RACIAL & SOCIAL JUSTICE INITIATIVES

The intent of our ongoing work with Dr Lawrence-Lightfoot is to embrace and invest in our school’s commitment to Racial & Social Justice with an emphasis on deepening connections with our families to increase our students engagement and success. Dr. Lawrence-Lightfoot is currently in conversation with our Faculty and staff, across two sessions, answering questions and providing guidance and wisdom as well as fantastic stories from her own life as an outstanding and award-winning educator. Her second session is on Tuesday March 2nd.

Sara Lawrence-Lightfoot, a MacArthur prize-winning sociologist, is the Emily Hargroves Fisher Research Professor at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, where she began her career in 1972. Educator, researcher, author, and public intellectual, Lawrence-Lightfoot has written eleven books: Worlds Apart: Relationships Between Families and Schools (1978), Beyond Bias: Perspectives on Classrooms (1979) (with Jean Carew), and The Good High School: Portraits of Character and Culture (1983), which received the 1984 OutstandingBook Award fromthe AmericanEducational Research Association. Her book, Balm In Gilead: Journey of A Healer (1988), which won the 1988 Christopher Award, given for "literarymerit and humanitarian achievement," was followed by I've Known Rivers: Lives of Loss and Liberation (1994), and

The Art and Science of Portraiture (1997) (with Jessica Hoffmann Davis), which documents her pioneering approach to social science methodology; one that bridges the realms of aesthetics and empiricism. In Respect: An Exploration (1999), Lawrence-Lightfoot reaches deep into human experience to find the essence of this powerful quality.

The Essential Conversation:What Parents and Teachers Can Learn From Each Other (2003), captures the crucial exchange between parents and teachers, a dialogue that is both mirror and metaphor for the cultural forces that shape the socialization of our children, and The Third Chapter: Risk, Passion, and Adventure in the Twenty-Five Years After 50 (2009) explores new learning during one of the most transformative and generative times in our lives. In Exit: The Endings That Set Us Free (2012), she trains her lens on the myriad exits—ordinary and extraordinary, painful and liberating—thatwe make in our life journeys. Her most recent book, Growing Each Other Up: When Our Children Become Our Teachers (2016), offers an intimately detailed, emotionally powerful account of a pedagogy—of witness, growing, intimacy, and acceptance—composed by our children.

Lawrence-Lightfoot is a member of numerous professional and scholarly committees and boards of directors including: The American Philosophical Society, The American Academy of Political and Social Sciences, The American Academy of Arts & Sciences, The National Academy of Education, Bright Horizons,

WGBH Educational Foundation, The Berklee College ofMusic, and the Atlantic Philanthropies where she is Deputy Chair. Lawrence-Lightfoot has been a Fellowat the Bunting Institute at Radcliffe College and at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford University. In 1984, she was the recipient of the prestigiousMacArthur Prize, and in 1993 she was awarded Harvard's George Ledlie Prize given for research that makes the "most valuable contribution to science" and "the benefit of mankind.” In 1995, she became a Spencer Senior Scholar; and in 2008, she was named the MargaretMead Fellowby the Academy of Political and Social Sciences. Lawrence-Lightfoot has been the recipient of thirty honorary degrees fromcolleges and universities in the United States and Canada.

In 1993, the Sara Lawrence-Lightfoot Chair, an endowed professorship was established at SwarthmoreCollege; and in 1998, she was the recipient of the Emily Hargroves Fisher Endowed Chair at Harvard University, which when she retired,

in July of 2019, became the Sara Lawrence-Lightfoot Endowed Chair, making her the first African-American woman in Harvard’s history to have an endowed professorship named in her honor.

Lawrence-Lightfoot did her undergraduate work in psychology at Swarthmore College (1962-1966) and received her doctorate in the sociology of education at Harvard in 1972