Introduction .
Patricia Phelan, Ph.D.
.
Ann Locke Davidson,
Ph.D. .
Nancy Altenburg, RN, BSN, CSN .
Kristin Kajer-Cline, M.A.
.
Jennifer Pruyn Heckman, PhD, MACP
.
Introduction
Drs. Phelan and Davidson opened their firm, Educational Connections in
2000 in Portland, Oregon. Together they bring a wealth of experience to
their roles as educational consultants. Their backgrounds include
therapeutic work with children, adolescents and families, research on
at-risk youth and mental health issues of children and adolescents,
program assessment and evaluation, curriculum development, teaching, and
teacher education.
Particularly relevant and important to their work as educational
consultants, Drs. Phelan and Davidson endeavor to keep up-to-date on the
latest research related to learning differences, mental health issues,
and chemical dependency, as well as research concerned with “best
practices” in the fields of education and treatment.
Drs. Phelan and Davidson regularly give presentations to schools,
community organizations, mental health clinics, and therapeutic and
psychiatric facilities as well as to professional organizations
throughout the country.
Patricia Phelan, Ph.D.
Dr. Phelan brings a
twenty-seven year history of professional experience with children,
youth, and families to her current role as an educational consultant.
Her professional background includes work as a therapist with at-risk
youth and their families, a group facilitator with adolescents
experiencing trauma, drug and alcohol issues and grief and loss, a
professor researching and teaching in the areas of mental health and
at-risk youth, and a member of the Stanford Evaluation Consortium
focusing on the design and evaluation of specialty programs for
adolescents.
Born in Portland, Oregon, Dr. Phelan attended Portland Public Schools
and earned her B.S. Degree in Education at Oregon State University. In
1973, she joined the Urban/Rural School Development Program at Stanford
University where she consulted with and provided assistance to programs
and schools serving low-income, ethnically diverse children and families
throughout the United States. Subsequently she obtained her Masters
Degree in Anthropology (1978) and her Ph.D. in Anthropology of Education
(1981) at Stanford University. Dr. Phelan's dissertation involved
research in one of the first programs in the country to work with incest
victims and their families. In addition to her research agenda, she
worked as a therapist for nearly six years with women incest survivors,
adolescent victims and father incest perpetrators and their wives.
Dr. Phelan's interests in education and mental health led to her
appointment as a faculty member in the Medical Anthropology Program at
the University of California, San Francisco (1982-1988) where her
research continued to focus on mental health issues of children and
adolescents. She also held an appointment as an adjunct faculty member
at Stanford University. From 1989-1992, as a Senior Research Scholar in
the School of Education, Stanford University, she continued her research
on the relationship between adolescent's lives and contexts and their
involvement in school. During this time she spent hundreds of hours in
high schools in California to understand, from the perspective of youth,
those things that impact students' connection with schools and learning
as well as the kinds of pressures and problems that youth face. This
work resulted in the publication of numerous articles, books chapters
and two books co-authored with Dr. Ann Davidson, Renegotiating Cultural
Diversity in American Schools and Adolescents' Worlds: Negotiating
Family, Peers, and School.
In 1992, Dr. Phelan joined the faculty as a Professor at the University
of Washington where she helped to develop a Masters Degree Program for
teachers and designed an academic concentration on at-risk children and
youth. Her teaching included such courses as Psychosocial Problems of
Youth, Seeing Promise in At-Risk Youth, and Social Contexts of Youth.
For three years Dr. Phelan’s research was supported by a Spencer
Foundation Grant to study programs, policies, and practices that support
students’ social, emotional, and academic well-being. During this time
she was also awarded a Fulbright Scholarship and was one of six invited
senior teaching and research scholars from the United States to
Australia where she served on the faculty at the University of
Launceston, Tasmania. During her ten years at the University of
Washington, Dr. Phelan continued her involvement in schools as a
teaching assistant in a fifth grade classroom, a reading group
facilitator in a sixth grade classroom, a member of the Nathan Hale Teen
Health Clinic Advisory Board, and as a facilitator for grief and loss
groups and drug and alcohol groups for high school students.
Dr. Phelan is an active member of the Independent Educational
Consultants Association, regularly attends meetings of the National
Association of Therapeutic Schools and Programs. She is the mother of a
22 year old son.
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Ann Locke Davidson, Ph.D.
