Last month, the Queen's Gazette highlighted the recipients of the federal Insight and Partnership Grants, awarded through the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC). These grants are part of a larger $1.3 billion federal investment in Canadian research, with over $240 million allocated to the social sciences and humanities. As reported by the Gazette, “Close to 50 researchers at Queen’s have secured $11.5 million across four SSHRC programs.”
Among these researchers are five scholars from the Faculty of Education, who have secured funding to support projects that promise to advance equity, innovation, and impact within the education sector. We spoke with each of them to learn how their projects will take shape over the coming years—and how their work is poised to influence educational research and practice at regional, national, and global levels.
The Insight Grants fund research excellence in the social sciences and humanities, enabling scholars to address complex issues about individuals and society and advance their research programs. Funding of up to $500,000 is available for up to five years.
Dr. Rosa Bruno-Jofré: Corpus Christi School, New York City: Education, Politics, Theology, and a Catholic Progressive School, 1930s-1950s
When Rosa participated at one of the triennial conferences of the History of Women Religious, at the University of Notre Dame, which was attended by historians and archivists working on the history of all things Catholic, she had a conversation with Mary Ewen, OP. In their conversation, Rosa became aware of the Corpus Christi School, a Catholic School located in Morningside Heights, New York City, across from Columbia University’s Teachers College. Corpus Christi School was the project of the legendary Father George Barry Ford (1885-1978). Father Ford invited the Dominican Sisters of Sinsinawa, Wisconsin, who were familiar with progressive education, to run the school, and he played a primary role in choosing the teachers who were best suited to implementing a progressive approach to education and oversaw the program there. Ford was known for his involvement in civil rights, ecumenism, intercultural work, and anti-racist initiatives. Rosa plans on examining the period between 1936, when Ford rebuilt and re-opened the school with a new faculty, through the mid-fifties, when Ford retired. The landscape is provided by the context of the time, and in particular, by the involvement of Ford in many committees and conferences in New York City, including the Freedom House, where he worked with Eleanor Roosevelt. Ford’s impact in the community at large was so great that there is now a residence at Columbia University named after Father Ford. The New York Times also left a record not only of the way in which the Corpus Christi School was considered a model progressive school at the time, but also of Ford’s many controversial interventions that generated conflicts with the New York Church hierarchy. Rosa would like to mention that she is a secular historian. In June 2022, at the triennial conference of History of Women Religious, at the University of Notre Dame, she received the Distinguished Historian award for her work on the history of Catholicism.
Rosa’s collaborator on the Corpus Christi School project is Dr. Ana Jofre, (SUNY Polytechnic Institute, in Utica, NY), who has been working with her to develop the digital components of the project; this element has included a social network to trace the many political and activist-oriented connections that are associated with Father Ford.
There are so many aspects of this school that drew Rosa to it. To name a few: the uniqueness of the school, in line with its social reconstructionist approach in progressive education, the close relationship of the school with Teachers College, the hundreds of visitors the school received due to it emerging as a model of progressive education for its time, the reading/interpretation of Dewey and Ford’s closeness to William Heard Kilpatrick, the religious services that Ford initiated with participatory components in the vernacular that were ahead of their time, Ford’s conflicts with the New York Archdiocese, and the support from the progressive Catholic magazine Commonweal. And then of course, to get into more minute details, she also cited Ford’s conflict with Cardinal Spellman is also quite fascinating.
When asked about how this project builds upon her previous work on religious education, Rosa described that she writes about the history of education, including the history of women congregations and the French issue in Canada. She has delved into the cruelty of the residential schools, (emptying the soul, while working with a child-centered pedagogy.) She published a book on the Missionary Oblate Sisters, (McGill-Queen’s University Press), on Our Lady of the Missions: From Ultramontane Origins to a New Cosmology, (University of Toronto Press), which was a product of another Insight Grant, and she has written many articles on related issues, for example, Catholic readings of John Dewey and the way he was de-pragmatized, (a term coined by her colleague, Gonzalo Jover). Rosa is also completing a book on the transnational circulation of ideas in education; the latter book has been funded by a previous Insight Grant that is ending in September. She will also build on her work on the intellectual history of education, including her research on two public intellectuals whose work had Catholic underpinnings: Paulo Freire and Ivan Illich.
In response to what she hopes this research will reveal about the broader historical role of Catholic progressive education in North America, Rosa stated candidly, “I need to actually do further research to respond more fully to your question. I still need to continue to build my argument/interpretation upon working further with the sources. The social reconstruction approach in progressive education in Catholic schools has not been fully explored, and I hope to shed more light on this topic as my research progresses.”
Within the scope of this project, the Insight Grant funding will cover the cost of archival research in New York, as well as the salaries of research assistants. Rosa will do extensive work in the New York Public Library to follow Ford’s many humanitarian-based, civil rights-oriented involvements. She has already consulted the archives in Sinsinawa, Wisconsin, which are being moved to Boston. Unfortunately, she has not been given access to the Archdiocese archives. However, she does have access to whatever records the Dominican Sisters have kept, which includes quite a bit of correspondence with Father Ford himself. Rosa will also get oral testimonials and also intends to have an exhibition/installation about the Corpus Christi School, the Dominican Sisters, and Father Ford at the Gannett Gallery at SUNY Polytechnic Institute in Utica, NY––which also happens to be located in the city where Ford grew up. Ana Jofre is the director of the Gallery. Of course, there will be an intense dissemination effort beyond just the publication of a book on Corpus Christi, the Dominican Sisters, and Ford in a University Press, as well as articles and presentations at conferences.
When speaking upon the possible contributions of this project to the field of education history, Rosa states, “It is a topic that has not been explored before. Ideally, it will provide a new understanding of the interactions of individual priests committed to social justice and congregations having their own charism with the historical configurations of their time, beyond the dictates of the Vatican. Hopefully, it will contribute to a better understanding of the multi-faceted character of the Catholic Church.”
Read about the other major SSHRC-funded projects at the Faculty of Education