PROMOTIONS AND TRANSITIONS

Congratulations to the School of Education faculty and teaching academic staff members who have been promoted over the past year.

At the June 2019 Board of Regents meeting, MAGGIE BARTLETT (1) and LEANNE EVANS (2) of the Department of Teaching and Learning were promoted from assistant to associate professor with tenure. RAJI SWAMINATHAN (3) of the Department of Educational Policy and Community Studies was promoted to full professor.

In addition to these faculty promotions, ERIN WIGGINS (4), clinical associate professor in the American Sign Language program, was approved for indefinite status by the UWM Academic Staff Committee and the chancellor.

ANGEL HESSEL (5) was promoted from senior lecturer to distinguished lecturer in the Department of Teaching and Learning.

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Transitions

NANCY FILE, professor in the Department of Teaching and Learning, is retiring this year after 17 years of service to the School of Education. Her research and teaching at the graduate and undergraduate level have focused on early childhood education. Among her many published works was the 2019 “Handbook of Early Care and Education,” which she co-edited.

She was an advocate of the importance of having well-prepared educators working with children in their formative early years.

“Young children tend to be devalued in terms that if you care for them, you don’t need a great deal of skill, she said in an interview. “It’s important not to treat those first four years as caretaker years, just making sure their diapers are changed.”

File served five years as the Mary and Ted Kellner Endowed Professor in Early Childhood Education, and was part of a national research project that looked at the impact of early childhood education on children from disadvantaged backgrounds.

The study concluded high-quality early childhood education can have a positive impact for infants and toddlers from lowincome backgrounds, minimizing some of the disparities that exist between children from low-income backgrounds and those from more affluent backgrounds.

“We hope the findings from our research will provide new evidence to convince policymakers to increase investments in high-quality early learning for infants and toddlers,” said File.

ELISE FRATTURA, professor of administrative leadership, is retiring at the end of the summer. She has been with the School of Education since 2001. Before coming to UWM, she was a K-12 district office administrator for 13 years. In addition to her research and teaching, she was co-founder of Integrated Comprehensive Systems for Equity and co-director of the National Leadership for Social Justice Institute and Academy at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. From 2005-2013, Frattura served as an Associate Dean and Department Chairperson in the School of Education.

She researched and published extensively in the area of Integrated Comprehensive Systems™, nondiscrimination law for all learners, and the theoretical underpinnings of educational segregation. She has worked extensively with urban, rural and suburban school districts across the country as well as internationally to assist in the movement from reactionary systems of segregation to proactive systems of support through presentations, evaluations and consultation.

CAROL WACKER, director of development for the School of Education for the past six years, left the School of Education in February to take a position as director of major gifts at the Medical College of Wisconsin. Her work here gave her a new appreciation for those involved in the field of education, she says.

Dean Alan Shoho praised Wacker’s work for the School of Education: “Carol has done an exemplary job of facilitating our development and external relations efforts over the past six years. Due to her hard work, the School of Education raised over $8 million during the campaign, ‘Made in Milwaukee, Shaping the World.’”