Dr. Herb Childress, Boston Architectural College
Herb Childress is the Dean of Research and Assessment at the Boston Architectural College, a professional school with undergraduate and master’s degrees in several spatial design disciplines. He came to the BAC in 2006 as their Director of Liberal Education, and was made Dean in 2009, where he has helped to coordinate a whole-College curricular reform and developed important educational assessment tools that make use of existing data to provide significant pedagogical direction. Prior to the BAC, he was a Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow in the University Writing Program at Duke University, where he taught first-year writing and led two major assessment projects of the effectiveness of the writing curriculum. He has also worked in professional design practice, and as a researcher in K-12 school reform with the Bay Area Coalition for Equitable Schools.
Since 2003, he has been a leader with the Council on Undergraduate Research. He was a member of the Executive Board for four years, helped to organize the 2008, 2010, and 2012 national conferences, was part of the negotiating and planning team for the merger of CUR and NCUR (the National Conferences on Undergraduate Research, a student conference of 2500 undergraduate researchers), and has facilitated at eight CUR professional development workshops. He has worked as a consultant to colleges on educational assessment, on research and proposal writing for early-career faculty, on using the local environment as a curricular focus, and on facilities master planning and capital-campaign fundraising. He and his wife Nora Rubinstein, an environmental psychologist, operate a consulting company called Place/Space Associates, which focuses on community development, qualitative research, and local-learning curricula.
He is committed to an interdisciplinary scholarship, and has published in architecture, adolescence, cultural geography, education, and qualitative research ethics. His first book, Landscapes of Betrayal, Landscapes of Joy, shows the ways in which American suburban physical environments of home, school and community hinder the social, emotional and educational growth of teenagers. His second book, The House of Ennui, is a particular examination of one 22-year old and the ways in which he was attempting to craft a satisfying adult life without models of adult living that he found appealing and trustworthy. Through that examination, he raised important and difficult questions about whether contemporary adult life is worth emulation at all