CUSP's blog

October 3, 8:30 am to 5:00 pm
New Bedford Whaling Museum

The New Bedford Historical Society and Westport Historical Society announce a full-day, FREE symposium commemorating the 250th anniversary of the birth of Paul Cuffe (1759-1817).

Local and national scholars will address Cuffe’s life, work and legacy. Each session will include a panel discussion and a time for questions and comments with a focus on:

• Cuffe and relationships with the black and white community
• Cuffe’s entrepreneurial and philanthropic ventures
• Sierra Leone, “Back to Africa” and the rise to be a people
• Contemporary relevance of Cuffe and his legacy

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WHO IS PAUL CUFFE?

Paul Cuffe was an African American businessman, patriot and abolitionist born as free child on Cuttyhunk Island in 1759. His father was a former slave. His mother was a Native American of the Wampanoag tribe.

Cuffe worked on whaling and cargo ships departing from New Bedford Harbor as a teenager. Then, as a young man, he started his own shipping industry and amassed a large profit.

Cuffe used his wealth, his business relationships with white merchants and businessmen, and his common bond of faith with local Quakers to advocate for African Americans rights.

In 1777, at the age of 21, Cuffe protested the government’s right to tax African Americans without representation (the right to vote). Then, from 1809 to 1816, Cuffe supported a movement to stem the slave trade by introducing skilled artisans and tradesmen to Sierra Leone, West Africa to establish an economic model allowing Africans to support themselves through agricultural and other goods.

Cuffe also opened the first integrated school in Massachusetts for black and white students on his property in Westport, sought care for orphaned children, funded Quaker projects, and petitioned his ideas in the House of Representatives.

Cuffe died in 1817 as a noted philanthropist and abolitionist.

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SPONSORS: New Bedford Historical Society; New Bedford Whaling National Historical Park; Westport Historical Society, Old Dartmouth Historical Society; Rotch-Jones Duff Museum; University of Massachusetts Dartmouth

In the Fall, Congress is scheduled to debate a series of legislative proposals that will increase and improve learning among very young children.

National Public Radio recently interviewed one of the leading proponents of early childhood education, University of Chicago professor James Heckman, in their summer broadcast series about current ideas and trends in education.

In this 8 minute interview, which you read or listen to by clicking here, Heckman dives into “inequality” in education. He says:

But on the one hand, we see a group of people who are essentially doing better than ever before, in the sense we have more people graduating from college, more people who are going into situations of advantage, going into the larger society, never mind the current economic downturn. At the same time, properly measured, the U.S. high school dropout rate is increasing. And it’s not just for African-Americans, it’s true for Americans of all ethnic background. And we have to understand that what’s happening then is we’re creating two different cultures, two different societies. The level of inequality is actually increasing at a fundamental level.

And it’s this inequality in early conditions which perpetuates inequality into the next generation and the generation after that… when we really understand how to solve the problem of poverty, we’re going to understand that disadvantage in the early years and disadvantage through childhood is increasingly playing a role in producing the two societies that America is becoming.

Monday, August 17, 5 pm to 8 pm—Room 4 at CUSP

Noyce Scholarship Program Coordinator Kym Welty invites all Noyce Scholars and friends of CUSP to a watch Chalk, a mock-documentary about three novice teachers and one newly appointed assistant principal battling the rigors, stresses and humors of first-year teaching and leadership.

Pizza and refreshments served from 5 pm to 6 pm.

Click here to view the movie trailer: Chalk Trailer

Please RSVP to Kym Welty by August 14 at kwelty (at) umassd.edu

Summer courses have ended at CUSP, signaling that summer is quietly drawing to a close, with school days right around the corner. In preparation for the fall, CUSP program directors and instructors have been busy this week crafting and organizing new academic opportunities.

Karen DeRusha, a specialist in mentoring, will present Mentoring in Action—a three-credit graduate course for mentors, induction coordinators and administrators in need of cultivating their individual mentoring skills and building strong mentoring programs to support and retain new teachers.

The course is based upon the month-by-month mentoring curriculum developed by CUSP’s own Dr. Carol Radford, director of the nationally-recognized TEACH! SouthCoast program. The curriculum systematically guides participants through activities and practices that address the needs of new teachers as they arise throughout the school year.

More information can be obtained by calling CUSP at 774-929-3002.

Last week, artist and master teacher Dr. Virginia Freyermuth taught a course on reflective practices for K-12 teachers at CUSP in partnership with Connecting Oceans Academy.

Click here to view pictures of the teacher-participants creating art at CUSP, gathering inspiration on field trips throughout the SouthCoast, and presenting their finished pieces of art and writing to one another during their final class meeting.

Reflection questions for teacher-participants—please respond by clicking “Comments” at the bottom of this post:

1. How did you benefit from Dr. Freyermuth’s course?
2. What reflective practices will you bring back to the classroom?

This week, the CUSP office is as busy as ever. On July 15 and 16, our Associate Director, Trina Crowley, and our Leading for Learning Program Coordinator, Sharon Hartley will attend the Massachusetts Association of School Superintendents (MASS) Executive Institute at Mashpee High School.

