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April 20, 2000
John B. Webb to Direct Program in Teacher Preparation
PRINCETON, N.J. -- John B. Webb has been appointed director of Princeton University's Program in Teacher Preparation, effective July 1. Webb will succeed Marue E. Walizer, who will retire from the directorship at the end of the June after 11 years.
Webb comes to Princeton with more than three decades of experience in classroom teaching at the secondary and postsecondary levels, in school administration, and in teacher preparation. Chair since 1986 of the Foreign Language Department at Hunter College High School, he serves concurrently as an adjunct associate professor in the Department of Curriculum and Teaching at Hunter College of the City University of New York. He also holds an appointment as an adjunct professor at Manhattanville College in Purchase, N.Y. From 1968 to 1986, he chaired the Department of Foreign Languages and English as a Second Language at East Ramapo Central School District in Spring Valley, N.Y.
Trained initially as a teacher of French at the French School of Middlebury College, Webb broadened his focus early in his career as a supervisor of English as a Second Language working with immigrant students and their families. In his doctoral studies at New York University, he worked in the broad area of cultural diversity in education, with special attention to the Haitian community in the greater New York metropolitan area. He won a three-year grant from the Fund for the Improvement of Postsecondary Education (FIPSE) for a collaborative project on heritage language learners in foreign language classrooms that brings together Hunter College, the American Council on the Teaching of Foreign Languages (ACTFL), and teachers and administrators from public schools in New York City. Now in its final year, the project will be the subject of a volume in the ACTFL Series 2000, Our Voices, Our Selves: Stories of Heritage Language Teachers and Their Students (Holt, Rinehart and Winston, November 2000), which Webb is co-editing.
As a member of the National Foreign Language Standards Task Force (1993-96), Webb helped conceptualize the five goal areas, and he wrote the sample progress indicators for two of those areas. He also served as a writer for the New York State Syllabus (1985) and as principal writer of the New York State Framework for Languages Other Than English for the New York State Education Department (1996). As president of the New York State Association of Foreign Language Teachers (1990), he worked with the State Education Department and school districts throughout the state to provide in-service opportunities for teachers. In the national secondary-postsecondary articulation project sponsored by the Modern Language Association, he has coordinated the articulation program between the Chicago campus of the University of Illinois and Harper High School in innercity Chicago. He has lectured and published widely on issues in foreign language education.
Webb earned his B.A. in French at the State University of New York at Albany in 1968, his M.A. at the French School of Middlebury College in 1972, and his Ed.D. at New York University in 1986.