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Nieto
Wins International Rockefeller Fellowship, US Book Award
Sonia Nieto, professor of Teacher Education and Curriculum Studies, has been invited for a one-month residence at the Rockefeller Foundation's Bellagio Study and Conference Center in the Italian Alps. The center, known for its beauty and stimulating intellectual community, seeks to encourage international understanding by providing a place for groups and individual scholars and practitioners to think deeply and reflect on their work, as well as interact with each other. Nieto will use her stay to work on a book or series of papers based on research done as an Annenberg senior fellow in Boston since 1998. Nieto, whose book "The Light in Their Eyes: Creating Multicultural Learning Communities" recently won one of the 27 1999 Critics' Choice Awards from the American Educational Studies Association, says she is thrilled by the opportunity to participate in the Bellagio community. "It is beyond wonderful," she said. "My husband is going to join me for most of the time. It is one of the few where you are invited to bring your life partner. They give you and your partner room and board. They also provide a computer." During her Annenberg fellowship, Nieto met regularly with Boston teachers who had been identified as excellent, particularly in their work with students of different backgrounds, to study what inspires them to excellence. "I decided to work with high school teachers in a school system that is particularly challenged in terms of funds, overcrowded classes, lack of resources, and students with many different challenges themselves, including poverty," she said. "My burning question is: what keeps teachers going, in spite of everything? "I want to write a book, including the teachers' voices. This might be a good textbook for beginning teachers." Nieto is the editor of a new textbook series, called "Language, Culture and Teaching," published by Lawrence Erlbaum and Associates. "I hope to develop a case study of [the teachers]," she said. "Two or three of the teaching autobiographies they wrote are so powerful I would like to include them in the book because you need to understand why they are there before you learn what keeps them there." Reflecting on the opportunities at Bellagio, she says, "These are the kinds of things that teachers should have available and of course don't. I hope that something useful comes out of this for new and prospective teachers." |
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