By Warren Parker—
Dr. Lois Weiner, Professor in the Department of Elementary and Secondary, was awarded the coveted Fulbright Specialist Program grant on August 2012 and was invited to Universidad Distrital, Francisco Jose De Caldas University to collaborate with faculty and graduate students in meliorating mandates germane to standards and competencies for primary and secondary schools.
The University is Columbia’s largest public university dedicated to humanistic education.
“This is a wonderful program that allows faculty who cannot take off a full year or semester to work with researchers in other countries,” said Dr. Weiner. “This was a milestone in my career. I had a chance to co-teach a doctoral seminar in Colombia’s equivalent of City University of New York (CUNY) and spoke at two international conferences. I think I learned more than I taught!”
Lecturing at NJCU since 1990, Dr. Weiner has developed her career as an educator, specializing in social foundations of education and curriculum and instruction and coordinating. Dr. Weiner shares her knowledge in her publications and is currently researching for her current book on what she believes is the “global assault” on teaching, teachers, and unions.
In her more than 20 year career at NJCU Dr. Weiner’s department, “Is in the process of rethinking our program because of the many changes. Teachers and schools are under tremendous pressures that they didn’t face a decade ago, primarily because of privatization, cutbacks in funding, testing, and an anti-teacher climate.”
“As a researcher, I’ve always been able to use our campus as a laboratory, to think through and apply ideas, and I’m hoping to capture what I’m learning now, perhaps in a revised version of [my book] “Urban Teaching: The Essentials.”
According to Dr. Weiner, “In order to understand what’s going on in this country, we have to see what’s happened in the rest of the world. A project that began in the World Bank forty years ago boomeranged back to us in the form of No Child Left Behind. This project aims to privatize schools, sell them to the highest bidder, and control what’s taught through standardized tests.”
Dr. Weiner has a new book out explaining this concept called “The Future of Our Schools: Social Justice and Teachers Unions.”
“The aim of this project is to have the kind of workforce transnational corporations want, and the biggest barrier to their getting this is teachers unions. [The Future of Our Schools], helps in explaining this and what teachers might do to push their unions in a progressive direction,” she said.
Dr. Weiner wants students to receive more than what they pay for, when it comes to her classes.
“In planning my classes, I try to give NJCU students the kind of education they’d receive at elite institutions, like Princeton.”
Despite not having the same resources, Dr. Weiner believes that, “NJCU students can bring to their studies rich life experiences and a capacity to push themselves. I try to draw on these. My classes are very demanding, but I try to give students support, and in the end, almost all of them rise to the challenge. The result is that they receive a Princeton education for an NJCU tuition – a great bargain!”
Dr. Weiner hopes to pass off her knowledge not only to students, but to her fellow educators as well.
As a high school English teacher for 15 years before getting her doctorate, Weiner has worked through her philosophy of education many years before coming to NJCU.
“As a teacher educator, I want to help them develop academic skills and the ability to think critically about schooling in a democracy, and their moral and political responsibilities as teachers.”