Ann Locke Davidson
completed her Ph.D. in Education and M.S. in Anthropology at Stanford
University in 1992. While at Stanford she was a member of the Stanford
Evaluation Consortium specializing in the assessment of programs for
at-risk youth. Her interests and experience, spanning a period of 20
years, include work as a research scholar concerned with programs and
environments that address the social, emotional and academic needs of
struggling youth, program design and evaluation, teaching at-risk
adolescents and adults, and teacher development and training. Dr.
Davidson’s work over the last 20 years has involved literally hundreds
of hours interacting directly with at-risk adolescent and adult learners
as well as direct involvement with school and program environments
designed to affect these populations. Building on this background and
experience, Dr. Davidson founded Educational Connections with Patricia
Phelan in 2000.
Dr. Davidson is the author of four books and numerous articles and book
chapters. Her books Making and Molding Identity in Schools, Adolescents’
Worlds (with Dr. Patricia Phelan) and Renegotiating Cultural Diversity
in American Schools (with Dr. Patricia Phelan) result from her work as a
Senior Research Scholar at the University of Washington and Ph.D.
candidate at Stanford University. Her research, supported by two major
Spencer Foundation grants, focused specifically on psychosocial and
environmental pressures and problems that impact students’ ability to
engage optimally in educational environments. She also worked to
identify school and classroom characteristics that exacerbate or
ameliorate the problems that youth face, and worked directly in schools
and within communities to understand how innovative programs designed to
address students’ emotional, social and mental health issues affect
their school involvement and success. As part of this work, she trained
graduate students to conduct specialized interviews with youth about
sensitive areas of their lives. In addition, she participated in a year
long, large-scale evaluation of a community based program for at-risk
high school youth, many of whom were involved with the juvenile justice
system.
In addition to her role as a researcher, Dr. Davidson participated in
numerous program design and evaluation efforts while on the faculty at
the University of Pittsburgh and as a senior member of a Harvard
University research team. With the Harvard team, she helped develop
portfolio assessment practices for at-risk students. The emphasis of
this project was on creating classroom practices that engage students
who traditionally do not perform well on standardized tests. At the
University of Pittsburgh, she helped develop and evaluate an innovative
science curriculum designed to respond specifically to middle school
children's developmental needs. In addition, she was a lead member of a
National Science Foundation study of Internet environments and their
impact on public school students’ academic and social experiences. The
results of this study culminated in her fourth book, Bringing the
Internet to School: Lessons from an Urban District.
Dr. Davidson also has a wealth of experience as a teacher. She began her
career in education teaching English to adult immigrant students. As a
teacher in the People’s Republic of China, she helped prospective
Chinese teachers learn to teach English composition and literature. As a
faculty member at the University of Pittsburgh, she headed a team
working with seasoned middle school teachers to implement alternative
assessment practices. At part of the Stanford University Teacher
Education Program, she supervised prospective high school teachers,
assisting educators with curriculum planning, pedagogical techniques,
and classroom interaction methods. Finally, she has worked as an art
literacy teacher and as a teaching assistant in various public and
private elementary school classrooms.
Dr. Davidson is the mother of two school-aged boys. She is a member of
both the Independent Educational Consultants Association and the
American Educational Research Association. Davidson’s B.A. degree is
also from Stanford, where she graduated with distinction and was elected
to the Phi Beta Kappa society. She is a former All-American long
distance runner, placing sixth among American runners at the NCAA
Division I 10,000 meter championships and participating on the second
place team at the NCAA Division I Cross-Country Championships. She was
raised in Boulder, Colorado and Anchorage, Alaska, where she attended
public schools.
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Nancy Altenburg, RN, BSN, CSN
Nancy brings more than 20 years of
experience working with mental health, educational, and physical health issues
to her work with Educational Connections.
For the past eight years, she has worked closely with families and
students (ages 5-21) as a school nurse for the Beaverton School District. In collaboration with mental health
professionals, one of Nancy’s roles has been to understand the impact of
students’ emotional and behavioral issues on their academic functioning. Further, she has designed individual
programs to enable students to succeed in mainstream school and classroom
settings. And finally, she has worked
to identify appropriate psychological and medical resources and to train
teachers to work with medically, emotionally, and psychologically compromised
students in classroom settings.
Having
served as a member of the Special Education team at a variety of Beaverton
schools, Nancy also has extensive knowledge of the special education referral,
evaluation and placement process. In
this capacity she has participated in the evaluation process to determine
factors impacting students’ capacity to function in school and she has
collaborated with other professionals to determine the level and types of
services students need.
Prior
to becoming a nurse, Nancy worked as a vocational rehabilitation counselor for
chronically mentally disabled teens and young adults for two years. As a counselor she served as the primary
therapist for young people with a variety of severe mental health diagnoses
including schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, depression, anxiety as well as
chemical dependency.
