We are crossing a number of significant milestones this year. Our Professional Development School (PDS) partnership with the State College Area School District has been going strong for 20 years. There is much to celebrate with this program, and you can read about its accomplishments in the pages that follow.
This year also marks the 50th anniversary of the College of Education Alumni Society. Founded in 1968, our college’s Alumni Society provides an organizational home for a worldwide network of more than 56,000 education alumni. The society is led by a board of volunteers and works closely with our faculty, staff and students to provide innovative program opportunities that connect alumni and friends. You can read more about the Alumni Society in a new column from Alumni Society Board President Tonya DeVecchis-Kerr.
In June, the College of Education will celebrate its 95th anniversary. When it was created as a School of Education in 1923, Will Chambers was named dean. The school enrolled 359 students and was located in a converted fraternity building. We’ve come a long way from those early beginnings. Now housed in four buildings on the University Park campus and online through the World Campus, we enroll close to 2,000 undergraduates and more than 1,800 graduate students. We have more than 110 tenure-line faculty members, and 59 fixed-term faculty teaching nearly 56,000 student credit hours annually.
Our programs continue to be recognized for their quality, with five ranked in the top 10 and nine ranked in the top 20 in the latest U.S. News and World Report rankings. While rankings don’t even begin to tell the story of our quality and innovation in teaching and learning, they do provide public recognition of our accomplishments.
From the beginning, it has been the mission of our college to deepen and extend knowledge about the formation and utilization of human capabilities, and this includes updating teaching and learning spaces throughout the college. We have been doing quite a bit of that recently, particularly in Chambers Building.
Last fall we shared our plans to renovate the science education wing of the building (see story at bit.ly/sci_ed_renovation) and I’m pleased to report that renovation of the wing is in full swing. When it’s completed, it will join the Krause Studios for Innovation, the Mathematics Education Lab, the Social Studies Lab, and the Language and Literacies Studio as 21st century teaching and learning spaces.
Philanthropic support has been critically important in enabling us to transform these spaces. The most recent gift, from Jeanne Leonhard, will enable this work to continue and as an indication of our gratitude and appreciation for her generosity, we will be naming the Language and Literacies Studio in her honor.
We also have made a large number of impressive hires this year across the college, and it is very clear that highly talented individuals are interested in becoming faculty members in the College of Education at Penn State.
We can all be proud of the college’s accomplishments in the 95 years since its founding. Look for information about activities to celebrate our various milestones as the year unfolds in Bridges, our electronic newsletter. If you don’t receive that twice-monthly email newsletter and would like to, please email edrelations@psu.edu and ask to be added to the subscription list.
Spring has been a little slow in coming to Happy Valley this year, and it is being welcomed with open arms. Many thanks.