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Presenters

Marvin Berkowitz

...is Sanford N. McDonnell Professor of Character Education at the University of Missouri-St. Louis, where he also directs the McDonnell Leadership Academy in Character Education for School Principals. Berkowitz is the author of over 60 book chapters, monographs, and journal articles.

He has served as a board member of the Character Education Partnership, and is co-editor of the Journal of Research in Character Education. His most recent book (2005) is Parenting for Good. In 2005, Berkowitz co-authored (with colleague Melinda Bier) “What Works In Character Education: A Research-Driven Guide for Educators,” a comprehensive overview of the compnents of effective programs.

His primary interests address young people's development toward becoming healthy and happy adults who contribute to society through their willingness to act morally.

Suzanne Bessenger

...completed her History of Religions PhD coursework in the Religious Studies department at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville. She has traveled widely and spent several years living and studying in India, Nepal, and China. Her primary research in Nepal and India has been on the female Hindu-Buddhist hybrid deity Vajravarahi and the Tibetan women who claim to be human incarnations of her. Suzanne currently teaches Hinduism and Buddhism in the Religious Studies department at the College of William and Mary.

Matthew Davidson

...is Research Director of the Center for the 4th and 5th Rs, co-creator of the GoodSport Curriculum, and co-author of Character Education Evaluation Toolkit and Character Quotations: Activities That Build Character and Community. Lickona and Davidson co-authored Smart & Good High Schools based on their site visits to 24 award-winning public and independent schools.

Tom Duckett

...is the Chairman of the teaching faculty within The Center for Leadership, a Master Instructor in Leadership and holds the Freeman Chair for Leadership. He is the Head Coach of Boys and Girls Swimming/Diving, an Assistant Coach (Sprints) in Track, serves as Advisor to the student run Honor Council and advises all students who are applying to the Federal Military Service Academies. This is his 18th year at the Culver Academies.

Prior to his arrival at the Culver he served for 21 years in the US Army with his last five years as a member of faculty of the US Army Command and General Staff College teaching graduate level leadership and management courses in the Advanced Military Studies Department.

Roger S. Gottlieb

...is professor of philosophy at Worcester Polytechnic Institute. He is the author or editor of fourteen books and more than 100 articles on political philosophy, environmentalism, ethics, religion, spirituality, the Holocaust, and disability.

He is editor of six academic book series, book review editor of Capitalism, Nature, Socialism: A Journal of Socialist Ecology, contributing editor for the national magazine Tikkun, and on the editorial boards of Social Theory and Practice and Worldviews: Religion, Nature, Culture.

For the last fifteen years Gottlieb has concentrated on the political, ethical, and religious dimensions of the environmental crisis and on the broad social and normative connections between religion and politics.

His anthology This Sacred Earth: Religion, Nature, Environment is known internationally as the first comprehensive collection on the topic. His 1999 book, A Spirituality of Resistance: Finding a Peaceful Heart and Protecting the Earth was called by Protestant theologian John Cobb "a true spiritual guide for our day," and praised by Elie Wiesel. His 2002 book Joining Hands: Politics and Religion Together for Social Change received advance acclaim from Harvey Cox and Bill McKibben.

His recent work on religious environmentalism, A Greener Faith: Religious Environmentalism and Our Planet’s Future and the Oxford Handbook on Religion and Ecology establishes him as the leading analyst of this unprecedented political, environmental, and religious movement.

John Grim

...comes from the Missouri drift plains of North Dakota. He studied the history of religions with Thomas Berry at Fordham University. His area of scholarly exploration is indigenous traditions and in those studies he undertakes field studies in the summer with Crow people in Montana, and in the winter with Salish peoples in Washington state.

Currently he is a Senior Lecturer and Research Scholar at Yale University, and Environmental Ethicist-in-Residence at Yale’s Interdisciplinary Center for Bioethics.

With Mary Evelyn Tucker he is the co-founder of the Forum on Religion and Ecology and series editors of "World Religions and Ecology" a 10 volume publication from Harvard University Press and the Center for the Study of World Religions. In that series, he edited Indigenous Traditions and Ecology: the Interbeing of Cosmology and Community (Harvard, 2001).

