The Black Scholars Index

Dr. Robbin Chapman

Dr. Robbin Chapman is currently the Manager of Diversity Recruitment for the MIT School of Architecture and Planning where she is responsible for strategic leadership and development of faculty and graduate student recruitment programs and initiatives. Dr. Chapman received her Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science from Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 2006.

She conducted her dissertation research at the MIT Media Laboratory, where she explored computational tools and practices for promoting critical reflection embedded in design-based learning activities. Her theoretical framework, Cooperative Constructionism, establishes a design-based approach to critical reflection. Dr. Chapman has several publications about her research, including the newly published book, The Computer Clubhouse: Constructionism and Creativity in Youth Communities and chapters in Social Capital and Information Technology, Communities of Practice: Creating Learning Environments for Educators.

She has presented her work at numerous conferences and invited talks. She also develops workshops for exploring creative ways of leveraging technology for deeper learning. She earned her S.M. degree at MIT’s Artificial Intelligence Laboratory where she developed a novel method for robust sign language identification. She is the recipient of, with a group of colleagues from several universities, a CILT (Center for Innovation in Learning Technologies) grant to investigate equity issues as they relate to the use of technology in education.

She currently serves as Regional Liaison for the Ford Diversity Fellowship program, sponsored by the National Academies of Science. Dr. Chapman has also served as Assistant Program Director for NASA’s Space Life Sciences Training Program at Kennedy Space Center, where she was responsible for all aspects of program logistics and administration. She was also a member of the LSSF (Life Sciences Support facility) flight hardware team, which develops technologies to support life science experiments aboard the Space Shuttle. Her projects at NASA include work on the Variable Speed Mid-Deck Centrifuge (VSMDC), Algae Liquid Fixation Apparatus (ALFA), and the Microgravity Plant Nutrient Experiment (MPNE). She served as Science Instructor for the Eureka math and science program for teenage girls desiring careers in science.

In her spare time, Dr. Chapman volunteers at after-school centers, working primarily with underserved communities and as a peer counselor for at-risk teens. She is a founding member of the Habibis, MIT’s Middle Eastern dance troupe and has been performing with the group for over six years. Additionally, she has been very active in numerous MIT student and community initiatives.

The Clubhouse Clubhouse - Book Cover

ABOUT THE BOOK
This book is about the Computer Clubhouse — the idea and the place — that inspires youth to think about themselves as competent, creative, and critical learners. So much of the social life of young people has moved online and participation in the digital public has become an essential part of youth identities. The Computer Clubhouse makes an important contribution not just in local urban communities but also as a model for after-school learning environments globally. The model has been uniquely successful scaling up, with over 100 clubhouses thriving worldwide. Showcasing research by scholars and evaluators that have documented and analyzed the international Computer Clubhouse Network, this volume considers the implications of their findings in the context of what it means to prepare youth to meet the goals of the 21st Century.

ABOUT THE AUTHORS
Yasmin B. Kafai is a Professor of Learning Sciences at the Graduate School of Education at the University of Pennsylvania. Kylie A. Peppler is an Assistant Professor of Learning Sciences at Indiana University, Bloomington. Robbin N. Chapman is a learning technologies consultant and researcher, and serves as Manager of Diversity Recruitment for the MIT School of Architecture and Planning

Contributors: Brenda Abanavas, Gail Breslow, Grace Chiu, Stina Cooke, Shiv Desai, Patricia DÃ az, Rosaline Hudnell, John Maloney, Amon Millner, Jesse Moya, Mitchel Resnick, Natalie Rusk, and Elisabeth Sylvan

Dr. Eileen Southern - Harvard Gazette Archives

Dr. Eileen Jackson Southern was a noted author and researcher of African-American music and the first Black woman appointed as a tenured full professor at Harvard University.  

Dr. Southern made tracing the history, evolution and impact of Black music her life mission. In 1973, she and husband Joseph Southern, a professor, founded Black Perspectives In Music, the first musicological journal on the study of Black music, which she edited until the journal ceased publication in 1990. Other works include The Music of Black Americans: A History and the Biographical Dictionary of Afro-American and African Musicians.

Her scholarship earned her a National Humanities Award in 2001 for helping to “transform the study and understanding of American music” and the 2000 Lifetime Achievement Award of the Society of American Music.

Music was a part of Dr. Southern’s life early on. Although Minneapolis was her birthplace, Eileen Jackson cut her musical teeth in Chicago, where her childhood home was a hot spot for Black musicians. She studied piano and made her first concert appearance at age 7.

In 1941 she received her master’s from the University of Chicago with her thesis, The Use of Negro Folksong in Symphonic Form. She later taught at Black colleges in the South and in New York at CUNTs York College, where she was promoted to music department chair. In 1961, she earned her Ph.D. at New York University.

In 1974 Dr. Southern went to Harvard as a lecturer. Two years later she received a dual appointment in Afro-American studies and music. She headed the department of Afro-American studies from 1975 to 1979 and retired in 1987.  She died in 2002 at the age of 82.

