This year, Penn GSE is continuing its tradition of bringing leading scholars, policymakers, and education innovators to campus through a range of annual lecture and speaker series. Designed to foster discussion around pressing educational issues, emerging research, and diverse perspectives, these programs connect students, faculty, alumni, and community members with influential voices from across the field.
Among Penn GSE’s signature events is the Nessa Wolfson Colloquium, which celebrates the legacy of the founder of the School’s Language and Literacy in Education group and welcomes new and returning students to the Educational Linguistics program each fall. This year’s event will be held September 25, starting at 9 a.m., and will feature Ron Darvin, associate professor at the University of British Columbia. His talk, “Identity, investment and the negotiation of power in human-AI interaction,” introduces the model of investment as a framework for understanding how power operates in language learning, whether in offline or online spaces.
The Global Possibility Network, Professor Mike Nakkula and Andrew Babson’s research-to-practice initiative focused on how young people develop interests and navigate pathways across education and career, also hosts a monthly virtual speaker series on youth development. This year’s series kicks off September 18 when Candace Marie Henry, assistant professor of higher education and student affairs at the University of South Florida, speaks on “Reimagining Financial Futures: What Black Women’s Debt-Free College Pathways Can Teach Us About Possibility Development” at 11 a.m.
The annual Visiting Scholars Speaker Series welcomes researchers from across the country to share their work and engage in discussions with the Penn community. This year, the series—which is now organized by Penn GSE’s new Office of Community, Climate, and Doctoral Education—is planning to host speakers whose expertise centers on community, belonging, and the current social and educational landscape. Specifics will be announced in the coming months.
A new addition to the annual slate two years ago was the Early Childhood Education and Family Studies Speaker Series, which is co-sponsored by Early Childhood Education and Family Studies (ECEFS) academic certificate program, Penn Early Childhood and Family Research Center (PECF), and the Penn Education and Inequality Workshop. The first talk in that series, held October 5, at noon, will be by Hirokazu Yoshikawa, the Courtney Sale Ross Professor of Globalization and Education at NYU Steinhardt, a professor of applied psychology, and a university professor at NYU. His talk, “Understanding and supporting infant, toddler and early childhood development in contexts of displacement and crisis,” will present data from several studies that aim to understand how early development unfolds in contexts of displacement and crisis and how to support early childhood development through research-practice and research-advocacy partnerships.
Penn GSE will also host the annual Constance E. Clayton Lecture, which honors former Philadelphia School District Superintendent Dr. Constance E. Clayton and highlights leadership, equity, and educational transformation, and the International Educational Development Program (IEDP) Speaker Series, a spring-semester program that, in past years, has featured experts from organizations such as UNESCO, UNICEF, the World Bank, and other global development institutions as well as researchers and scholars. Details on this year’s speakers are still forthcoming.
Check the Penn GSE Event Calendar to stay up-to-date with these and other offerings the School is hosting.
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