He has been a professor of religion at Bucknell University, and Sarah Lawrence College where he taught courses in Native American and Indigenous religions, World Religions, and Religion and Ecology.

His published works include: The Shaman: Patterns of Religious Healing Among the Ojibway Indians (University of Oklahoma Press, 1983) and edited volumes with Mary Evelyn Tucker entitled, Worldviews and Ecology (Orbis, 1994, 5th printing 2000), and a Daedalus volume (2001) entitled, "Religion and Ecology: Can the Climate Change?"

John is also President of the American Teilhard Association.

Presenter: Spiritual Development Workshop, April 2008

Dan Heischman

...is a former executive director of the Council for Religion in Independent Schools. He served as Head of Upper School at St. Alban's School, in Washington D.C., and until June of 2007 as chaplain at Trinity College in Hartford, Connecticut. He is currently Executive Director of the National Association of Episcopal Schools.

Amanda Hughes

...is the author of Lost and Found: Adolescence, Parenting, and the Formation of Faith, Five Voice Five Faiths, and the Journey to Adulthood program. She is also the director of external affairs and the Five Faiths Project for the Ackland Art Museum at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

Thomas Lickona

...is perhaps the best known character educator in the United States today. He is a Professor of Education at the State University of New York (Cortland) and director of the Center for the 4th and 5th Rs.

He is author of seven books, including Raising Good Children, Educating for Character, and Character Matters: How to Help Our Children Develop Good Judgment, Integrity, and Other Essential Virtues.

Tom Monaco

...is former head of upper school at Summit Country Day School in Cincinati, Ohio. He is the principal architect of Summit’s student leadership program. Versions of the Summit program are in use in schools across the country.

Nel Noddings

...is Lee Jacks Professor of Education Emerita at Stanford University. She is a past president of the National Academy of Education, the Philosophy of Education Society, and the John Dewey Society. She served for 15 years as a teacher, administrator, and curriculum supervisor in New Jersey public schools.

She has published 16 books and hundreds of articles, chapters, reviews, and commentaries. Her books include Caring (2nd ed., 2003), The Challenge to Care in Schools (2nd. ed., 2005), Happiness and Education (2003), Critical Lessons: What Our Schools Should Teach (2006), Starting at Home: Caring and Social Policy (2002), and When School Reform Goes Wrong (2007).

Larry Nucci

...is Director of the Office for Studies in Moral Development and Education and Professor of Education and Psychology, at the University of Illinois at Chicago. He has written extensively in the field of moral and social development and education.

Nucci's books include Education in the Moral Domain (Cambridge University Press, 2001); Culture Thought and Development (with Geoffrey Saxe and Elliot Turiel) (Lawrence Erlbaum, 2000); and Moral Development and Character Education: A Dialogue (McCutchan, 1989).

Nucci was a pioneer in development and articulation of the domain theory of social cognitive development. His work with a variety of cultures has shown that children throughout the world share a set of common moral concerns for fairness and human welfare, and that these moral concerns differ from children's concepts of conventions and religious norms specific to their particular social and cultural setting.

Nucci has done extensive work with educators in the development of moral reasoning skills. He has been a popular workshop presenter for CSEE in the past.

Bridgette O'Brien

...is a former religion teacher at Annie Wright School. She is presently a graduate student in the Religion and Nature program at University of Florida (Gainesville).

O'Brien has traveled extensively in Asia, and is considered by colleagues from a variety of schools to be one of the most creative high school relgion teachers they know. One of the comments on her last presentation was "we did not have enough time with her!"

Mary Pashley

...is Director of Community Service at Choate Rosemary Hall, and has led numerous community service workshops for CSEE. She has extensive experience planning service trips abroad as well as organizing local service projects.

She has authored chapters on Community Service for Avocus Publishing Company and consulted on other written works covering ethical education and community service. She is known for her ability to look at individual programs in individual schools, and her ability to help schools tailor their programs to specific circumstances.

Marc Lee Raphael

...is the Nathan and Sophia Gumenick Professor of Judaic Studies, Professor of Religious Studies, and Chair of the Department of Religious Studies at The College of William and Mary, and Rabbi of Congregation Bet Aviv in Columbia, Maryland.

