Pamela Cytrynbaum

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Pamela Cytrynbaum teaches writing and multimedia storytelling at Northwestern University's Medill School of Journalism. At Brandeis University she taught in American Studies, served as associate director of the Schuster Institute for Investigative Journalism and director of the Justice Brandeis Innocence Project. She taught courses in writing and in New Media Communications in the English Department at Oregon State University. She writes for NBC Universal in Woman on the Verge and is a former staff writer for The Chicago Tribune and The (New Orleans) Times-Picayune. Her writing has also appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, Chicago Parent and The Oregonian.


Pages authored by Pamela Cytrynbaum

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Sandy Hook Started a Conversation, Now What? We are teachers and problem solvers. We are learners. What can we learn from this, we ask. We think ahead, look for the lesson in every situation,...
Students Get Real Insight Into Abilities Growing up, I remember the children in “special ed” seemed to live in an alternate universe within our school. Regardless of the distinctions in...
Two Worlds Can Become One Universe Okay, so we’re all still here. That’s what I want us to remember following the presidential election. There’s been so much talk of the Big Divide,...
Facebook is My Classroom, Too As teachers, we hear almost daily that we “must meet the students where they are.” It is a core tenant, a sacred truth offered as a key to...
Bullying is Not a Team Sport We are ending this school year mid-sentence in an ongoing conversation about what it means to live together in a learning community and treat each...
Hundreds of Offenses Go Unchecked We are all still thinking, talking, teaching and grieving about the shooting death of Trayvon Martin, the 17-year-old in Florida, wearing that...
The Case of the Missing Women I held up the front page of our college newspaper and asked my first-year journalism students if any questions came to mind as they looked at the...
Saving the Lives of Our LGBT Students L-R: Carl Walker Hoover, Eric Mohat, Jaheem Hererra middle: Justin Aaberg, Raymond Chase, Seth Walsh bottom: Tyler Clementi, Asher Brown, Billy...
Students Use Classroom to Inspire Others Some of my favorite teaching moments are when I can shut up and let students teach each other. This magic happened recently when a group of high...
Giving the Gift of a College Education One of the most powerful gifts we can give our children—for the future of our nation—is a college education. It may, in fact, be the most powerful...
Becoming the Minority Offers New Insight Have you ever been the only (fill in category) person in the room? Race, class, gender, age, body type, marital status—any number of identifiers can...
Students Break Out of Fixed-Race Box My journalism students were brainstorming topics for their final story projects. I urged them to come up with compelling ideas that relate to their...
Turning Headlines into Impromptu Lessons The explosion of news coverage over the controversial execution of Troy Davis in Georgia recently is a reminder that our students learn powerful...
Public School Integration Still ‘Best Goal’ When my daughter pulls hard on the heavy glass doors of the Martin Luther King Jr. Laboratory School and races upstairs into her fifth-grade...
Race Talk When Diversity Equals One It happens in every class. We’re discussing a text, a publication, a current event, a poem. The content doesn’t matter. It’s the phrase that counts...