By SUSAN JONES
When Eboni Zamani-Gallaher was first approached last summer about being interim dean of the School of Education, she was reluctant to fill the shoes of her friend, Valerie Kinloch, who left to become president of her alma mater, Johnson C. Smith University in Charlotte, N.C.
She eventually decided to take on the new role in August 2023, as Pitt conducted a national search for a permanent dean.
“It's been interesting. I've stretched. I've grown,” Zamani-Gallaher said after she was named the Renée and Richard Goldman Dean of the School of Education at the beginning of May. “I realized that as much as I thought this wasn't a role that interests me, it is anything but uninteresting. Every day is unlike the day before or the day that will follow. But we’ve got some really great people under this roof, and I'm excited.”
Zamani-Gallaher came to Pitt from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign College of Education in July 2022 as a professor and associate dean for equity, justice and strategic partnerships in the School of Education.
At Illinois, she also worked as associate head of the Department of Education Policy, Organization and Leadership; as associate dean of the Graduate College; and spent seven years as director of the Office for Community College Research and Leadership, which is one of her passions.
“A large part of coming here was I was attracted to working with and for Valerie Kinloch,” Zamani-Gallaher said. The two knew each other from being in the same Big 10 academic leaders cohort. When Kinloch got the offer to be dean at Pitt in 2017, the two were together at a Big 10 leadership meeting at Penn State. “And (Kinloch) said, ‘Well, you know what has to happen next?’ She said, ‘Well you should come because there's nothing community college in that portfolio there.’ ”
At the time, Zamani-Gallaher had two teenagers at home and didn’t want to move. “Long story short, the universe just conspired I guess, where our paths had an opportunity to cross again. And I was really fortunate and happy to get a chance to at least get that one year with her. And she was saying that she could see it — you should be a dean. And I was like, ‘No, I shouldn’t, I gotta dean, that's you. But here we are. Never say no.”
Community colleges and transfers
The role that brought Zamani-Gallaher to Pitt — associate dean for equity, justice and strategic partnerships — represents her key priorities in higher education.
“The strategic partnership side was what I was really kind of leaning into and felt like that provided connective tissue to the equity and justice part,” she said. “Because much of what has concerned me is about broadening participation and access and creating more on ramps for students to better attend to their mobility — economically and educationally — and I think the transfer function is one means by which we could do it.”
One of her goals is to make Pitt and “the term transfer receptive akin to one another. (Pitt) is just not a place that has prided itself on being transfer friendly,” she said, noting that this is common among top research universities. “A lot of times what happens is there's an institutional elitism” that leads some to say, “That’s just not who our students are.”
But with the attacks on diversity, equity and inclusion programs over the past few years and the Supreme Court ruling last summer banning universities from using affirmative action in admissions, Zamani-Gallaher said she’s seeing a “convergence at highly selective institutions to think about, ‘maybe we should pay attention to (transfers) and build bridges, because that's one way that we can tap into getting a pipeline of students that are more diverse,” including first-generation and lower-income students.
She pointed out that around 40 percent of Pennsylvania college students are not at places like Pitt or even Slippery Rock, but at community colleges, and that many of those students have aspirations to move on to higher-tier institutions. “So it's not just that students enter but it's where they enter, and it's about how we create multiple on-ramps for folks to be able to be more nimble and mobile and have opportunities for further education for gainful employment.”
One of the reasons she agreed to take on the dean role was because it not only allows her to have an impact in the School of Education, but also “to be at the table … to talk with and be among that Council of Deans and the other leadership teams … to be able to create a space to have this conversation.”
Just days after Zamani-Gallaher was named dean, the School of Education hosted its first Transfer Pathways Summit on May 17, with the theme of “Building Bridges and Facilitating Student Mobility” and the goal of bolstering transfer-friendly practices into four-year institutions for community college students.
