Harvard Graduate School of Education

More About the Authors

Michael Nakkula is currently a research associate at the Harvard Graduate School of Education (HGSE), where he has taught courses on counseling, urban education, and adolescent development over the past fourteen years. During that time he has helped develop and direct HGSE’s Risk and Prevention Program, an interdisciplinary master’s program that trains educators to work as counselors, prevention specialists, and program evaluators for urban schools and community settings. For his research and teaching on issues related to urban education, Nakkula was named HGSE’s inaugural holder of the Kargman Assistant Professorship in Human Development and Urban Education, an appointment he held from 1998 to 2004. He is the coauthor, with Sharon Ravitch, of Matters of Interpretation: Reciprocal Transformation in Therapeutic and Developmental Relationships with Youth, which summarizes much of his early research, theory, and practice in the area of adolescent development. His current research focuses on the experiences of adolescents as they traverse the challenges of urban educational systems en route to work, college, and careers. Nakkula earned bachelor’s degrees in communications and psychology from Michigan State University, a master’s degree in counseling from the University of Minnesota-Duluth, and his doctorate in counseling and consulting psychology from HGSE.

Eric Toshalis is Assistant Professor of Secondary Education at California State University, Channel Islands. A former middle and high school educator, he has worked with youth and adults in schools as a coach, mentor teacher, community activist, teachers union president, afterschool group leader, and curriculum writer. He cotaught the course on adolescent development for preservice teachers in Harvard’s teacher education program from 2003 to 2006. As a researcher, Toshalis studies how teachers and students variously resist public schools’ tendency to reproduce social inequality and how such resistance can be promoted in the classroom. He received his bachelor’s degree, teaching credential, and master’s degree in education from the University of California, Santa Barbara, and his master of theological studies from Harvard Divinity School.

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