The Sadie Tanner Mossell Alexander University of Pennsylvania Partnership School will be the stage for Bill Cosby's next show.
This Thursday, the acclaimed actor-comedian will speak to students, faculty and staff members in the teacher education program of Penn's Graduate School of Education. Teachers and administrators from the Sadie Alexander school and Penn's three partnership schools in West Philadelphia -- Henry C. Lea, William C. Bryant and Alexander Wilson elementary schools -- will also be in attendance.
The discussion will center on "the role teachers play in shaping the lives of young people," according to GSE spokeswoman Nancy Brokaw.
Cosby will also speak the following day at the Palestra as part of the Penn Relays School Days program, an annual event that the University has hosted for the past four years. Cosby plans to address a wide range of topics, including talking to kids about staying in school and making good decisions, as well as promoting the Penn Relays. The children will also receive discounted tickets to the event, which begins Thursday and concludes Saturday.
Cosby, a Philadelphia native and star of popular sitcom The Cosby Show, which aired from 1984 to 1992, began his college career at Temple University.
He earned a bachelor's degree in radio, television and film from Temple and earned his Ph.D. in education from the University of Massachusetts at Amherst in 1977.
Cosby has won a number of Emmys and People's Choice Awards, in addition to being awarded a Lifetime Achievement Award from the Kennedy Center in 1998 and being voted All-Time Favorite Performer in 1999 at the People's Choice Awards.
This will not be the first time Cosby has returned to Philadelphia and set foot on campus.
Cosby also spoke at the Penn Relays School Days program last spring, and in June of that year, he came to the Annenberg Center for the Performing Arts to speak at the event "A Tribute to Support Rising Stars in Education." One million dollars in proceeds from the benefit went toward establishing the Puente-Forchic Scholarship
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