Berkeley Teacher Education Program (BTEP)

Tesha Sengupta-Irving (She/Hers)

Associate Professor, Learning Sciences & STEM Education Affiliate, UCB Center for Race & Gender Affiliate, UCB Asian American Research Center

Research

Dr. Sengupta-Irving’s research explores the sociocultural, disciplinary, and political dimensions of children’s mathematics learning. Broadly, her work asks a deceptively simple question: What, in addition to mathematics, do children learn when they learn mathematics? Dr. Sengupta-Irving works closely with teachers to understand and design pedagogical...

George Ellis

Prior to becoming the Director of the California Reading & Literature Project in 2017, George Ellis worked as a Teacher of Special Programs for the Berkeley School of Education and as the Program Lead for Elementary Education for CRLP at UC Berkeley from 2012-2017. In his role as Director, he oversees CRLP’s annual Teacher Leadership Invitational, collaborates with local school districts to support the implementation of evidence-based reading initiatives, and serves as an educational consultant on projects focused on continuous...

Veronica Vasquez

Veronica serves as the STEM Faculty Advisor for the Berkeley Teacher Education Program (BTEP). Her journey in education began as an undergraduate in the CalTeach program at UC Santa Cruz, where she obtained her teaching credential and MA in Education. Throughout her career, she has held various roles including middle and high school science teacher, assistant principal, and teacher on special assignment, working with students, teachers, and communities in Watsonville, Sacramento, Santa Rosa, and South San Francisco. Veronica is deeply committed to reducing barriers and expanding access to...

Sarah W. Freedman

Sarah Warshauer Freedman studies the development of written language, as well as ways writing, English, and history are taught and learned in schools. Her research focuses on US schools but also includes cross-national comparisons. Besides studying writing development, she is interested in societal divisions that lead to conflict and inequality. She has conducted research on how adolescents on varied sides of societal divides develop as citizens and civic actors. Her work on societal divides has included research on the role of education in reconstructing societies after genocide in Rwanda...

Thomas M. Philip

Thomas M. Philip is a Professor in the Berkeley School of Education, where he also serves as the Faculty Director of the Berkeley Teacher Education Program. He studies how ideology shapes learning and how learning is a site of ideological contestation and becoming. As a learning scientist and teacher educator, he is interested in how teachers make sense of power and hierarchy, and act on their sense of agency as they navigate and ultimately transform classrooms and institutions toward more equitable, just, and democratic practices and outcomes. His scholarship also explores...

Fatimah Nadiyyah Salahuddin

Fatimah Nadiyyah Salahuddin is a lecturer and the secondary Humanities Faculty Advisor for the Berkeley Teacher Education Program (BTEP). Fatimah is a Black San Francisco native and Oakland teacher-scholar who brings more than 10 years of teaching experience at all secondary levels. She strongly believes in the liberatory power of Ethnic Studies embedding it into every subject she has taught as a K-12 humanities teacher. As Faculty Advisor her commitment extends to empowering pre-service teachers to incorporate Ethnic Studies into their teaching as well. Before joining BTEP, she taught...

Michelle Hoda Wilkerson

I am a learning scientist whose work explores computational literacy, with special focus on how young people learn about scientific computing, its power, and its limitations. Most recently, I have explored how two varieties of scientific computing in particular, visual data analysis tools and agent-based simulation, can be responsibly introduced as epistemic tools within the precollegiate curriculum. Because my research focuses on the ways in which these tools allow youth to explore large-scale systems with significant social impacts (e.g. climate, health patterns, nutrition, pollution), I...

University of California campuses to boost early childhood teacher preparation, thanks to new $1.8 million in funding

January 9, 2023

The California Commission on Teacher Credentialing has awarded $1.5 million to three University of California campuses, bolstering the state’s ability to prepare thousands of newly credentialed teachers to serve another quarter-million children statewide.

California lawmakers and the governor aim to extend Universal Pre-kindergarten (UPK) to all 4-year-olds by 2026. But the scarcity of new teachers has slowed implementation, a snag that Governor Gavin Newsom confronts in his new budget, due out this week.

“The governor will...

Manny Herrera

Manny Herrera is the Elementary Faculty Advisor and lecturer for the Berkeley Teacher Education Program (BTEP). He graduated from UC Berkeley's teacher education program in 2007 when it was known as Developmental Teacher Education (DTE). Manny's masters thesis focused on re-envisioning family engagement as he knew family voice was key to teaching to the whole child. By bringing family voice into the classroom space through home visits he disrupted schools' traditional views on family participation. He continued this action research into his actual teaching practice by starting every school...

Chela Delgado

Dr. Chela Myesha Delgado is the secondary Humanities Faculty Advisor for the Berkeley Teacher Education Program (BTEP). Chela was born and raised in Oakland, Calif., and is a graduate, parent and former teacher of the Oakland Unified School District with 17 years of experience teaching Humanities classes to all high school grades in Philadelphia, San Francisco, and Oakland. As a kid of community organizers and a mixed Black student who witnessed plenty of racial inequity coming up in the era of highly tracked classrooms, Chela became particularly interested in issues of education and...