U.S. and Non-U.S. Scholars

Fulbright New Century Scholars Program
Overview • Previous NCS Programs • NCS Scholar List • NCS Brochure • 2005-2006

Lesko, Nancy

• Professor
  
• Columbia University
  
• Teachers College
  
• United States

Dr, Lesko's recent international educational experiences has been as a Fulbright Scholar in South Africa and as a Visiting Professor at Teachers College-Tokyo Campus. Her current research focuses on how to think about curriculum in the context of socially catastrophic events, and she is trying to approach the topic from an international perspective. In addition to looking at South Africa's responses to HIV/AIDS and U.S. responses to 9/11, she is also intrigued with how contemporary Japanese pop culture, especially anime, recalls and philosophizes about the atomic bomb. She is also working on what "sexual citizenship" for youth might mean in contemporary South African contexts and in the U.S. where the 2004 election results were interpreted as a moral vote against gay rights and marriage.

In 2004, Dr. Lesko was named the inaugural Maxine Greene Professor at Teachers College, an honor that is made even greater by ongoing opportunities to work alongside Maxine Greene in her new NYC high school. Dr. Lesko's book, Act your age! A cultural construction of adolescence, won an outstanding book award from the Curriculum Studies Division of the American Educational Research Association in 2002.

Selected Publications

• Moletsane, R. & Lesko, N. (2004). Overcoming paralysis: AIDS education-and-activism. Agenda 60, 69-80.
  
• Coleman, A., Ehrenworth, M. & Lesko, N. (2004). Scout's Honor: Duty, citizenship and the homoerotic in the Boy Scouts of America. In M. L. Rasmussen, E. Rofes, & S. Talburt (Eds.), Youth and sexualities: Pleasure, subversion and insubordination in and out of schools (pp. 120-151). New York: Palgrave.
  
• Lesko, N. (2001). Act your age! A cultural construction of adolescence. New York & London: RoutledgeFalmer.
  
• Lesko, N. (Ed.). (2000). Masculinities at school. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.

This research project aims to enhance public dialogue about HIV/AIDS in university curricula and to thereby promote the development of an inclusive civil society. Democratic, public dialogue about dangerous or difficult topics is understood as central to modern civil societies, and the combined stigma of HIV/AIDS, taboos around sexuality, and the trauma of death and dying contribute to the exclusion of many citizens from South Africa's moral and social community. The expectations for university faculty to respond to the HIV/AIDS pandemic are urgent, yet the development of the expertise to do this-in both personal and curricular resources-is lagging. This research project creates individual and collective contexts for such curriculum discussions and development to occur.

University faculty are expected to develop curricula that are simultaneously attuned to psychological, emotional, and cultural aspects of students' lives as well as to broader social and political realities and that utilize and teach legitimate disciplinary knowledge (Berubé & Nelson, 1995; Moletsane & Lesko, 2004). These are large tasks. Several years ago, I wrote about some of the difficulties of developing approaches to multicultural teacher education that did not just ask students to parrot multicultural platitudes or adopt "anything goes" relativism (Lesko & Bloom, 1998; 2000). In that work and in current research on doctoral research training (Lesko et al., in preparation), I have concentrated on barriers to teaching and learning "dangerous" knowledge. This earlier work has convinced me that part of supporting democratic dialogue around HIV/AIDS involves helping university faculty engage with peers and students on social and civic dimensions of HIV/AIDS that take up conflicting ideas and beliefs about AIDS (Treichler, 1999).

The setting for this project is the University of KwaZulu-Natal (UKZN) in Durban, South Africa. KwaZulu-Natal is the most populous province and has the highest number of HIV/AIDS cases, which has earned it the label of "epicenter" of the epidemic in South Africa. This project is a research-and-development project with UKZN faculty in which existing teaching approaches to the social and civic aspects of HIV/AIDS are documented, analyzed as a typology, and presented in interdisciplinary faculty workshops for discussion, refinement, and extension. Because of the many competing perspectives on HIV/AIDS (for example, denialist, moral retribution for sinful behavior, a problem of "deviant" behavior, etc.), central to teaching about the social and civic aspects of HIV/AIDS is engaging with the conflicting interpretations of what AIDS is and what it means for individuals, groups, and society. The final aim of the project is to disseminate the various approaches to teaching about HIV/AIDS at UKZN and to other South African universities.