Fellow faculty members, students, alumni, family, and friends last month joined Joseph N. Cooper, assistant professor of sport management in the Neag School, to celebrate his newly released book, From Exploitation Back to Empowerment: Black Male Holistic (Under)Development Through Sport and (Mis)Education (Peter Lang, 2019), inspired by his research on the intersection between sport, education, race, and culture and the impact of sport involvement on the holistic development of Black male athletes.

Thanks to a newly announced investment of $240,000 from the William Caspar Graustein Memorial Fund, the Neag School will be able to support further efforts to diversify the teacher workforce of tomorrow.

As part of an international partnership that began two-plus years ago, Neag School Dean Gladis Kersaint and Yuhang Rong, UConn’s associate vice president for global affairs, traveled this past fall to the Middle East on behalf of the University to connect with educators, administrators, students, and even royalty, in a country where one Neag School program has been making an impact.

Like most kids heading into seventh grade, Jesús Cortés-Sanchez was not yet thinking ahead to a future career. What mattered most then was enjoying time with his friends. Even into his high school years, the idea of going to college was not on his mind. An undocumented student ineligible to apply for federal student aid, he viewed college as an unrealistic, financially impossible feat. All of that would start to change when a recent Yale School of Music graduate named John Miller began recruiting students to a new band program he had established at Cortés-Sanchez’s middle school in New Haven, Conn.

The Neag School of Education welcomes four new faculty members — two in the Department of Educational Leadership and two in the Department of Curriculum and Instruction — effective Aug. 23.