On this page:
- National Urban Alliance (NUA) Mission
- Professional Development and Cultural Relevance
- NUA and The Pedagogy of Confidence
- National Urban Alliance People
National Urban Alliance (NUA) Mission
The NUA’s mission is to substantiate an irrefutable belief in the capacity of all public school children to achieve the high intellectual performances demanded by our ever changing global community. Our focus is teacher and administrator quality through professional development which incorporates current research from cognitive neuroscience on learning, teaching, and leading. We partner with school districts to support the building of their capacity to advocate community-wide responsibility for realizing the learning potential of its children.
NUA helps districts provide school leaders and teachers with the opportunity, guidance and voice to identify what practices they need that will help them build on student strengths and engage them in learning essential skills, content and strategies.
It’s a given that students and teachers do not always come from the same racial or cultural backgrounds. NUA’s focus is on changing teachers’ perceptions and expectations of underachieving students in a way that pays particular attention to the cultural dimensions of these differences.
NUA and The Pedagogy of Confidence
In her book Pedagogy of Confidence, Yvette Jackson, NUA Senior Scholar, shows educators how to focus on students’ strengths to inspire learning and high intellectual performance. Jackson asserts that the myth that the route to increasing achievement by focusing on weaknesses (promoted by policies such as NCLB) has blinded us to the strengths and intellectual potential of urban students—devaluing the motivation, initiative, and confidence of dedicated educators to search for and optimize this potential. The Pedagogy of Confidence dispels this myth and provides practical approaches to rekindle educators’ belief in their ability to inspire the vast capacity of their urban students.
www.pedagogyofconfidence.net
National Urban Alliance People
Maria Sudduth
Maria Sudduth strongly believes in the promise of public education as the vehicle for equitable opportunities in the 21st Century. She is an educator with 30 years of experience, primarily working with underserved populations. Her areas of expertise are linguistically and culturally responsive pedagogy in emergent bilingual settings. Mrs. Sudduth taught in a rural elementary bilingual setting for 12 years. Ms. Sudduth joined the Bilingual Faculty at California State University, Chico in 2003. Her responsibilities included teaching research based bilingual instructional practices across content areas: Math, Language Arts, Social Studies and Science – K-12. She also was on the planning committee and taught in the Rural Teacher Residence program, in which she was responsible for teaching across content areas k-8 with a focus on English Language Development (English as a New Language), preparing pre-service candidates to teach in linguistically and culturally diverse settings. Currently Ms. Sudduth is a Senior Scholar and Regional Director for National Urban Alliance for Effective Education.
Stefanie Rome
Stefanie B. Rome has been a member of the NUA family since 2003. She holds a Bachelor of Arts Degree in Communication Studies from the University of Kansas and earned her Master of Education degree from the University of Missouri-Columbia in Educational Leadership and Policy Analysis with Principal Certification. Stefanie is continuing her studies at MU, pursuing her Ph.D. in Educational Leadership and Policy Analysis. Her research interests include: Critical Race Theory, Black Feminist Epistemology and Social Justice Leadership Theory.
Eric Cooper
Eric Cooper is the President of the National Urban Alliance for Effective Education (NUA). He served in a similar position as Executive Director for the NUA at Columbia University’s Teachers College and as Adjunct Associate Professor for 7 years. Prior to this position, he was the Vice President for Inservice Training & Telecommunications for the Simon & Schuster Education Group. He has worked in the capacities of Associate Director of Program Development for the College Board, Administrative Assistant in the Office of Curriculum for the Boston Public Schools, and Director of a treatment center for emotionally disturbed students, in addition to working as a teacher, researcher, counselor, and Washington Fellow.
Additional professional activities include: producer of educational documentaries and talk shows; producer for the Public Broadcasting Service; congressional testimony for House committees; presentations for federal and state educational agencies; advisor to the International Reading Association, the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), the Editorial Advisory Board, and the Journal of Reading. Eric has been a member of the Select Committee in Educating Black Children; fund-raiser for the National Conference on Educating Black Children; chief advisor for the Thinking Skills Project, Macmillan Publishing Company; director of restructuring team for the Mt. Vernon Public Schools (NY); and has served on the advisory board of WGBH/PBS, Boston, MA. He was honored in 2005/2006 to speak at the prestigious Aspen Institute’s Ideas Festival along with participants such as: Colin & Alma Powell, Bill & Hillary Clinton, Supreme Court Justice Breyer, Brian Greene, Alan Greenspan, Katie Couric and many more.
Yvette Jackson
Yvette Jackson is internationally recognized for her work in assessing the learning potential of disenfranchised urban students. Her research is in literacy, gifted education, and the cognitive mediation theory of Reuven Feuerstein. She has applied her research to develop an integrated process to motivate and elicit potential in underachievers. This research was the basis for her design of the New York City Gifted Programs Framework when she was the director of gifted programs. Her book Pedagogy of Confidence is a grounding for the collaboration with Redwood City. As executive director of instruction and professional development for the New York City Board of Education, she led the development and implementation of the Comprehensive Education Plan, which optimizes the delivery of all core curriculum and support services in the public schools of New York City.
Dale Allender
Dale Allender, who has been an NUA educational mentor since 2010, is director of the National Council on Teachers of English – West (NCTEWest), which is housed at the University of California, Berkeley. NCTEWest is a regional division of NCTE, a professional association that focuses on improving the teaching and learning of English and the language arts. Allender established NCTEWest in 2003 to organize literacy research and policy events, pilot online-teacher education course tools and promote innovative literacy instruction. In addition, he teaches Urban Education in the college’s Graduate School of Education.
Allender also teaches at San Francisco State University, where he trains future high school educators to teach literacy across content areas. He earned his doctorate in education from the University of Queensland in Australia; he has a master’s degree in developmental reading from the University of Iowa.
One of his passions as a teacher and mentor is helping teachers develop a critical understanding of the challenges and the promise of teaching in urban settings, which to him means helping them incorporate good practices, research and innovations in the classroom. “What I enjoy about working with NUA is that it brings the scientific [brain-based research], educational and cultural together to improve the way teachers are teaching and students are learning,” Allender says.
Robert Seth Price
Robert Seth Price is a senior scholar with National Urban Alliance. Robert understands the power of lived stories. He collaborates with the student’s and participant’s voices as part of his integrative projects. He incorporates technology, art, and music into his teaching, trainings and collaborations. Robert’s Mobile Critical Thinking Tools for Equity in Learning and Teaching is currently used as a foundational practitioners guide in Redwood City. Current and previous collaborations include Thinking Foundation with research, case studies, and video documentation for visual tools; grass roots implementation of Thinking Schools Ethiopia and Thinking Design Healthcare Ethiopia; culturally relevant virtual learning focusing on ELA development with autonomous learners for Learning 1 to 1 Foundation; teaching over ten years in K-5 urban schools and a public arts high school; adjunct professor for ELA and technology university courses; multiple amplifying student voice projects; and critical thinking training modules for textile workers.
More information on his current collaborations and previous experiences may be found on his website at www.eggplant.org.