Barbara Henriques
Coordinator for School Partnerships and Visiting
Assistant Professor of Educational Studies
At some point during her career as an elementary school science
teacher, Barbara Henriques came to the conclusion that she would
have a much greater impact on the lives of students if she studied
the most effective ways for schools to operate and for teachers to
teach. Once she made up her mind to do just that, she began a
journey that has taken her from that classroom in Holyoke,
Massachusetts, to Yale Divinity School, to Bank Street College of
Education in New York City, back to Massachusetts to complete
advanced studies at UMass, to Skidmore College, across the globe to
Lithuania, and, finally, to Trinity College—where she arrived in
2000.
“I love teaching,” she says with a characteristic laugh. “But I also
have an almost inherent need to learn new things. When I was
studying at Yale Divinity, where I was both a student and an
administrative employee, my classmates and professors just assumed
that I was going to become an ordained minister of some kind. In
reality, I was there for the education; then I went back to
teaching.”
Along the way, Henriques has compiled an impressive array of
experiences and credentials. The daughter of Portuguese
immigrants—her late father ran a small moving business and her
mother worked as a sewing machine operator—she was the first person
in her family to attend college. Intending to major in business, she
enrolled in community college after working at a bank in Holyoke.
She soon switched to the sciences and transferred to UMass as a
microbiology major. “Then I had a summer internship where I worked
for the state department of public health,” she explains. “That
experience convinced me that I didn’t want to be microbiology major.
So I transferred to the school of education and got my degree in
elementary education with a major in science.”
While teaching at St. Thomas’s Day School in New Haven, Henriques
was selected to participate in the Fulbright Teacher Exchange
program. After traveling to England for a year, she was chosen as a
PIMMS (Project to Increase Mastery of Mathematics and Science)
Fellow. Associated with Wesleyan University, PIMMS is designed to
provide participants with new teaching strategies and to further
develop their leadership capabilities in order to extend the impact
of the program to fellow educators. Henriques says that it was while
studying at Bank Street College of Education a few years later that
she decided to pursue a doctoral degree. So she headed back to UMass,
where she earned an Ed.D. in 1997.
Among the accomplishments of which she is most proud, Henriques has
traveled to Lithuania numerous times over the past 12 years to
assist in the creation of an effective national education system
following the break-up of the Soviet Union. Working through the
A.P.P.L.E. organization (American Professional Partnership for
Lithuanian Education), and with funding from the Soros Foundation,
she has helped to establish 59 teacher centers across the country to
support educational reform. Says Henriques, “The Lithuanian Ministry
of Education recognizes how important a viable national education
system is to the future of the country, especially given its pending
membership in the European Union. It’s really a simple principle: we
can teach them techniques that will then be taught to other
teachers, and so on. In that way, education is contagious.”
It is a principle that Barbara Henriques applies at Trinity every
day.
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