this opportunity to share our most recent program updates.

ADVISING
Current IRT Scholars are hearing back from graduate programs about acceptances and funding packages. They are utilizing resources as well as engaging with their IRT Advisors and fellow cohort members through meetings, chats and cohort social hours. These differentiated tools of engagement allow our scholars to feel a sense of belonging and community as they embark on their decision making process. Our warmest CONGRATULATIONS to our scholars on their graduate school acceptances! Our young people across the education sector will greatly benefit from your knowledge, skills and talents. Also, we want to shout out APPRECIATIONS to our Statement of Purpose Advisors for working closely with our scholars on their applications. Scholars have remarked that their advisors not only offered constructive feedback on their drafts but also encouraged them to show their authentic selves. At a time when diversity is being dismissed this type of guidance is of even more importance.

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.