Tuesday, March 7, 2023, 3:30 - 4:30pm
Eliot Lyman room, Longfellow Hall 2nd floor, 13 Appian Way, Cambridge, MA
Opportunities to learn through higher education extend beyond course enrollment. Indeed, for many students, employment provides valuable mentorship, skill development, and career exploration in addition to income. While educational research offers many insights about equity issues in classroom learning, what can the research tell us about equitable access to employment pathways, especially those that provide opportunities to learn under the mentorship of faculty members?
In this session, Anthony Abraham Jack,
Assistant Professor at Harvard Graduate School of Education, will discuss findings from a chapter of his new book project, When Campus Closed: Inside the Upended World of Elite College. He examines how Harvard undergraduates with disparate pre-college experiences differ in their orientations toward seeking employment. In particular, Jack focuses on how these differences affect students' access to “life of the mind” opportunities that involve working with faculty—e.g., as course assistants, research assistants, or employees of teaching and learning centers. These findings have implications for Harvard faculty who serve as gatekeepers to many “life of the mind” positions in universities and for learning-and-teaching professionals who both support faculty members and directly employ students.
After a presentation of the research, Professor Jack will engage in a Q&A discussion about the study and its implications. The first 50 attendees will receive copies of Jack’s previous award-winning book, The Privileged Poor: How Elite Colleges are Failing Disadvantaged Students (Harvard UP, 2019).