Nancy has personally experienced the
impact of substance abuse on family functioning. Both of her parents were life-long alcoholics and her 18 year-old
son is in recovery. As a mother, she
understands well the process of making the decision to send a child to a
therapeutic wilderness program as well as a therapeutic boarding school
specializing in addiction.
Nancy
is a native Oregonian born in Eugene and raised in Portland and Madras. She graduated with honors from Southern
Oregon University in 1978 and received her BS degree in Nursing from Oregon
Health Sciences University in 1987 where she graduated with honors. She also received the Elnora Thompson Award
for Outstanding Undergraduate Student Leadership. During the next 12 years, Nancy was a hospital staff nurse for
OHSU in oncology, cardiology, and general medicine. She then assisted in the opening of the OHSU Primary Health Care
Clinic in Beaverton, where she established the triage phone system and was one
of the primary advice nurses.
Nancy has been happily married to
her husband Grant for 25 years and they have three children ranging in age from
15-20. She loves animals and hiking in
the Arboretum with her husband and their big dog, Lily. Nancy’s family also includes two cats and
more bird feeders than she can count.
She enjoys reading, writing, gardening, being outdoors, and riding
horses. Nancy and her family love to
travel and are looking forward to trips near and far in the future.
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Kristin Kajer-Cline, M.A.
Kristin Kajer-Cline’s
work for the past 10 years has focused on understanding and assisting
children, adolescents, and adults struggling with emotional, social,
behavioral, learning or mental health challenges. Having earned her M.A.
in Education with a focus on At-Risk Youth from the University of
Washington, Kristin has developed three key areas of expertise and
experience: assessment of individual social, emotional and academic
needs, evaluation of academic and treatment systems and direct
intervention and communication with adolescents and their families.
Prior to her work with Educational Connections, Kristin was integrally
involved in a number of research projects concerned with assessing the
social, emotional and academic needs of individuals. Most recently she
worked collaboratively to assess the impact that mental health and
substance abuse problems play in people’s lives. As part of this project
she conducted extensive interviews with individuals struggling with
severe chemical dependency and mental health issues and documented how
these challenges impact physical and emotional health, education,
employment, legal status and family relationships. In another project at
the University of Washington, Kristin assessed the needs and progress of
high-risk students by conducting interviews, ascertaining students’
overall emotional needs, and determining their predisposition for
suicide. In a third study, Kristin examined how students' mental health
and substance abuse issues impact their school involvement and academic
success. Finally, she facilitated parent and community focus groups with
Southeast Asian parents in order to understand parenting styles and thus
determine the most appropriate educational services for these families.
Secondly, Kristin has been involved in the research and evaluation of
academic and treatment systems. For example, she worked collaboratively
on a research team concerned with understanding the degree to which the
Oregon Health Plan adequately serves individuals in need of substance
abuse or mental health treatment and how monetary and service cuts
impact quality of care. In another study, Kristin evaluated the extent
to which school-based teen health centers serve students' mental health
and emotional needs and considered the ways in which other school
supports are frequently inadequate in addressing these issues. In both
of these studies, Kristin conducted in-depth interviews with a variety
of individuals including students, parents, teachers, counselors,
principals and teen health center staffs in order to understand program
strengths and weaknesses.
Finally, Kristin has worked directly with struggling youth and their
families providing interventions, support, and informed recommendations.
She has served as a liaison and advocate in schools and in mental health
programs. For example, as part of the Redirecting At-Risk Youth Research
Project, Kristin conducted interviews with struggling adolescents to
determine suicide risk, often obtaining first-time disclosures of
potentially harmful intentions and thoughts. At the close of each
therapeutic interview she provided direct feedback and helped students
to identify and utilize appropriate coping skills. Further, she
facilitated communication between students and their parents helping
students to disclose the pressures and problems they faced as well as
harmful thoughts and actions. Finally, she worked to connect these
previously isolated students with school counselors, teachers, school
administrators, and other appropriate resources. As Skills Training
Facilitator within this same project, Kristin taught coping and support
skills to suicide vulnerable adolescents and documented improved student
progress based on extensive professional team evaluations.
Prior to discovering her passion for understanding and working with
struggling students and their families, Kristin taught French to middle
and high school students in Washington. She also spent two years with
the U.S. Peace Corps, teaching English as a foreign language to high
school students in Guinea, West Africa. Though most of her upbringing
and education took place in Minnesota, she was born in Kenya and
attended private, public, international and boarding schools in England,
Sri Lanka, India and France. Kristin is the mother of a 10 year-old
daughter and 8 year-old son. Currently, she is a provisional member of
the Independent Educational Consultants Association.
