Institute for Recruitment of Teachers

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!

IRT Hiring Advisors!

The time to hire Statement of Purpose Advisors (SOPAs) is upon us! The IRT seeks to hire 15-20 alumni or similarly qualified applicants to serve as SOPAs for the incoming 2024 cohort. A full description of the role, length of employment, compensation, and qualifications can be found in the job description here. The deadline to apply is March 17^th.

Anyone with questions about the role should reach out to Arts & Sciences Programs Specialist Brittany A. Zorn at bzorn@andover.edu. Previous SOPAs have said about the role:

“I applied to be an SOPA advisor because I would not be where I am today without IRT. The individualized attention I received through the program, the academic and emotional support, and the knowledge I gained was priceless. It is my greatest hope that I can give any student I work with the same feeling of confidence that no matter where I ended after the application deadline was over, I had done everything I could. Every individual in the IRT program belongs in academia, and I am incredibly proud to be a part of this program.”
Yasmin Mendoza, IRT ’21

“I’m really excited to return to the IRT community as a Statement of Purpose Advisor. With the support of Leslie and LaShawnda a few years ago, I found the process of writing a Statement of Purpose to be an important and rewarding intellectual journey that helped me refine my ideas, weave my lived experiences and interests into a narrative, and articulate my scholarship and its significance in different words. I look forward to becoming a thought partner to IRT scholars in their intellectual adventures!”
Woohee Kim, IRT ’19

IRT Letter, January 2024

Greetings from IRT!

We hope the holidays offered you time to rest, reflect and rejuvenate. Venturing into the new year, we are excited to continue to explore IRT’s future. Given the continuing urgency and crisis of our times, we know we need more diverse teachers, specialists, administrators, and professors now. We know that change does not happen in isolation or departmental vacuums. With the mounting challenges to what we teach, how we teach, where we teach, and who we teach with, the IRT represents a throughline of community, connection, and care.

The IRT Furthering Connections and Conversation

In partnership with educational thought leaders across the country, the IRT engages in conversations on the current landscape, implementing change, and sharing knowledge.

October 2023

In October Catherine Wong, IRT Associate Director and Manager of Programs, co-presented with Gerry Ebalaroza-Tunnell, PhD at the 13th International Conference on Education and Justice led by Kevin Kumashiro, PhD, currently the Interim Dean of the School of Education at Hofstra University, and hosted by the University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa, College of Education, University Laboratory School (HI) and Hawai‘i Scholars for Education and Social Justice (HSESJ). The theme of the conference was “Collective Scholarship for Public Pedagogy and Against Empire,” and the title of their workshop was “Whose Talk Story? Our Talk Story; Battling the Empire Through Pōkā Laenui’s Process of Decolonization.”

(L-R) Jennifer Dazo Bishop, Ke Kula Kaiapuni ‘O Pū‘ōhala, Gerry Ebalaroza-Tunnell, Co3 Consulting, Jose Paolo Magcalas, California State University at Los Angeles

The 2023 UNCF/Mellon Programs Conference

IRT Education Programs Specialist Leislie Godo-Solo, IRT ’91 collaborated with colleagues and presented in this one-day workshop. This year’s annual conference, which was held in Atlanta, focused on the imperative to transform the academy.