Breakfast at the Barracks - Season 2, Episode 25
Maurice J. Elias
Department of Animal Sciences
Clinical Psychology/Intradisciplinary Health
The unifying themes in my action-research, clinical work, and policy/advocacy are the development of positive, constructive life paths for children and youth and the organization of opportunities to allow this to happen in equitable ways. This has brought me into areas such as social-emotional learning (SEL), emotional intelligence, social competence promotion, character education, primary prevention, school-based, evidence-based intervention, and socialization of identity. It has also brought my work increasingly into the areas of implementation and sustainability of interventions, and cutting edge issues such as the link of social-emotional and character development (SECD) and academics and the distinguishing features of sustainable, versus well-implemented, empirically supported innovations.
I have worked to establish the field of prevention, school-based preventive intervention, and social competence promotion as a credible, important, and rigorous area of research, practice, and public policy. To accomplish the latter, collaborative models are necessary, as are programs of longitudinal, synergistic action-research with an explicit eye to practice and policy. Thus, I have organized my work within the Rutgers Social-Emotional Learning Lab. The Lab is dedicated to conducting action-research in public, private, and religious school settings for the purpose of building children’s skills for facing the tests of life, and not a life of tests. It focuses on understanding the relationship of academic achievement, social-emotional competencies, and the development of character and a core set of life principles, and the development of school-based interventions to strengthen SECD and one’s Laws of Life, and prevent bullying, violence, intimidation, and victimization, substance abuse, and related problem behaviors.
Projects of the Rutgers Social-Emotional Learning Lab focus on students and their school, family, and community environments.
Important Links and References:
Sandra Simkin
Clinical Associate Professor
Professor Simkins created and co-directs the Rutgers Children's Justice Clinic, the first clinic at the law school to focus on children. She is a national trainer on the issue of girls in the juvenile justice system and is involved in conditions of confinement reform. Prior to joining the Rutgers faculty in 2006, she spent 15 years working in criminal and juvenile defense. She served as assistant chief of the Juvenile Unit at the Defender Association of Philadelphia, supervising and training a staff of 40, including 23 lawyers, to represent children in the juvenile justice system. Professor Simkins also was involved in wide range of national and statewide policy reform for children.
In 2009, she was selected as "Lawyering Professor of the Year" and in 2007 she received the "New Professor of the Year" award, both at the Rutgers School of Law–Camden. In 2008, she was selected by the MacArthur Foundation to participate in the Models for Change Juvenile Indigent Defense Action Network. Since creating the Children's Justice Clinic, Professor Simkins has been appointed to several New Jersey committees, including the Supreme Court Committee on Women in the Courts, the Camden Safer Cities Initiative, and Camden County's Steering Committee for the Annie E. Casey Foundation's Juvenile Detention Alternative Initiative.
She also co-directs the Northeast Region Juvenile Defender Center, a subsidiary of the National Juvenile Defender Center, where she provides consultation and training to child advocates in Delaware, New Jersey, New York, and Pennsylvania. She has championed the creation of effective statewide coalitions and led fundraising initiatives for program development. Her various fundraising efforts have created a specialized mental health and special education attorney, and a statewide training program for juvenile defenders in the state of Pennsylvania. She was selected by Harvard Business School's Social Enterprise Philadelphia Club in 2005 to participate in advanced non-profit management training. In 2004, she was chosen by the MacArthur Foundation to partner with the Foundation's Juvenile Justice Aftercare Initiative in Pennsylvania, and was being recognized in The Philadelphia Lawyer for providing strong advocacy for children at each stage of juvenile court involvement. In 2002, she was the recipient of the American Bar Association's Award for Outstanding Representation of Children. Professor Simkins has taught the Criminal Defense Clinic at the University of Pennsylvania Law School and Juvenile Law at the Temple University Beasley School of Law.
http://www.philly.com/philly/blogs/what_happened/81958122.html
http://rutgerspress.rutgers.edu/acatalog/When_Kids_Get_Arrested.html