Jeff Anderson, Professor and Department Chair of Curriculum and Instruction, has been named Associate Dean for Undergraduate Education.

As Department Chair, Anderson has worked to increase the coordination between C&I and the Office of Teacher Education. He also has been chairing the Committee on Teacher Education (CTE) for the past several years and sees this new role as associate dean as allowing him to expand current efforts, while developing new initiatives for undergraduate education. He is most interested in ensuring that all our undergraduate programs are grounded in DEI, actively imparting respect for diversity, integrity, and self-reflection.

More than that, he sees the possibilities of the new role as “endless and very exciting” and wants to find ways to:

• significantly enhance undergraduate recruitment initiatives;
• increase collaborations with Global Gateways and other globalization efforts;
• reimagine the role of academic advising to more fully embrace coaching and mentorship;
• establish a research arm in the Office of Undergraduate Education that makes critical connections among accreditation, assessment, and institutional research; and
• revise SOE policies to better encourage, recognize, and reward faculty engagement with school and community partners, and with other campus units.

In his own words, Anderson said, “I find myself drawn to the potential for the Associate Dean for Undergraduate Education to establish an exciting vision for the future of undergraduate education in the School of Education. I am driven by ideas and questions, starting with, ‘What can the next generation of well-grounded, theoretically based undergraduate education look like? And how can IU position itself as a leader in this regard?’”

Anderson is also currently working on a project with the Civil Rights Division of the U.S. Department of Justice and is part of a research team conducing an randomized controlled trial that examines the effectiveness of ‘Check and Connect’ for increasing the graduation rates of secondary students in the foster care system.

Associate Professor Lara Lackey will become the Interim Chair for the Department of Curriculum and Instruction.