The new dean said Pitt is at a unique time to make transformative change on transfer access, with Chancellor Joan Gabel finishing up her first year here and the opportunity to elevate this to a chancellor-level priority.
“Joan Gabel has shared that part of her Plan for Pitt is wanting to broaden access, and within that, drill down … to explore what does that look like? How do we create better partnerships, how do we do so in a way where we have developed some strategies and initiatives that are bi-directional, that our win-wins for who we are partnering with in our community colleges,” she said.
This also plays into Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro’s Blueprint for Higher Education, she said, “to think about student mobility very differently. We're talking about how we consider being community engaged, how we're responsive to labor markets, workforce needs and development.”
The governor has proposed combining the state’s community colleges with the Pennsylvania State System of Higher Education (PASSHE) schools to make that mobility easier.
“What is the place for Pitt within this larger conversation?” Zamani-Gallaher said. “When we look at Pennsylvania and so many other areas in the country, more black and brown students, … when they're involved in college, again, they're at community colleges. And nearly half of all students that ended up with a baccalaureate degree had at least some community college credit, so it's not that community colleges aren't a part of the career trajectories of students. They are, they just don't always get to share in the credit of that completion story.”
Pitt has an opportunity, as an R1 university, to create research experiences for undergrads who are community college students that are bridge programs to some areas at Pitt, “and then from there, we think about stackable credentials and think about what could be a transfer pathway to graduate education, like a first professional degree.”
Other priorities
Zamani-Gallaher said that though much of her work has focused on community colleges, it hasn’t been her only priority.
Pitt’s School of Education, she said, “has been a place that's rich in opportunities to think about how we train educational personnel and leaders for P-20 (pre-K through graduate education).”
Under Kinloch, the school’s departments were reorganized and a new bachelor’s degree in education program was created, which welcomed its first class in fall 2023.
The reorganized departments were just taking shape when Zamani-Gallaher came to Pitt in 2022, and she said the identity of the merged units is now really starting to gel.
“For example, HHD — which is our Health and Human Development Department that was three distinct areas that are now meshed into one — they are starting to really have more of a unifying overall identity as HHD,” she said, and the same is true in the other departments.
During the past year, Zamani-Gallaher and others at the school have been introspective about strengths and weaknesses in the school’s programs and other areas. The coming year, they will look at “where can we began to take those action steps to have launches and move toward implementation for impact.”
She said they’ve seen growth in the exercise science program and in the new bachelor's program. Now they need to look at how to make that sustainable.
The school is planning to commission external reviews of its centers and initiatives, starting with the Center for Urban Education, which just celebrated its 20th anniversary; the Office of Child Development, which will mark 38 years this fall; and the Western Pennsylvania Writing Project, which is 40 years old. She noted these are some mature institutions within the school that have never had a review to see how they align with the school’s mission.
“I think there's ways we can better leverage those centers with resources, tools, webinars, programming for the community,” she said. “Because part of our mission vision is that we do work with and for communities and in schools.”
Zamani-Gallaher would like to expand the school’s footprint online. Right now, they’re piloting a non-credit to credit pipeline. This would allow working adults — including teachers who need to complete continuing education for Act 48 compliance — to take non-credit classes online, asynchronously at a reduced price. Then if they decide to pursue a degree within two years of taking the class, you will receive credits for the previously non-credit class.
“There's no money lost, there's no credit lost, there's money saved, and there's no time lost and then that online non-credit opportunity becomes a springboard right into what is a fully online graduate certificate,” she said, and potentially the graduate certificate can lead to getting a master’s degree online.
Currently there are two classes offered on the Pitt Professional website — STEAM Education and Foundations of Infant Mental Health.
“That's the blueprint and that's going to be north star in the near future for us as we think about how to diversify the delivery of our offerings, where we think about how to have broader impacts and reach beyond just Western PA.”
Susan Jones is editor of the University Times. Reach her at suejones@pitt.edu or 724-244-4042.
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