‣ Chief Program Officer, Grantmakers for Education
‣ Vice President of Partnership and Research, Education Reimagined
‣ Former VP of the Public Education and Business Coalition
‣ Former Executive Director, Colorado Boettcher Teacher Residency
‣ Acclaimed Author of ‘The Future of Smart’
Ulcca is currently Chief Program Officer at Grantmakers for Education, a member organization of education philanthropists in the US. She is also associate director of national outreach and partnerships for Education Reimagined, building an ecosystem of partners that support educators as they pioneer learner-centered environments around the country.
Prior to joining Education Reimagined, Ulcca served as VP of the Public Education and Business Coalition and and executive director of the Colorado Boettcher Teacher Residency, the largest statewide teacher residency program in the country serving both urban and rural school districts.
She developed strategic plan for the expansion/scaling of the Colorado Boettcher Teacher Residency to become a statewide pipeline for effective teachers. She developed and oversaw a strategy for merging the programs, operations and budgets of two organizational programs into one Education Team. Oversaw a budget of $3.5 million, a staff of 16 and an overall team of fifty.
Prior, Ulcca was Associate Director to the Technical Advisory Group to the State Council for Educator Effectiveness, Colorado Legacy Foundation. She coordinated 12+ work groups that are assisting the Council to develop recommendations regarding the development, rollout and implementation of an educator effectiveness framework implemented into law by CO Senate Bill 191 in May 2010.
Ulcca began her career in the classroom as an elementary teacher in Newark Public Schools. Ulcca holds a BA from Drew University and a certificate in early childhood and elementary education, with a focus on special education. She also earned her Ph.D. in Education and Philosophy from Oxford University and a JD from Harvard Law School.
Ulcca’s new book, The Future of Smart, was officially launched! It debuted as the #1 New Release on Amazon and hit #1 in ten individual categories including Education Policy, Education Theory and Research & Education and Teaching. Early reviewers are confirming that it provides innovative insights into how we can shift the education system to support the potential of all students.
Below is a synopsis of The Future of Smart, which is now available on Amazon.
“In her compelling new book, THE FUTURE OF SMART: How Our Education System Needs to Change to Help All Young People Thrive (Capucia Publishing; September 14, 2021), Ulcca Joshi Hansen, PhD, JD, draws on her education transformation and policy work, and experience as an educator, to explore how we arrived at our basic assumptions about the aims of education and how we can—and must—do better. Hansen goes beyond the usual conversation about why the conventional, factory model of school fails our children, and explores the underlying values and worldview that birthed this system as well as so many of the other systems society is critically examining now. She cites a massive shift during the Scientific Revolution that led to a dominant worldview that changed the very meaning of education. Only by fully understanding this shift, its connection to racial, social and economic injustice, and contemporary education, can we ever hope to change our education system.”
KEYNOTE 1
Highly Popular
UH1 The Future Of Smart
BY Dr. Ulcca Joshi Hansen
Synopsis
In this talk I discuss the future of “Smart”, the idea of shifting schools away from questioning whether kids are smart to helping them discover how they are smart. This talk focuses on the difference between the “school-centered” approach to learning that lies at the heart of the “industrial model” of education, and a learner- centered model that recognizes the purpose of education as being about creating whole human beings, and about embracing and actualizing the unique potential of every person.
The talk will discuss design elements of transformed schools that represent the future of smart, as well as the unique competencies of adults who can successfully work within these models.
A lot has been made of the industrial model of education and the need to redesign away from this model. However, to focus on the industrial model is to ignore the fact that it is the by-product of deeply-entrenched scientific, cultural and social beliefs that are being challenged and overturned in radical ways in today’s globalized, multi-cultural, ecologically-oriented world, and across a range of other disciplines.
This talk will leave audience members with a deeper understanding of the powerful beliefs that undergird the “industrial model” and will challenge them to move beyond tinkering with the model by proposing strategies for uprooting and replacing the model, the only way in which efforts to transform education will succeed.
