Pathways Voices: Episode 2

Maddie Albanese and DeeSoul Carson:

From the Center for Faculty Advancement at New York University.

Group:

Are we there yet? Are we there yet? Are we there yet?

DeeSoul Carson:

I’m DeeSoul Carson.

Maddie Albanese:

I’m Maddie Albanese.

DeeSoul Carson:

Faculty development is at the core of what we do.

Maddie Albanese:

Our programs are devoted to faculty support and development.

DeeSoul Carson:

From recruitment to career advancement…

Maddie Albanese and DeeSoul Carson:

… throughout the faculty life cycle.

Maddie Albanese:

We are also creating pathways for a younger generation of academic scholars, researchers…

Maddie Albanese and DeeSoul Carson:

… and future professionals.

DeeSoul Carson:

Are we there yet? Are we there yet?

Maddie Albanese:

There are only beginnings.

DeeSoul Carson:

How do you get there?

Maddie Albanese:

Who paved your way? Your path?

DeeSoul Carson:

How did you get here?

Maddie Albanese:

Who brought you along and held your hands?

DeeSoul Carson:

How do you get anywhere?

Maddie Albanese:

Whose shoulders are you standing on today?

DeeSoul Carson:

Who paved your way? Whose shoulders are you standing on? Who brought you along and held your hand?

Maddie Albanese:

Are we there yet? How do you get there? How do you get there?

DeeSoul Carson:

How do you get there?

Maddie Albanese:

How do you get there?

Maddie Albanese and DeeSoul Carson:

There are only beginnings.

Elise Cappella:

What’s incredible is you think about how much I was given. How many opportunities I had made available to me by the people in my life. About the kinds of supports that I got along the way. It is really all about taking advantage of the opportunities that you’re given, fighting for opportunities that you don’t have, and then making those opportunities available to the next generation in the ways that I hope to be doing for the rest of my career.

My name is Elise Cappella. I am Vice-Dean for Research at NYU Steinhardt School of Culture, Education, and Human Development. I am also Professor of Applied Psychology and I co-direct the Institute of Education Sciences pre-doctoral interdisciplinary research training program.

It’s clear from my many titles that I wear a lot of hats. I’ve always been interested in diving deeply into lots of different roles and not just doing one thing.

I grew up in Madison, Wisconsin with an Italian American family, one of just a handful that I knew about. We were raised in the seventies and eighties during a time of a lot of activism. My parents were the first in their families to go all the way with their education, and they really wanted me to embrace all of the potential opportunities that I had that perhaps they and their families didn’t have.

I played soccer. I did dance and theater as a young person. I also really enjoyed school, and it wasn’t really the specific subjects that I liked the most. It was the teachers, the coaches, the theater groups, the people that I met along the way that I think really inspired me and helped me to learn how to collaborate, how to be creative within particular constraints or parameters, how to be tenacious and tough, and to get back up when I was knocked down.
I was a history major at Yale, so I’m a psychologist now, but I was interested in the amazing teachers that were weaving stories of people in their contexts, and that really stems till today. I really just study individuals in their social and cultural and economic and political contexts.

After college, I worked for the company that makes Sesame Street. We were really responsible for going out into the communities and talking to kids, to caregivers, to teachers, families, and bringing that back to the group that was doing the entertainment side and the group that was doing the content to make sure that the products that we were creating.

Ghost Writer was a literacy show for eight to 10 year olds. Dragon Tales, a social emotional learning show for young children, and everything in between were relevant for the audiences, were accessible to the audiences, were culturally responsive and developmentally responsive. I did that for a few years. I taught fourth grade, which was the hardest job I have ever had and perhaps the most important.

I spent six years in community and clinical psychology, wearing many, many hats again, doing clinical work, community engaged work, research practice, running, being a human, having friends and family members buttress me through the hard times. Then four years in Chicago at an institute called the Institute for Juvenile Research. Amazing mentorship along the way in graduate school and then came to NYU, 15 and a half years ago as a junior faculty member in the Department of Applied Psychology and have worked my way through a variety of roles.

We all bring to whatever we face, both what we have inside us and what we have outside us. I think what I’ve had inside me from a very young age is this balance between empathy, being able to understand the perspectives and experiences of others who are not like me, but also a sense of hope and optimism that is my baseline. Empathy can sometimes bring you to a place of despair, especially when you are listening to people who are really struggling. Hope brings you out of that to a place of now what? What can I do to make this better, to make this right, to move us forward? I think the combination of the two have really helped me to get to where I am today.

My research is in the juncture between education and mental health. I’ll give you an example of a project right now that I am most excited about and I think has a lot of potential for growth. It’s a partnership between NYU’s Steinhardt School, two institutes, the Institute of Human Development and Social Change and the Metro Center, and the New York City Public Schools, particularly their division of Specialized Instruction and Student Support. This is the division that cares for and supports kids in special education across the New York City system.

We together have partnered to create a program called the Path Program, and that’s a specialized program of the New York City Department of Education that serves kids who have been classified as something called an emotional disability. That’s a broad classification that is disproportionately affecting black boys from low income backgrounds and is a classification that encompasses kids who need additional emotional and behavioral support in school.

Unfortunately, to this day, these are kids who’ve been segregated into education settings that are not inclusive and they have been pushed out of their community schools and they end up not having then equitable opportunities. In this program, it’s designed to bring kids together across kids who have these needs for additional support, and then kids who don’t have these needs for additional support in smaller classrooms with two teachers with push and support from other staff members.

My role and the role of NYU is both on the practice side to support the teachers and the occupational therapists and the administrators and the social workers in the school to work most effectively with kids across difference, but also for us to embed research at every step of the way. So this is a true partnership and I just love how we’re working together so collaboratively and with members of communities, with parents, and with young people to create something that can scale across the system and can make a huge difference for a group of kids who the system has not served well.

I would say my unsung heroes are two people. They are my paternal grandfather, Joe Cappella and my maternal grandmother, Helen di Napoli. I say those two people, they are no longer with us, but they’re with me in spirit because they infused in my parents a love for, a respect for education, for family, for community that I carry with me to this day. I’ll say a little bit about them though.

Both of them come from Southern Italy and Sicily. My paternal grandfather was an immigrant himself as a young man, and my maternal grandmother was the daughter of an immigrant. They both became clothes makers, one a tailor and one a seamstress. They both overcame a lot of hardship. They did not have access to formal education that they deserved to give to their families in a way that I just find so beautiful. So I wanted to raise them up because they are the shoulders that I stand on today.

Maddie Albanese:

Are we there yet?

DeeSoul Carson:

We’ll see you next time.