Barbara Hall
After completing an A.B. in Philosophy at Bryn Mawr College in 1991, Barbara Hall taught junior high school English as a Second Language (ESL) in two public schools in a rural area of northern Japan for two years. She also taught French and ESL to adults in the evenings and regularly taught in local elementary schools and preschools. Upon returning to the United States, she was an Acting Study Abroad Advisor at Penn. While completing her doctoral coursework at the University of Pennsylvania, she taught ESL to college students and other adults in the Intensive English Language Program (ELP) and coordinated the ELP International Student Center, where she advised students from around the world on their transitions to life at Penn. She has taught Japanese language in elementary school summer programs in suburban Philadelphia and researched and written curriculum for online training courses in the corporate world. She has also taught writing at Bryn Mawr College in the College Seminar Program for first year students and the Writing for College summer program for high school students and at Penn. She has especially enjoyed the opportunities she's had to co-develop curriculum and team teach in nearly all of these settings.
In the Bryn Mawr/Haverford Education Program, Barbara has taught Education 200: Critical Issues in Education and the two senior year courses required to complete an Education minor: Defining Educational Practice (Education 310) and Fieldwork Seminar (Education 311). She has also worked closely with students completing the minor in Educational Studies on ways to improve their learning in their field placements as a Field Liaison.
Barbara earned an M.S.Ed. in Education, Culture and Society from the Graduate School of Education at the University of Pennsylvania in 1996 and is currently a doctoral candidate in Cultural Anthropology at Penn. Her research interests include comparative, cross-cultural and multicultural education; Japanese culture, society and schools in Japan and abroad; ethnography; kinship studies; and complex societies. Her dissertation focuses on the ways that American families who have adopted children internationally experience adoptive kinship and participate in formal and informal social and educational efforts to learn about the adoptee's heritage culture.