On this page:
- National Urban Alliance (NUA) Mission
- Professional Development and Cultural Relevance
- NUA and The Pedagogy of Confidence
- National Urban Alliance Founder
National Urban Alliance (NUA) Mission
The NUA’s mission is to substantiate an irrefutable belief in the capacity of all public school children to achieve the high intellectual performances demanded by our ever changing global community. Our focus is teacher and administrator quality through professional development which incorporates current research from cognitive neuroscience on learning, teaching, and leading. We partner with school districts to support the building of their capacity to advocate community-wide responsibility for realizing the learning potential of its children.
NUA helps districts provide school leaders and teachers with the opportunity, guidance and voice to identify what practices they need that will help them build on student strengths and engage them in learning essential skills, content and strategies.
It’s a given that students and teachers do not always come from the same racial or cultural backgrounds. NUA’s focus is on changing teachers’ perceptions and expectations of underachieving students in a way that pays particular attention to the cultural dimensions of these differences.
NUA and The Pedagogy of Confidence
In her book Pedagogy of Confidence, Yvette Jackson, NUA Senior Scholar, shows educators how to focus on students’ strengths to inspire learning and high intellectual performance. Jackson asserts that the myth that the route to increasing achievement by focusing on weaknesses (promoted by policies such as NCLB) has blinded us to the strengths and intellectual potential of urban students—devaluing the motivation, initiative, and confidence of dedicated educators to search for and optimize this potential. The Pedagogy of Confidence dispels this myth and provides practical approaches to rekindle educators’ belief in their ability to inspire the vast capacity of their urban students.
National Urban Alliance Founder
Eric Cooper
Eric Cooper is the President of the National Urban Alliance for Effective Education (NUA). He served in a similar position as Executive Director for the NUA at Columbia University’s Teachers College and as Adjunct Associate Professor for 7 years. Prior to this position, he was the Vice President for Inservice Training & Telecommunications for the Simon & Schuster Education Group. He has worked in the capacities of Associate Director of Program Development for the College Board, Administrative Assistant in the Office of Curriculum for the Boston Public Schools, and Director of a treatment center for emotionally disturbed students, in addition to working as a teacher, researcher, counselor, and Washington Fellow.
Additional professional activities include: producer of educational documentaries and talk shows; producer for the Public Broadcasting Service; congressional testimony for House committees; presentations for federal and state educational agencies; advisor to the International Reading Association, the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), the Editorial Advisory Board, and the Journal of Reading. Eric has been a member of the Select Committee in Educating Black Children; fund-raiser for the National Conference on Educating Black Children; chief advisor for the Thinking Skills Project, Macmillan Publishing Company; director of restructuring team for the Mt. Vernon Public Schools (NY); and has served on the advisory board of WGBH/PBS, Boston, MA. He was honored in 2005/2006 to speak at the prestigious Aspen Institute’s Ideas Festival along with participants such as: Colin & Alma Powell, Bill & Hillary Clinton, Supreme Court Justice Breyer, Brian Greene, Alan Greenspan, Katie Couric and many more.