The MASS Executive Institute is titled, Leadership in Challenging Times, and will feature both Sir Ken Robinson and Rick and Becky Dufour, leading thinkers on professional learning communities.

As as sponsor the event, CUSP will also showcase our Leading for Learning program and its innovative program design in the sponsor’s exhibit hall.

Leading for Learning prepares K-12 teachers for principal and assistant principal licensure in partnership with the UMass Dartmouth Charlton College of Business. Participants simultaneously enroll in management and organizational leadership courses and educational leadership seminars to complete their licensure requirements.

This week, CUSP also says farewell to our writer/editor and web master, Will Dane. Will has developed and managed the CUSP website for over two years, building the site to its current capacity and functionality.

Will has also teamed up with CUSP Director, Karen O’Connor, to write several successful grants—including a National Science Foundation Grant, which established a Noyce Scholarship Program at CUSP, offering $10,000 scholarships to college undergraduates to become teachers after graduation.

Will plans to work remotely from his new home in California, but he will be much missed in the CUSP office.

Eight aspiring principals in Leading for Learning’s 2009-2010 cohort attended their final summer seminar this week enroute to beginning their practicums in local schools in September.

Stephen Furtado (far right), former superintendent of Freetown-Lakeville Public Schools, led the cohort in a study of administrative policies and practices.

The cohort worked together through complex issues, while drawing from Furtado’s extensive experience and personal wisdom on school management.

After their practicum in the fall, the eight cohort members will be endorsed for their principal and assistant principal licensure and may apply for leadership positions in K-12 schools.

This week (July 6-10), CUSP welcomes a full house. Connecting Oceans Academy is presenting a graduate course on art and reflective practices to be used in K-12 classrooms. Twenty-seven teachers representing a variety of school districts, grade levels and content areas are bent over pencil, paper, scissors and paint as course instructor Dr. Virginia Freyermuth circles the room.

Freyermuth is a local artist, a former Massachusetts Teacher of the Year, and recipient of the Massachusetts Art Educator of the Year Award. Her week-long summer course at CUSP in partnership with Connecting Oceans Academy is the most popular course of the year.

Each day, Freyermuth guides the teachers through artistic and creative writing prompts. Then in the afternoon, she leads them to nearby coastal and historic sites to gather inspiration and create art outside. Later today, they will bus to New Bedford to paint the harbor.

Meanwhile, down the hall, a handful of ‘buzzards’ or instructors from the Buzzards Bay Writing Project (a site of the National Writing Project) are churning their creative juices in their office.

The Buzzard Bay Writing Project’s two-week summer camp for students entering grades 5-10 started this morning at Jospeh Case Junior High School in Swansea, and their 2009 Invitational Summer Institute for teachers is starting tomorrow, July 7.

The Institute witll teach teachers how to teach writing—an increasingly important and increasingly difficult task in today’s schools.

The teachers in the Institute will participate in a gamut of writing exercises, prompts and challenges to refine their own writing, and the ‘buzzards’ will help them to develop lesson plans and strategies for teaching writing.

Then—to add to the liveliness at CUSP—around the corner from the ‘buzzards’, former Freetown-Lakeville superintendent of schools, Steve Furtado, is leading a seminar on administrative policies and procedures for teachers working toward their principal licensure in our Leading for Learning program.

And tonight, paraprofessionals working toward their bachelor’s degrees and teacher licensure in elementary education and moderate disabilities in our Journey into Education and Teaching (JET) program will arrive for their summer course.

Here at CUSP, there is always something going on—courses, conferences, workshops, network events. To keep our followers updated, here is “The Weekly Buzz”—quick updates and insights on what’s “buzzing” at CUSP.

National Science Foundation Robert Noyce Scholarship Program Conference

This week, our Director, Karen O’Connor, Associate Director, Trina Crowley, and Noyce Scholarship Program Coordinator, Kym Welty, are in Washington, D.C. at the National Science Foundation’s Robert Noyce Scholarship Program Conference.

CUSP received grant funding to establish a Noyce Scholarship Program at CUSP in October 2008. The program awards $10,000 scholarships to UMass Dartmouth seniors and post-graduates in STEM fields (science, technology, engineering and math) to become teachers in high need, urban schools.

As coordinator of the newly established program, Kym Welty focused her efforts in fall 2008 and spring 2009 on recruiting juniors and seniors to participate and will present her strategies and results at the Noyce Scholarship Program Conference poster session.

To date, Kym has recruited five college undergraduates—four to participate in the Noyce Scholarship Program’s 2009 cohort and one to participate in the 2010 cohort. Four additional undergraduates will participate in internships this summer to familiarize themselves with the teaching profession.