Dr. Jennifer Lindsay: Director, Elementary Teacher Education

November 5, 2013

Jennifer Lindsay joins the College as the newly appointed Director of the Elementary Teacher Education Program. Previously, Lindsay directed the Elementary Education Master in Teaching Program at Brown University. She has worked as a public school teacher, most recently at a project based, teacher-led school in San Francisco, where she worked in collaboration with bay area teachers and the National Equity Project on action research projects, focused on classroom practice. 

“I am excited to be at an institution that so thoroughly supports strong partnerships with communities.  This is evident through multiple efforts to frame learning to teach in terms of becoming a community teacher and authentically engaging with families on multiple fronts to better understanding the contextual complexities of teaching and learning, and even more specifically, how poverty impacts schooling” Lindsay says. “I am also excited to be working with research faculty that is invested in teaching and learning in K-12 schools, principally in the role of beginning teachers in that work.  Policy, research, and practitioners all deeply valuing the complexities of teaching is vital to preparing new teachers for the complexities of teaching in urban classrooms today. I see these areas working much more collaboratively at UW than I do at many other institutions.”

Lindsay has extensive experience supporting novice teachers’ growth. At Brown University, she supported novice teachers with individualized research projects, helping them engage with the “high stakes environment of urban, poverty impacted schools.” Their work bridged the gap between theory and practice, culminating in a conference at which they presented their work. This process synced up with academic work and action-oriented practice, giving these students an opportunity to ‘evaluate and reflect upon the teaching and learning in their classroom in connection to their question, with was deeply rooted in beginning teachers desire to see and know children as sense makers and constructors of knowledge.’ 

She is eager to engage more deeply with some College projects, such as the Community-Family-Politics strand, stating, “I am curious and excited to think with [College] faculty and community members about how contextual knowledge is situated on par with content and pedagogical knowledge and how these domains are influencing one another across course offerings.  I am also interested in how the program feels as a coherent whole. Both of these interests are ones I thought about and worked on while at Brown.  I know that program coherence and making strong and relevant linkages between theory, research, practices in schools and communities is complex work and necessary work.”