Jeff Snyder, Assistant Professor of Educational Studies, is a historian of education who studies the twentieth-century United States.
A Carleton alumnus, Professor Snyder majored in Psychology and concentrated in Educational Studies. He holds an EdM in Learning and Teaching from the Harvard Graduate School of Education and a PhD in the History of Education from New York University.
Before pursuing graduate studies, Professor Snyder taught English to Speakers of Other Languages to students of all ages and ability levels in the Czech Republic, France, China, India, Nepal and the United States. He teaches the following courses at Carleton: Introduction to Educational Studies (EDUC 110), The History of American School Reform (EDUC 245), Fixing Schools (EDUC 250), Multicultural Education (EDUC 338) and a new Argument & Inquiry seminar called Will This Be On the Test? Standardized Testing and American Education (EDUC 100).
Professor Snyder's work explores the intersections between the history of education and broader trends in U.S. cultural and intellectual history. His research interests include African American education during the Jim Crow era; radical and experimental education in the 1960s and 1970s; and standardized testing, from the turn of the twentieth-century to today. His articles, essays and book reviews have appeared in academic journals such as the Journal of African American History, History of Education Quarterly and Teachers College Record as well as newspapers and magazines such as Boston Review, the Chronicle of Higher Education and the New Republic. He is completing a book called Making Black History: Race, Culture and the Color Line in the Age of Jim Crow, under contract with the University of Georgia Press.