Harriet R. Fayne, PhD

Professor, Leadership Studies, Department of Counseling, Leadership, Literacy and Special Education
Principal Investigator, LUTE-STEM Partnership Project
Lehman College, City University of New York

I have spent close to fifty years as an educator. After earning a B.A. with a major in American Studies from Barnard College and a M.A.T. in Social Studies Education from Harvard University, I taught social studies for five years. I then pursued two masters at Teachers College, Columbia University, one in reading and a second in special education. For two years, I worked as a special education resource teacher. 

I continued to pursue my studies and ended up earning a Ph.D. in educational psychology from Columbia University. That is when my forty-year journey in higher education began. While I have worked at the collegiate level for a long time, I have only worked at two institutions: one, a small liberal arts college in Ohio and the second, Lehman. While on the surface, these two institutions might strike someone as quite different, in many ways they share important characteristics.  Both colleges are student-centered institutions focused on teaching excellence. Both serve large numbers of first generation college students.
I have held a number of administrative positions: director of a reading/study skills center and community reading clinic, associate dean of academic affairs, department chair, dean, and interim provost. No matter what my official title, at my core, I have always been a teacher.  So, at this juncture, I relish the opportunity to celebrate that part of myself and return to the classroom.

Leton Hall

I have been a part of the instructional leadership team, equity team, department lead all at my school, Pelham Gardens Middle School. Outside of school, I am a master teacher with Math for America, one of the inaugural mentors with NYC Men Teach, a certified mentor with the NYCDOE, and a STEMteachersNYC teach-leader. I was also an adjunct at Lehman College.

“When facilitating workshops you need to be flexible and have the ability to adjust on the fly depending on your participants. This is something essential to getting the difficult but necessary work done. I strongly believe that a workshop flows in both directions. Participant to facilitator and vice versa.”

Eleanor Miele, PhD Prof. Emeritus Brooklyn College

Eleanor Miele was Chair of Secondary Education and Coordinator of General Science at Brooklyn College of the City University of New York where she has been on the faculty since 1998. She received her B.S. in Genetics from Cornell University College of Agriculture and Life Science and her Ph.D. in molecular biology from Columbia University. After leaving research in molecular biology, she taught courses in human genetics and molecular biology to high school students in the Science Honors Program of Columbia University for 16 years. 

Ellie has worn many hats across the science teacher education space – teaching undergraduate and graduate courses in elementary science education, acting as the program head of the masters program in elementary science and environmental education, as Project Director for the Brooklyn College K-9 Math & Science Consortium, and partnering with AMNH on improving pre-service teacher preparation for environmental education. Since first assuming a faculty position as a teacher educator, she focused on holistic approaches to science teaching, including integration of choice in learning, informal and place-based science learning and reducing stress in the science classroom.