Celebrating Our TC Group on Alumni Day

Alumni, college students, school and buddies convened on campus on Oct. 18 for TC’s Alumni Day, a reunion that emphasizes the transformative energy of group and celebrates the College’s Alumni Award Recipients in addition to progressive school analysis. Reflecting a shared dedication to creating a greater world, the colourful celebration united the TC group for networking alternatives, participating discussions and a celebration of the impactful work of TC’s 2025 Alumni Award recipients.

“The concept of ‘community,’ the centrality of that connection to the TC experience, is very important to me, and something all of us at the College work to uphold,” stated President Thomas Bailey in his welcome remarks. “Our scholarship is important. Our research changes lives. We continue to do the work that brought you all to TC, whether it was in the 1950s or last year.”

Alumni in attendance spanned generations, with graduates from the Class of 1952 to the Class of 2025 gathering in Morningside Heights on a crisp fall day. Alumni additionally gathered for regional occasions in Los Angeles and Guangzhou, China. 

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A gaggle of 16 alumni convened in Los Angeles to share meals and tales of their time at TC (Photo: TC Archives)

Eleven alumni gathered in Guangzhou, China for a day of thought alternate and networking (Photo: TC Archives)

“Whether you walked these halls five, 10, 20, 30 or 50 years ago, being a part of the TC community is very special. We come from different places, different backgrounds, but we share a commitment to the TC vision to create a better world,” stated Jane E. Brown (M.A. ’10), President of TC’s Alumni Council, in her welcoming remarks. “Whether you went on to a career in education, health, psychology or beyond, you share this vision with all of us.”

Alumni Reflect on the Day

Celebrating the Alumni Awards

During the day’s festivities, Teachers College honored the 5 recipients of this yr’s Alumni Awards for profound contributions to their respective fields, the TC group and past.

The 2025 honorees characterize the breadth of the Teachers College alumni group. Collectively, they exemplify the influence of TC graduates working to construct a extra equitable, knowledgeable and related world.

Diving Deeper into Applied Expertise

Following the awards announcement, Distinguished Alumni Award Recipients Monique Herena (M.A. ’17), Chief Colleague Experience Officer at American Express, and Rebecca Winthrop (Ph.D. ’08), Senior Fellow and Director of Center for Universal Education on the Brookings Institution, sat down for a dialog about their views on management, scholar company, their careers and the influence of their TC schooling.

“Monique and Rebecca, two incredible leaders, embody the deep components that define leadership: values, potential and thinking of others,” stated Roberta W. Albert (M.A. ’97), Vice President for Institutional Advancement, who moderated the dialog. “We feel and practice these values in the halls of TC.”

The dialogue offered perception into Herena’s strategy to vary management at American Express in addition to Winthrop’s latest guide — The Disengaged Teen: Helping Kids Learn Better, Feel Better, and Live Better — and the totally different modes of studying college students occupy.

“I think about leadership from a very early stage, and I think that very much aligns with Teachers College and its mission,” stated Herena, who established the Herena Family Endowed Scholarship Fund along with her husband, Lou, in 2018 to assist college students within the Executive Master’s Program in Change Leadership (XMA). “How someone is developing self-awareness, or not, at a very early stage in their career, or life if you’re lucky enough, impacts your leadership.”

“Nobody learns just to learn. We are hardwired, evolutionarily, to learn because we want to do something,” stated Winthrop, who was impressed to analysis scholar disengagement after observing her personal youngsters’s modified relationship to studying throughout COVID. “Anything that we can do that pairs knowledge acquisition with knowledge application in the school setting will be incredibly helpful…Schools should be training our kids to be good thinkers…to learn things and solve problems with their knowledge.”

Professor of Clinical Psychology George Bonanno, writer of The End of Trauma:  How the New Science of Resilience is Changing How We Think About PTSD and one of many world’s foremost students on human resilience, condensed his 35 years of analysis into an attractive keynote about resilience to trauma. The presentation got here at a well timed second in American historical past and in TC’s historical past, as KerryAnn O’Meara — Vice President for Academic Affairs, Provost, and Dean of the College — famous in her introductory remarks, which additionally emphasised the broad attain of school analysis on the College. “Our faculty continue to win awards for their scholarship, and for their leadership roles with journals, centers and institutes,” she stated. “[But] what is perhaps more important…is the impact that our faculty are having in their respective fields impacting the public good.”

The keynote examined the parts of resilience and why two thirds of people overcome trauma, as Bonanno’s analysis has discovered. “We get through these events by flexibly adapting ourselves to the challenge,” stated the Loss, Trauma and Emotion Lab Director. “We work out the right behavior for the right situation at the right time and we correct as needed.”

The day’s program additionally featured a panel on generative synthetic intelligence and schooling moderated by Charles Lang, Senior Executive Director of the Digital Futures Institute and coterminus professor, shedding new gentle on the rising know-how and its shifting position in schooling. The dialog between Erik Voss, Assistant Professor within the TESOL program, and Maria Hamdani (M.S. ’10), VP of Assessment & Strategic Partnerships on the Center for Measurement Justice — who each leverage AI instruments of their work — coated potential purposes of generative AI in evaluation and language studying, considerations about fast adoption of recent applied sciences and the way forward for AI.

TC Alumni Day concluded with networking and dessert in Everett Lounge, offering everybody a possibility to strengthen connections by means of group and dialog. Current college students, referred to as “aspiring alumni” by President Bailey, combined and mingled with alumni throughout generations.

Learn extra about how one can join with TC’s sturdy alumni community right here.