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Jennifer Pruyn
Heckman, PhD, MACP
Jennifer Heckman has a
long history of working in the areas of education and mental health,
with particular emphases on children, families, and family-systems. Upon
completing her Bachelor’s degree in Education from the University of
Colorado in 1977, Dr. Heckman returned to her home in Hawaii to work
with the local Easter Seal Society’s Residential Services program. This
program, developed to serve multiply handicapped children who were
unable to live in their parents’ home, included group and foster
“teaching home” placements. While with Residential Services, Dr. Heckman
worked initially as a group home counselor and then became responsible
for providing psychosocial and educational support for the foster
teaching home parents; during her last year and a half with Residential
Services, Dr. Heckman served as the Director for the program.
Desiring to further her
work with children and families, in 1980, Dr. Heckman returned to the
mainland to pursue graduate work in Education at Stanford University.
She subsequently completed her Masters and Doctoral degrees in
Educational Administration and Policy Analysis from Stanford in 1981 and
1987, respectively. While at Stanford, Dr. Heckman worked as a research
assistant and treatment group leader for a study on the effectiveness of
cognitive-behavioral coping strategies for children, ages 9-12, with
recently divorced parents. Dr. Heckman also worked on studies of school
effectiveness and at-risk adolescents and developed a violence
prevention curriculum for use with at-risk families and management
training materials for school administrators. Immediately following the
completion of her Doctoral dissertation, Dr. Heckman served as a Senior
Research Associate for the Department of Psychiatry in Stanford
University’s Medical School. Following her work with the medical school,
Dr. Heckman worked with a non-profit research and technical assistance
organization in Los Altos, California where she conducted program
evaluations of educational programs designed to assist at-risk
adolescents.
Dr. Heckman’s research
interests have always been coupled with her interests in clinical work.
To further her clinical training and experience, Dr. Heckman pursued
additional graduate work at the Institute of Transpersonal Psychology (ITP)
in Palo Alto, California and received her Masters degree in Counseling
Psychology from ITP in 1995. As a part of her training, Dr. Heckman
provided therapy for children, families, and adults. Particular areas of
focus included relationship and family system issues, adolescent
acting-out behaviors, and coping with life threatening illnesses and
grief.
In 1997, Dr. Heckman
joined ETR Associates in Scotts Valley, California as a Senior Research
Associate and worked as the Principal Investigator for the evaluations
of two federally-funded San Joaquin County (California) substance abuse
treatment programs for women. In 1998, Dr. Heckman began her work as a
Principal Investigator for the federally-funded Women, Co-occurring
Disorders, and Violence Study (WCDVS). This study was designed to assess
the effectiveness of integrated services for women with mental health
and substance abuse disorders who also had interpersonal trauma
histories (http://www.prainc.com/wcdvs/publications/default.asp).
From 1998 through March 2004, Dr. Heckman provided conceptual input and
oversight, monitoring, supervision, and leadership to the development,
implementation, and analysis of this study.
Over the final year of the WCDVS, Dr. Heckman, along with the other
WCDVS Principal Investigators and three women with lived experiences of
substance abuse, mental health problems, and trauma histories who had
worked with the study, formed the National Trauma Consortium (NTC) (http://www.nationaltraumaconsortium.org/).
The NTC’s mission is to disseminate knowledge gained from the WCDVS
through trainings, technical assistance, and products, and to further
research on the inter-relationships between trauma, substance abuse, and
mental health disorders as well as research on effective service models
for assisting adolescents and adults who have been impacted by these
issues.
Dr. Heckman has co-authored several articles presenting the findings
from the WCDVS, including an article on trauma survivors’ spiritual
coping practices. Dr. Heckman was also a lead author on a monograph,
It’s My Time to Live: Journeys to Healing and Recovery, based on
qualitative case study data collected from WCDVS women. It’s My Time to
Live illustrates how hope, meaning, and caring connections with family
members and service providers help to further healing and recovery.
Dr. Heckman was raised in Honolulu, Hawaii where she attended Punahou
School. Dr. Heckman is a swimmer, an equestrian, and, once upon a time,
was a long distance runner. Dr. Heckman has served as a peer reviewer
for the Journal of Behavioral Health Services and Research and has been
a member of the American and California Associations of Marriage and
Family Therapists, the American Public Health Association, and the
American Educational Research Association. Dr. Heckman has two
school-aged daughters.
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