Student Projects from the Education in a Diverse Society Class

Social Innovation Ideas  - Ed in a Diverse Society, Fall 2010

Students and their projects:

Jason Winnikoff -- Margaret Spacapan - Laura white  (Youth Venture)
        Banneker/Tulane Choir Connection—

Kelly McGuire Ann Quilio  - Healthy School Lunch and Exercise Promotion in Schools—

Megan O'Connell -- gifted prog for Sci-tech Charter School (Youth Venture)
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Brandon Lee -- Bullying issues and APPLIKI 
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Patrick Schreiber - Dev. of a podcast site for careers and post hs choices
for kids
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Zachary Schraberg and Crystal Pennuto - "who threw dat - disk golf" (Youth Venture)

Heidi Zansler -Urban Studies and Your New Orleans (Urban Innovation Challenge)

Phoebe Ferguson -- Legacy Lessons - ( Plessey & Ferguson Foundation)

Megan Stanger - Swim for Success Video (Continuation and expansion of Laura White's Youth Venture Project)

I invite all of these students and others to comment on how your project ideas are going and what being involved in learning about social innovation in education has impacted your thinking and work. Please share!

Multi-Disciplinary Approaches to Social Entrepreneurship Education - Benchmark 3.5 Conference in San Diego, 3/26/11

This is the second in a 2-part series of colloquia focusing on social entrepreneurship education: It will examine approaches to teaching social entrepreneurship from various disciplinary backgrounds, including design, anthropology and education. As Social Entrepreneurship education evolves, this necessitates developing new curricular initiatives to support students in multiple disciplines to understand how to approach social issues and problems through the lens of social entrepreneurship.

The format of this colloquium will include short presentations of the approaches undertaken at three institutions: The New School, Tulane and Babson College. The New School teaches a course on social entrepreneurship linking a world-class design school (Parsons the New School for Design) with a renowned program in nonprofit management. Tulane has a course co-designed and co-taught by a student social entrepreneur where students learn through partnerships with local K-12 schools.  Babson teaches social entrepreneurship through field-based site visits to social entrepreneurs in Turkey.

 Panelists:

Anna Rabinowicz, Associate Professor, Product Design, Parsons The New School for Design

Lisa DiCarlo, Assistant Professor of Anthropology, Babson College (*not yet confirmed)

Carol Whelan, Professor of Practice, Teacher Preparation and Certification Program, Tulane University

Jason Winikoff, Sophmore, Tulane University

For more information about this conference, go to The Nonprofit Academic Centers Council at  http://www.naccouncil.org/benchmark.asp.

For more information about Tulane's Collaborative Programs, go to
http://teacher.tulane.edu/index_files/Newsletter%205th%20yr%20edition.pdf

View the brief video of Ms. Branche discussion how the infusion of social innovation strategies is impacting her teachers, her students and the Tulane University students who are working at her school, Banneker Elementary and Middle School.

Jason Winikoff, a Tulane student teaching about New Orleans genres of music  to Banneker Elementary students:

The original collaborative team from Tulane and Banneker is pictured below.

Carol Whelan, Laura White, Cheryllyn Branche and Marie Gould



Social Entrepreneurs in Education: Students, Faculty Members and the Community Working Together to Improve Education in New Orleans

By Carol Whelan and Laura White

This semester students in Education in a Diverse Society (EDLA 2000) are having the unique opportunity to develop innovative ways to improve education. Working with a public service fellow, Laura White, students and professors are identifying educational problems and identifying innovative ways to address them. With her background in social innovation work with Ashoka and the TU Changemakers program, Laura is working with Professor Whelan and her students to bring an awareness and knowledge of how we can all become "social innovators". Laura White is a junior Political Economy major, as well as a Teacher Certification candidate. Prior to coming to Tulane, and in response to high drowning rates and few after-school opportunities for at-risk youth in her community, Laura started a nonprofit (now called Swim 4 Success) that provides free swimming lessons to low-income kids. The program has been expanded to Tulane. Now, Laura works with the TUchangemakers program to bring social innovation and social entrepreneurship programming to campus. Laura also co-initiatiated the Changemaker Education Collaborative, which aims to help catalyze each person's capacity for creating social change through unique learning methods and tools.

The Tulane teacher certification students, through their public service assignments in the local schools, are in a unique position to experience and become social entrepreneurs. A social entrepreneur recognizes a social problem, such as educational disparities, and identifies creative and innovative approaches to address the problem. One example of a student who demonstrated this was my public service fellow for the past three years, Kirsten Hill. Kirsten worked with the For the Children Program at Banneker Elementary School while taking the  Education in a Diverse Society class. The next semester, she expanded her work to develop a reading program at Lafayette Charter School. She is now a graduate student at the University of Pennsylvania. Her model, the Lafayette Reading Room has recently been adopted by the Roosevelt Institute as a national model and will be used by other universities to start similar programs.

In October Earl Phalen, a leading social innovator and one of the NewDay Social Entrepreneurship Distinguished Speakers Series met with the Education in a Diverse Society class. He is CEO of Reach Out and Read and Founder of Summer Advantage, USA. He shared his own experiences, challenges, insights, thoughts, and recommendations to students and the community.  The Office of Social Entrepreneurship at Tulane provides the speaker series. It is a great opportunity to meet and engage with some of the most remarkable people working in the area of social entrepreneurship today. Additional information about Tulane’s social entrepreneurship initiatives can be found on the Tulane website at http://tulane.edu/socialentrepreneurship/index.cfm.

We are all enjoying learning about social innovation in education through the collaborative partnerships with Ms Branche, the principal at Banneker Elementary, Marie Gould, Site Coordinator of the For the Children Program and Tulane students and faculty in Education in  a Diverse Society.