To Embrace Student Agency [S1 E18]
Today, we bring to you our very first episode featuring an INTERVIEW! We are so excited to introduce you to Dr. Anindya Kundu, a senior fellow at the Center for Urban Research at the City University of New York (CUNY). This conversation is deep - fair warning!
Dr. Kundu’s work is revolutionary and critical for teachers in their journey toward anti-racist/anti-biased teaching and classroom management. We explore the “opportunity gap”, how to work toward closing it, and how to best serve the students in front of us every single year.
TEACHING PHILOSOPHY:
Before our interview, we asked Dr. Kundu about his teaching philosophy, and it was so beautiful, we just have to share it here:
“I believe each pathway from pre-K builds on the next as students strive towards college and career. I believe public education is our most important and valuable tool/service/program - but that currently education often reflects and reproduces inequality. Schools need more support from all angles. I believe students should be taught critical thinking, civic duty, and appreciation for diversity in school so understand structural limits and work to create a better future. I believe agency is as important to foster as any other content or character trait. “
We hope you enjoy this interview and it’s deep, winding turns into important conversations about equity, classroom management, and the state of education we face in America.
ABOUT DR. KUNDU
Dr. Anindya Kundu is an education sociologist who studies the contexts that allow youth and young adults to thrive. He is most interested in pathways to opportunity, so he also studies workforce development, and higher education, to identify the most equitable models worth following.
Dr. Kundu is a senior fellow at the Center for Urban Research at the City University of New York (CUNY). And also a member of the Citywide New York City Department of Education Career and Technical Education Advisory Council for the New York City Department of Education.
Dr. Kundu’s bachelor’s degree is from the University of Chicago in pre-law and this is also where he worked on a research project at the Cook County Juvenile Detention Center. That experience opened his eyes to the structural inequities that affect kids' lives. He then worked for a brief stint at the NYC Dept of Ed, then got his PhD in sociology of education from New York University (NYU), where he was an award-winning educator. Dr. Kundu taught undergraduate and graduate-level courses at NYU including American Dilemmas: Race, Inequality, and the Promise of Public Education; Research in Minority and Urban Education. My dissertation was supervised by Dr. Pedro Noguera and Dr. Angela Duckworth.
Dr. Kundu enjoys connecting research to practice; his work has appeared and been featured in NPR Education, MSNBC, Huffington Post. He has also gave two official TED Talks, each with over 1.5 million views. His book, The Power of Student Agency has just been published and is available for purchase here!
Your next pd read
The Power of Student Agency