Sam Intrator

Associate Professor of Education and the Program in Urban Studies

Co-Director of Project Coach

Co-Director of Smith College Urban Educational Initiative

Website: http://sophia.smith.edu/~sintrato/

Phone: (413) 585-3242

Office: Morgan 101

Email: sintrato@email.smith.edu

Degrees:
Ph.D Stanford University
M.A. Stanford University
M.A. Bread Loaf School of English, Middlebury College
B.S. The State University of New York at Binghamton

Research and Teaching Interests:

I came to Smith College in 1999 after more than a decade of teaching and administrative service in public schools in Brooklyn, Vermont, and California. I teach courses that examine educational issues as the product of interactions between a larger context (social, economic, political, ideological factors) and the actions and impulses of groups, institutions, and individuals. While we can read and discuss these issues, I know of no more effective way for us to learn about these issues then getting into schools and working with teachers and students. I encourage students to get involved and experience life in schools. To this end, I run two programs with colleagues that create connection and relationship to local youth and communities. The first is Project Coach. PC is an after school program that teaches economically disadvantaged to be sport coaches and to organize youth sports leagues for elementary aged youth in neighborhood sport leagues. Our coach education academy helps our teens become goal setters, communicators, and initiative-takers. As a by-product of cultivating these capabilities, our coaches create opportunities for children to have fun, have contact with "cool" neighborhood mentors, and practice habits of wellness and health. Our coaches become homegrown talent for local youth organizations and community centers. Project Coach builds capacity for neighborhoods from the inside out.

I also co-direct a program called the Smith College Urban Educational Initiative. This program places Smith students in urban classrooms. The goal of this program is to encourage Smith students to learn about the theoretical, practical and human issues facing urban youth and city schools.

My research focuses on two related questions. First, I am interested in how youth respond to the question: When do educational institutions matter to you? By educational institutions, I mean school, but I also mean those after school programs and other kinds of institutions that serve youth. Out of this research, I have worked with Don Siegel to develop a program called Project Coach that uses sports as a means to engage, connect and empower underserved adolescents and youth. We teach high school students to be youth sport coaches and then work with them to develop leagues for elementary-aged students from their communities.

When you ask youth matters to them, the answer is invariably the adults that staff these institutions. In other word, if schools and after school programs are to be places that promote social, academic, and intellectual development for young people then everything hinges on the pre3sence of intelligent, passionate, caring, skilled adults who work in the program. Thus, my second question: What conditions enable educators (teachers, principals, and others) to do their best and most inspired work in educational settings?

Teaching Interests:

Intrator teaches about urban education and teenagers in American culture. His latest effort is the development of Project Coach -- an after school program that prepares high school students from underserved communities to be youth sport coaches. These youth coaches then run neighborhood sport leagues in their home neighborhoods.

Courses:
Education in the City
Teaching the Imaginative: Writing and Art in the Classroom
Urban Youth Development
Growing Up American: Teenagers and their Educational Institutions
Issues and Problems in American Educational Policy
Secondary and Middle School Teaching Methods in the Humanities
Thinking about Learning

Representative Publications:

Intrator, S.M. & Scribner, M. Leading from Within: Poetry that Sustains the Courage to Lead. Jossey-Bass. San Francisco, CA.2007.

Intrator, S.M. & Siegel, D. "Youth Development and Academic Achievement Through Sport: Project Coach." JOPERD. (Forthcoming).

Intrator, S.M. & Kunzman, R. "Who is the Adolescent Today?" In Handbook On Adolescent Literacy Research. Edited by Leila Christenbury, Randy Bomer, and Peter Smagorinsky. Forthcoming, Guilford Press.

Intrator, S. "Starting with the Soul." Educational Leadership. V63, n6, March, 2006.

Intrator, S. Tuned in and Fired Up: How Teaching Can Inspire Genuine Learning. Yale University Press. New Haven, CT, 2003.

Intrator, S.M. & Scribner, M. Teaching With Fire: Poems than Honor and Sustain a Teacher's Heart. Jossey-Bass. San Francisco, CA., 2003.

Rosetta Marantz Cohen

Susan Etheredge

Sue J. M. Freeman

Janice Gatty

Sam Intrator

Alan L. Marvelli

Lucy Mule

Al Rudnitsky

Cathy Topal

Jack Czajkowski