Chair
Chair of Educational Studies
Hollis L. Caswell Professor of Educational Studies
Deborah Appleman received her doctorate in English Education at the University of Minnesota in 1986. At Carleton she is the Hollis L. Caswell Professor of Educational Studies. During 2003-2004 she served her second year as mentor for Carleton’s second group of Posse students from the Chicago area. Professor Appleman’s primary research interests include multicultural literature, adolescent response to literature, teaching literary theory to secondary students, and adolescent response to poetry. She was a high school teacher for nine years. She has written numerous book chapters and articles on adolescent response to literature and she co-edited Braided Lives, a multicultural literature anthology published by the Minnesota Humanities Commission. Her most recent publications include Critical Encounters in High School English: Teaching Literary Theory to Adolescents, Literature and the New Culture Wars: Triggers, Cancel Culture, and the Teacher’s Dilemma, and Words No Bars Can Hold: Literacy Learning as Liberation. Her book, Critical Encounters in High School English: Teaching Literary Theory to Adolescents, now in its fourth edition, was published jointly by Teachers College Press and the National Council of Teachers of English and is widely used in methods classes across the country. She recently edited an anthology of her students’ work titled From the Inside Out: Letters to Young Men and Other Writings Poetry and Prose from Prison and authored Adolescent Literacy and the Teaching of English published by the National Council of Teachers of English.
Please contact me through email: dapplema@carleton.edu
Faculty
Anita Chikkatur (she/her/hers) attended public middle and high schools in New York City and identifies deeply as a New Yorker. Her scholarly interests include student and teacher perspectives on race, gender, and sexuality and issues of diversity and difference in educational institutions. Her research broadly focuses on how educational institutions can be supportive and resource-full environments for everyone (students, teachers, and staff) so that no one has to be individually resilient or exceptional. From 2018-2022, she was the co-principal investigator on an AmeriCorps-funded participatory action research (PAR) project in Faribault, Minnesota, collaborating with youth, parents, teachers, and administrators. She is currently the principal investigator of a second AmeriCorps funded grant that builds on the networks developed from the first grant and focuses on Youth Participatory Action Research in five Minnesota school districts. You can find more information about these projects and general resources about PAR here (also available in Hmong, Spanish and Somali). Anita is a member of The Spoilers Collective, a group of academics of color, who produce a podcast called “The Drip” where they discuss books by authors of color.
Please sign up for Anita’s Winter 2025 office hours here
Office hours: Tuesdays/Thursdays 3:15-4:15 pm (in person) and Mondays 1:30-2:30 pm (Zoom)
Jeff Snyder, Associate Professor of Educational Studies, is a historian of education who studies the twentieth-century United States. His work explores the intersections between the history of education and broader trends in U.S. cultural and intellectual history, examining questions about race, national identity and the purpose of public education in a diverse, democratic society.
Professor Snyder is the author of the book Making Black History: Race, Culture and the Color Line in the Age of Jim Crow (University of Georgia Press, 2018). His articles, essays and book reviews have appeared in academic journals such as History of Education Quarterly, Schools and Teachers College Record. He is also a frequent contributor to newspapers and magazines, including American Prospect, Boston Review, the Chronicle of Higher Education, Education Week, Inside Higher Ed, the New Republic and Salmagundi.
A Carleton alumnus, Professor Snyder majored in Psychology and minored in Educational Studies. He holds an EdM in Learning and Teaching from the Harvard Graduate School of Education and a PhD in the History of Education from New York University. Before pursuing graduate studies, he taught English to Speakers of Other Languages to students of all ages and ability levels in the Czech Republic, France, China, India, Nepal and the United States.
Professor Snyder teaches the following courses: Will This Be On the Test? Standardized Testing and American Education (EDUC 100), Introduction to Educational Studies (EDUC 110), History of American School Reform (EDUC 245), Fixing Schools: Politics and Policy in American Education (EDUC 250), Multicultural Education (EDUC 338) and Culture Wars in the Classroom (EDUC 367).
Visit Professor Snyder’s personal website.
Office hours:
Tuesdays, noon-2PM & Wednesdays, 10AM-noon
