Boston College Athletics
Faculty Appreciation: Daphne Henry
March 11, 2021 | Boston College Athletics, #ForBoston Files
Strength and intelligence stamp one of BC's education professors.
Pittsburgh natives are taught from a young age to be as strong as steel. They live the character of the city and develop the necessary skills to overcome adversity, and they use their challenges and hurdles to help and influence those around them. They stitch the fiber of a region and bake it into its soul by living and breathing its blue-collar fabric.
It takes one conversation with Daphne Henry to understand what that means. As an assistant professor in Boston College's Lynch School of Education and Human Development, her classes are infused with her own experiences to reveal an experience for her students that touches their soul at the same adamantine level.
"I'm still relatively new as a professor," said the second-year educator, "but my research interests aren't just children's academic development. I'm interested in their social and behavioral development as well. A lot of my work focused on academic achievement and academic development but by looking at disparities related to socio-economic status, as well as race (and) ethnicity, and really thinking about how those two social positions intersect."
It's a curriculum built by her own personal experience growing up in Pittsburgh. An undergraduate history major at the University of Pittsburgh, she planned on using her passion to springboard a career in journalism and initially foresaw a career as, as she puts it, "the next Malcolm Gladwell." But her dreams of fighting for a role at a publication like the New Yorker suddenly swerved when her mother passed away.
It left Henry as the primary caretaker of her two younger brothers, and the surrogacy of parenting her siblings blended her interests with the world around her. She began reading to help inform her how to parent on the fly, and it led her into the topics surrounding child development. She investigated further knowing one of her brothers had developmental disabilities and immersed herself in the subject's real world applications.
It more specifically led her directly into her PhD work. She remained at the University of Pittsburgh and studied developmental psychology, and she achieved her doctorate in 2017 with a dissertation about the intersection of race and socioeconomic status in early family life. It capped years of study around class and race gaps while fully bridging her home life into her academic career.
"As an African-American, I came from a single parent household and I'm a first generation college student," she said. "School was always a source of pleasure, of respite, of self-esteem. I was also a keen reader, and I would read, before I ever received a graduate degree or did any of this type of work, about the so-called achievement gap, both in terms of economic status as well as race and ethnicity. In my own life, experiencing that and seeing how unequal those were in terms of school settings, I was initially motivated to try and understand what led to this phenomena."
It was on this foundation that she joined the faculty of Boston College in 2019. Since then, she's published in books and journals about the topic and advanced her own knowledge of why and how child development bonds with its surroundings. It constantly fuels her own passion and thirst for knowledge while spilling over into the classroom. Therein is the experience for her teaching that leaves an impact on her students.
"There's always a spark, something in their lives, that leads them to psychology, and I think that may be the same for other disciplines," Henry said. "There's usually something in their life history that sparks that initial interest. In general, it was kind of happenstance that these two different, important routes in my ultimate career choice intersected. I've been fortunate to be able to see and develop this interest and see it in a way that I can put it into my life.
"As a professor at Boston College, I really want to design (coursework) that aligns with what I think is really important," she said. "It's what I think are some of the critical issues in society and in education, and a lot of that deals with the role of social class and how that shapes children's family settings or communities settings. There are cultural aspects that children have access to, but it's also thinking in dealing in a direct way with the challenges and threats to our children's well-being as a result of things like racism, discrimination and prejudice that they may encounter. They're kind of the universal threats that children might be more disadvantaged or marginalized on experience, and having done the research, it greatly informs my work. I think it was natural to bring that perspective into the classroom with me."
It's how she's very much remained a down-to-earth person while expanding her entire horizons. She understands her students, especially those under stress and with time crunches in their lives, and she exhibits the empathy to help them grow and expand while exploring all facets of their lives. Her undergraduate and graduate work made her a Pitt Panther, but there's also a pride that comes with now being an Eagle, both inside and outside the classroom.
"I try to be receptive and aware of what's working and not working," she said. "When I've had a larger contingent of athletes, I ask myself how I can tailor what I'm going to teach some models or concepts. I want them to be thinking about family influences and how people can really be a positive direction and how there are disruptions in that trajectory. When we discussed a documentary on Aaron Hernandez, for example, the student athletes were able to relate, they were more active, raising their hands.
