Alumni

Dr. Chenyu Li graduated from the Social Studies Education program in 2025. He is currently the Assistant Professor of Foundations and Secondary Education at Indiana University South Bend. This past March, he presented his research on migrant youth at a South Bend community event, where it received local media attention. He plans to organize a teacher workshop on the same topic next summer!

Ivan graduated from the Social Studies Education program in 2025. He is now teaching 9 and 10 grade Global History at International Community High School, a public high school serving recently-arrived immigrant teenage students in the South Bronx. ICHS is a performance based high school that is part of the New York State  Performance Based Standards Consortium and the Internationals Network. In the past few months, his students learned about the challenges of modern imperialism and resistance movements against modern imperialism. To show what they learned, they created playlists of songs challenging modern imperialism and asserting their own individual identities, backgrounds, and values. This year, Ivan’s students have also analyzed ancient and classical civilizations to answer the question: What makes a "Golden Age”? They transferred what they learned about the past to the modern US in order to write an argumentative essay answering the question: How will future historians treat the United States today—as a "Golden Age",or as an empire in decline? Ivan has also organized several field trips, including to an upstate apple orchard in the fall, the Met Museum in the spring, and an afternoon hike upstate in Harriman State Park. He also just came back from a week of professional development in the Gambia, organized by his mentor teacher Alhassan Susso, where he networked with other teachers from New York State and the Gambia and learned many lessons to bring back to my students in the Bronx. Last year, he student-taught at ICHS in a role coordinated by our very own BC Craig. Ivan reflected, “I can certainly say that the Social Studies department at Teachers College set me up for success in finding and being accepted to this position! This is truly a dream job for me -I am working in exactly the role and doing the work that I wrote about being excited to work in
when writing my original application for Teachers College.”