Ken Tobin is Presidential Professor at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. In 2004 he was recognized by the National Science Foundation as a Distinguished Teaching Scholar and by the Association for Science Teacher Education as the Outstanding Science Teacher Educator of the Year. Prior to commencing a career as a teacher educator, Ken taught high school science and mathematics in Australia and was involved in curriculum design. His research focuses on the teaching and learning of science in urban schools, which involve mainly African American students living in conditions of poverty. A parallel program of research focuses on co-teaching as a way of learning to teach in urban high schools. Recently Ken edited a Handbook about Teaching and Learning Science (Praeger), Doing Educational Research (with Joe Kincheloe), and Improving Urban Science Education (with Rowhea Elmesky and Gale Seiler). In 2006 Ken, with Michael Roth, co-authored a third book on co-teaching and the uses of cogenerative dialogues—Teaching to Learn (SENSE Publishing). Toward the end of 2006 he edited (with Michael) another book entitled The Culture of Science Education: Its history in person (SENSE Publishing). With Michael, Ken is founding co-editor of Cultural Studies of Science Education.
Ken has supervised 40 doctoral degrees in science education at Florida State University, Curtin University of Technology, the University of Pennsylvania and the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. His former students hold positions in universities, centers of informal learning (e.g., museums), and schools in numerous countries that include the United States, Canada, Australia, Costs Rica, Colombia, Spain, Taiwan and Malaysia. He endeavors to maintain active collaborative links with many of them and exhorts that “divorce of a major professor is not a possibility.” In addition, Ken has collaborated actively with numerous post docs and junior colleagues over many years with the goal that they too will become mentors for new science educators—taking seriously the responsibility to expand the quality and quantity of the infrastructure to support science education.