Read more about her in the archives of the Harvard Gazette.

To kick off our Celebration of HBCU Presidents, we celebrate John Hope!

John Hope - from Wikipedia

103 years ago today (June 30, 1906), John Hope became the first Black president of Morehouse College in Atlanta. John Hope was an important African American educator and race leader of the early twentieth century. Twenty-three years later, in 1929, Hope went on to become the first African American president of Atlanta University (later Clark Atlanta University). Under his leadership, Atlanta University became the first college in the nation to focus exclusively on graduate education for African American students. As a race leader, Hope was steadfast in his support of public education, adequate housing, health care, job opportunities, and recreational facilities for blacks in Atlanta and across the nation. He also supported full civil rights in the South during an era when African Americans were expected to accommodate a system of inequality.

To accomplish his goals, Hope embraced several civil rights organizations, including W. E. B. DuBois’s Niagara Movement, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), and the southern-based Commission on Interracial Cooperation. He was also very active in such social service organizations as the National Urban League, the “Colored Men’s Department” of the YMCA, and the National Association of Teachers in Colored Schools. Hope was very well known among both blacks and whites in the early twentieth century. Buck Franklin, the father of the distinguished historian John Hope Franklin, was so impressed with Hope’s social and educational leadership that he named his son after Hope.

John Hope’s early life contributes much to an understanding not only of racial identity but also of class, color, and caste among African Americans, especially in the South. Born of a biracial union in Augusta on June 2, 1868, he belonged to a small black elite whose history predated the end of slavery. His father, Scottish-born James Hope, immigrated to New York City early in the nineteenth century and eventually moved to Augusta, where he became a prominent businessman. His mother, Mary Frances Butts, was a free African American woman born in Hancock County, Georgia. Although Georgia law prohibited interracial marriages, Hope’s parents lived openly as husband and wife until his father’s death in 1876.

Hope’s education prepared him for his life’s work. Though he quit school after the eighth grade to help his struggling family survive, he decided five years later to complete his education and attended a preparatory school in Worcester, Massachusetts, in 1886. He went on to earn a B.A. degree in 1894 at Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island. Hope eventually decided to become a professional educator, teaching first at Roger Williams University, a small black liberal-arts school on the outskirts of Nashville, Tennessee. In 1897 Hope married Lugenia Burns, who would also become a prominent race leader and social activist. They moved in 1898 to Atlanta, where he took a teaching position at Atlanta Baptist College, which became Morehouse College in 1913. It was in Atlanta that Hope first met and befriended prominent black leaders and educators like Booker T. Washington and W. E. B. Du Bois.

Suggested Reading:

Leroy Davis, A Clashing of the Soul: John Hope and the Dilemma of African American Leadership and Black Higher Education in the Early Twentieth Century (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1998).

Information taken from The Georgiaencyclopia.

Today, BSI highlights the Damon J. Keith Law Collection of Africa-American Legal History at Wayne State Law School.  Here’s a bit of information from its website.  

The collection, initiated by Professor Emeritus Edward J. Littlejohn, is dedicated to recording the history of African American lawyers and judges.  It was created to meet the need for a central repository for the nation’s African-American legal history.  

The collection intends to use its endowment, now exceeding $2.1 million dollars to gather oral histories, support lectures and research, provide educational teaching materials and traveling exhibits, and generally assist in the preservation and popularization of the lessons learned during the course of the historic struggle of the African American people for democracy in the United States.

Since September 5 2004, the site has had a little under 10,000 visits (9,700).  Let’s see if we can increase this number a bit!

Visit today! http://keithcollection.wayne.edu/

Screen capture of Blackpast.org

This weekend BSI’s Founder visits Google, the powerhouse of all things data-related, for winning the Google Anita Borg Scholarship.  For this reason, we’d like to highlight a website that features all things related to data about Black history – http://www.blackpast.org - and the Black Scholar who created it, Quintard Taylor, the Scott and Dorothy Bullitt Professor of American History at the University of Washington.  Here’s a description of this resource from its website:
 

Dr. Quintard Taylor, creator of BlackPast.org

BlackPast.org, an online reference center makes available a wealth of materials on African American history in one central location on the Internet. These materials include an online encyclopedia of over 1,500 entries, the complete transcript of over 125 speeches given between 1789 and 2008, over 100 full text primary documents, bibliographies, timelines and four gateway pages with links to 50 digital archive collections. Additionally 75 major African American museums and research centers and over 400 other website resources on black history are also linked to the website. The compilation and concentration of these diverse resources allows BlackPast.org to serve as the “Google” of African American history.

Blackpast.org has dozens of contributors and has an extensive historical progression of its existence.  Check out more about this amazing resource (and it’s specific tribute to Michael Jackson today).

RIP Michael Jackson!  May your memory inspire many Black Scholars of the future to dance in the middle of their studies!