Our name notwithstanding, Teachers College was founded on the proposition that education alone can’t correct our society’s inequalities — that to maximize the life chances of all people, we must support poorer communities’ physical and nutritional health and psychological wellbeing. Thus, fields such as education psychology, nursing education, nutrition education, special education, conflict resolution and spirituality and education were created at TC, and for more than a century we have prepared psychologists, nutritionists, health educators, speech pathologists and other professionals, as well as teachers and school leaders.
Today, more than a third of our tenure track faculty are psychologists and health educators, and we continue to take a multidisciplinary approach, combining our strengths across fields to tackle the world’s most challenging problems. We offer more than 100 programs in our four core areas of expertise — education, health, psychology and leadership — and conduct research on topics that range from the impact of poverty on the brain to the legal basis for a Constitutional right to education; from hip-hop pedagogy to the revival of Inca languages in Latin American schools; from the study of motherhood as a developmental stage to the exploration of resilience in military veterans; from the impact of microaggressions on mental and physical wellbeing to language development in children on the autism spectrum; and so much more.
When we speak of education, we mean education writ large — the study of how people learn, and how they should be taught, in all fields. And that, ultimately, is why we continue to proudly call ourselves…Teachers College.