He just completed a twenty-year term as Editor of the quarterly journal American Jewish History, and he has recently published (February 2008) the Columbia History of Jews and Judaism in America (Columbia University Press). He is author of Judaism in America (2003), and co-editor of When Night Fell: An Anthology of Holocaust Short Stories.

David Rockwell

...has been a classroom teacher at Suffield Academy for forty-four years. He served as the Chair of the History Department for twenty-five years. He is presently Chair of Suffield Academy's Leadership Departmen.

David has been actively involved in many different areas of the school, from the classroom to athletics to the dormitory. Whether running a dorm for nineteen years, coaching football, track and field and alpine skiing, developing one of New England's top outdoorleadership programs or teaching a wide range of academic courses, he has devoted his life to growth and education of many generations of Suffield students.

Eugene C. Roehlkepartain

...is co-director of the Center for Spiritual Development in Childhood and Adolescence at Search Institute. He also serves as senior advisor in the office of the president at Search Institute.

He is a co-editor of two recent academic books on spiritual development: The Handbook of Spiritual Development in Childhood and Adolescence (Sage, 2006), and Nurturing Child and Adolescent Spirituality: Perspectives from the World’s Religious Traditions (Rowman & Littlefield, 2006).

Michael Schulman

...most recently published Building Moral Communities: A Guide for Educators through CSEE in the spring of 2006.

Schulman also authored Bringing Up a Moral Child: A New Approach for Teaching Your Child to Be Kind, Just, and Responsible, and The Passionate Mind: Bringing Up an Intelligent and Creative Child. He is chairman of the Columbia University Seminar on Moral Education, and supervising psychologist for the Leake & Watts Children’s Homes in New York. He has taught at Yeshiva University’s Ferkauf Graduate School, at Rutgers University, and at Fordham University.

Earl Schwartz

...is on the faculties of Hamline University's Department of Religion and the Talmud Torah of St. Paul. He is the author of Moral Education: A Practical Guide for Jewish Teachers (1983) and co-author, with Barry Cytron, of When Life is in the Balance: Life and Death Decisions in Light of Jewish Tradition (1986) and Who Renews Creation (1993).

Judith Smetana

...is Professor of Psychology in the Department of Clinical & Social Psychology at the University of Rochester. Her primary area of research entails children’s emotional and social-cognitive development, with special focuses on the development of young children’s moral and social knowledge, and on parenting beliefs and how these beliefs relate to parenting practices and child outcomes.

Smetana is co-editor of the Handbook of Moral Development (Erlbaum, 2006), and editor of Changing Conceptions of Parental Authority: New Directions for Child Development (Jossey-Bass, 2005). She is currently principal investigator for major grants funded by the National Science Foundation and the Fetzer Institute.

Elliot Turiel

...is Chancellor's Professor in the Graduate School of Education at the University of California (Berkeley). He is an Affiliate in the Department of Psychology, and Acting Dean of the Graduate School of Education.

Turiel is author of The Development of Social Knowledge: Morality and Convention, and of The Culture of Morality: Social Devlopment, Context, and Conflict. He is editor or coeditor of Values and Knowledge, Develoment and Cultural Change: Reciprocal Processes, and Culture, Thought, and Morality.

John M. Yeager

...is Director of the Center for Character Excellence at The Culver Academies, Interim Wellness Education Chair, and Assistant Boy’s Lacrosse coach.

Prior to coming to Culver seven years ago, he was on faculty at Boston University and an associate scholar in BU’s Center for the Advancement of Ethics and Character.

At Culver, Yeager focuses his energies on the inclusion of character education and positive psychology in academic, leadership and athletic programs. Also, he represents Culver at national and international conferences, including the International Positive Psychology Summit in Washington, DC, and the Centre for Applied Positive Psychology conference in the United Kingdom.

He is the author/co-author of Character and Coaching – Building Virtue in Athletic Programs, and Our Game: The Character and Culture of Lacrosse. In 1996, he was inducted into the New England Lacrosse Hall of Fame.

Presenter: Developing Student Leaders, May 2008