Social Policy & Practice Teaching Awards	Print Issue
April 19, 2011, Volume 57, No. 30

Excellence in Teaching Award: Standing Faculty

Damon Freeman is the recipient of the 2011 Excellence in Teaching Award, Standing Faculty, School of Social Policy & Practice. Dr. Freeman is an assistant professor at SP2. He earned bachelor’s and master’s degrees in history from Morgan State University in Baltimore, a law degree from the University of Maryland School of Law, and a PhD in African American history from Indiana University. He has taught courses on American Racism and Social Work Practice, Understanding Social Change, the Courts and Social Policy, and Critical Race Theory.

Dr. Freeman is currently finishing a book manuscript entitled Not So Simple Justice: Kenneth B. Clark and the Dilemma of Race and Power. The book is an intellectual biography of Clark’s ideas and how they apply to issues such as racial identity, school desegregation, antipoverty programs, and the educational achievement gap. His new research projects include a community history of Berman v. Parker, a 1954 US Supreme Court decision that allowed the use of urban renewal to forcibly move 7,500 African American families in Southwest Washington, DC, and a broader study using oral history and archival research methods of how the civil rights and Black Power movements influenced social work.

Excellence in Teaching Award: Part-time Faculty: (awarded posthumously)

Joseph McBride is the recipient of the 2011 Excellence in Teaching Award, Part-time Faculty, School of Social Policy & Practice. Mr. McBride was a lecturer in the School from 1998 until his death in November (Almanac November 16, 2010). In addition to teaching at SP2, Mr. McBride held a private practice in Lawrenceville, NJ, where he specialized in family therapy, death and dying and bereavement, coping with chronic illness and behavior problems in children. He consulted with Compassionate Friends, Pennsylvania SIDS Foundation, the US Department of Justice, Office for Victims of Crime, Victims of Pan Am 103 and many other schools and organizations. He also worked on both the landmark NIH Diabetes Control and Complications Trial and the Diabetes Prevention Trial. Mr. McBride was the former chief social worker and the director of social work training at the Philadelphia Child Guidance Center and the associate director of the Diabetes Center for Children at Children’s Hospital.

This spring, Mr. McBride’s family is organizing a bike ride to honor and celebrate his life and work.  The Ride for McBride will be held on June 10, 2011 and proceeds from the event will go to the Joseph McBride Memorial Prize at the University of Pennsylvania School of Social Policy & Practice. The ride, which will include 10, 25, and 50 mile routes, will begin and end at Tall Cedars Grove in Hamilton, NJ, with a picnic following the completion of the ride.

For more information about the ride, go to: http://rideformcbride.wordpress.com/. To join the ride mailing list, email: ridemcbridemailinglist+subscribe@googlegroups.com