Barbara Finkelstein - professor, Department of Education Policy Studies, University of Maryland, and founding director, International Center for Transcultural Education.
Expertise - a world-renowned historian of education and transcultural educator, Professor Finkelstein has done prize winning research on the social and transcultural impact of education policies and practices. Her work seeks to integrate the experiences of childhood and youth into the history of education in the United States, document the evolution of teacher behavior in popular primary schools, explore civic purpose in education, and analyze the involvement of government in child-rearing. Prof. Finkelstein has used oral history as a way to center on minority group experiences with literacy and school reform in both Japan and the United States. Her work as Founding Director of the International Center for Transcultural Education, organized, participated, and engaged students in interdisciplinary research collaborations centering on the recovery of previously invisible historical voices, on reconstitution policies in the United States, immigrant education policies in Japan and the U.S., and cultural stereotyping in the Middle East, Japan, and the United States.

Credentials - Prof. Finkelsetin has written and lectured extensively about the role of teachers as cultural mediators, the uses of literacy among minority groups, the shape of diversity policies in various educational settings, and more recently on the historical roots of child abuse. She has received numerous awards, including Distinguished Scholar Teacher Award at Maryland for 2005-2006, and was the recipient of the Order of the Rising Sun from the Imperial House of Japan in 2005.
Contact - 301-405-3588(office); bf@umd.edu
Web Site - http://www.education.umd.edu/EDPS/facultyStaff/bfinkelstein.html