About

Welcome from the Chair and Vice Chair

As Chair and Vice Chair, we welcome you to the Department of Arts and Humanities at Teachers College, Columbia University. Our department is a community of scholars, artists, educators, and leaders who believe the arts and humanities are essential to understanding, with a global view, what it means to be fully human. We are home to ten distinctive programs spanning the visual and performing arts, philosophy, language and literacies, bilingual and bicultural education, applied linguistics and TESOL, social studies, and arts administration. Our department is united by a shared commitment to creativity, critical inquiry, and educational excellence. Across our classrooms, studios, and communities, we ask enduring questions about identity, culture, justice, and the transformative possibilities of teaching and learning.

At a time when education is too often measured by efficiency and outcomes alone, we remain steadfast in the belief that the arts and humanities are at the heart of education. A poem can awaken empathy, a song can preserve history, a work of art can challenge injustice, and a philosophical essay can deepen our understanding of ourselves and one another. We hope that you will encounter a diversity of writers and artists, some of whom are alumni, like historian of education Lawrence A. Cremins (Ph.D 1949), the artist Alma Thomas (MA, 1934), or the jazz trumpeter Donald Byrd (Ed.D. 1982). Through scholarship, artistic practice, and research, our faculty and students contribute to knowledge and social action locally, nationally, and globally, always with a commitment to creating more just, humanizing, and equitable communities.

We also recognize that higher education faces profound challenges. In moments of uncertainty, we are reminded why our work matters. As educators, artists, researchers, poets, musicians, and curriculum makers, we have a responsibility to advocate for the centrality of the arts and humanities in education because they cultivate imagination, courage, ethical thinking, and hope—the very qualities that our world, and the world of education, needs most.

In our scholarship and service, we are committed to fostering equity, belonging, and democratic engagement in schools, and to activate the power of the arts to help create communities where students are seen, heard, and valued, and where creativity and teaching flourish side by side.