From addressing AI in the classroom to helping schools make progress with limited resources, scholars tackling education’s most urgent, unresolved questions will receive support through the new Gordon Institute Fellows Program. A new partnership between TC’s Edmund W. Gordon Institute for Advanced Study and UNCF/Mellon Programs, the advanced-study fellowship will invest in scholars who study how to protect and expand educational opportunity.

Modeled in spirit after the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, NJ, the semester-long residency program fills a critical gap by providing scholars in the arts, humanities and humanistic social sciences with the space, intellectual community and collaborative environment needed to tackle pressing education challenges. 

"This is an exciting moment for The Gordon Institute — and the field of education research. Through this program, we are offering scholars the opportunity for curiosity-driven and critically engaged inquiry into some of the most socially intractable issues facing education today," said Ezekiel Dixon-Román, Director of the Edmund W. Gordon Institute for Advanced Study and Professor of Critical Race, Media, and Educational Studies

The program is currently accepting applications, and will welcome its first cohort of two fellows in either Fall 2027 or Spring 2028. Each year, The Gordon Institute leadership and its Advisory Board will select a thematic focus tied to a pressing dimension of educational inequity. The inaugural theme for 2027–2028 is “Democracy & Education at the Edges: Toward the Undercommons,” which takes on compounding crises such as enrollment cliffs and budget shortfalls, the destabilizing force of generative AI on teaching and assessment, book bans, disputes on the role of race and culture in schooling, and more. 

Over the course of a semester, two fellows will join a weekly seminar with Gordon Institute faculty affiliates, advanced doctoral students, and invited thought leaders to present their work, which will be developed into a course offering for select Teachers College doctoral students. 

To help promote creative problem-solving, leadership has designed the Gordon Institute Fellows Program to welcome a range of deliverables from its scholars. Their work may culminate in peer-reviewed articles, policy recommendations, book manuscripts, public humanities installations, or documentary and multimedia scholarship in order to welcome a variety of solutions to these critical educational issues. 

Since 1973, the Gordon Institute (formerly the Institute for Urban and Minority Education) has been committed to improving the quality of education for urban and minority children and youth and to better understanding their educational, psychological, and social development, as well as the experiences in the home, neighborhoods, communities, and larger society that determine opportunities for development and social mobility. The Institute is named for Edmund W. Gordon, TC’s Richard March Hoe Professor of Psychology Emeritus — a pioneering psychologist, Black studies, and education scholar whose lifelong work has shaped the field of equity in American education.