"From my perspective, students come in with a broad range of life experiences," she added, "and the extent that I can connect conceptual knowledge is by doing it in a way that's actually relevant to their life experiences and their interests. The other thing that I try to keep in mind, and not just with student athletes, but with BC students in general, is that this is a really busy group of students. I try to be mindful of that in general for all my students, and while I don't and can't change my expectations, I do try to be as flexible where I can be flexible."
It takes one conversation with Daphne Henry to understand what that means. As an assistant professor in Boston College's Lynch School of Education and Human Development, her classes are infused with her own experiences to reveal an experience for her students that touches their soul at the same adamantine level.
"I'm still relatively new as a professor," said the second-year educator, "but my research interests aren't just children's academic development. I'm interested in their social and behavioral development as well. A lot of my work focused on academic achievement and academic development but by looking at disparities related to socio-economic status, as well as race (and) ethnicity, and really thinking about how those two social positions intersect."
It's a curriculum built by her own personal experience growing up in Pittsburgh. An undergraduate history major at the University of Pittsburgh, she planned on using her passion to springboard a career in journalism and initially foresaw a career as, as she puts it, "the next Malcolm Gladwell." But her dreams of fighting for a role at a publication like the New Yorker suddenly swerved when her mother passed away.
It left Henry as the primary caretaker of her two younger brothers, and the surrogacy of parenting her siblings blended her interests with the world around her. She began reading to help inform her how to parent on the fly, and it led her into the topics surrounding child development. She investigated further knowing one of her brothers had developmental disabilities and immersed herself in the subject's real world applications.
It more specifically led her directly into her PhD work. She remained at the University of Pittsburgh and studied developmental psychology, and she achieved her doctorate in 2017 with a dissertation about the intersection of race and socioeconomic status in early family life. It capped years of study around class and race gaps while fully bridging her home life into her academic career.
"As an African-American, I came from a single parent household and I'm a first generation college student," she said. "School was always a source of pleasure, of respite, of self-esteem. I was also a keen reader, and I would read, before I ever received a graduate degree or did any of this type of work, about the so-called achievement gap, both in terms of economic status as well as race and ethnicity. In my own life, experiencing that and seeing how unequal those were in terms of school settings, I was initially motivated to try and understand what led to this phenomena."
It was on this foundation that she joined the faculty of Boston College in 2019. Since then, she's published in books and journals about the topic and advanced her own knowledge of why and how child development bonds with its surroundings. It constantly fuels her own passion and thirst for knowledge while spilling over into the classroom. Therein is the experience for her teaching that leaves an impact on her students.
"There's always a spark, something in their lives, that leads them to psychology, and I think that may be the same for other disciplines," Henry said. "There's usually something in their life history that sparks that initial interest. In general, it was kind of happenstance that these two different, important routes in my ultimate career choice intersected. I've been fortunate to be able to see and develop this interest and see it in a way that I can put it into my life.
"As a professor at Boston College, I really want to design (coursework) that aligns with what I think is really important," she said. "It's what I think are some of the critical issues in society and in education, and a lot of that deals with the role of social class and how that shapes children's family settings or communities settings. There are cultural aspects that children have access to, but it's also thinking in dealing in a direct way with the challenges and threats to our children's well-being as a result of things like racism, discrimination and prejudice that they may encounter. They're kind of the universal threats that children might be more disadvantaged or marginalized on experience, and having done the research, it greatly informs my work. I think it was natural to bring that perspective into the classroom with me."
It's how she's very much remained a down-to-earth person while expanding her entire horizons. She understands her students, especially those under stress and with time crunches in their lives, and she exhibits the empathy to help them grow and expand while exploring all facets of their lives. Her undergraduate and graduate work made her a Pitt Panther, but there's also a pride that comes with now being an Eagle, both inside and outside the classroom.
"I try to be receptive and aware of what's working and not working," she said. "When I've had a larger contingent of athletes, I ask myself how I can tailor what I'm going to teach some models or concepts. I want them to be thinking about family influences and how people can really be a positive direction and how there are disruptions in that trajectory. When we discussed a documentary on Aaron Hernandez, for example, the student athletes were able to relate, they were more active, raising their hands.
"From my perspective, students come in with a broad range of life experiences," she added, "and the extent that I can connect conceptual knowledge is by doing it in a way that's actually relevant to their life experiences and their interests. The other thing that I try to keep in mind, and not just with student athletes, but with BC students in general, is that this is a really busy group of students. I try to be mindful of that in general for all my students, and while I don't and can't change my expectations, I do try to be as flexible where I can be flexible."
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