Graduate School of Education professor Janine Remillard will serve in a new associate dean position focusing on community and climate.
The Associate Dean for Community, Climate, and Doctoral Education role serves as a reinvention of GSE’s former Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion leadership position, according to GSE Dean Katharine Strunk. In a statement to The Daily Pennsylvanian, Remillard wrote that she seeks to foster a supportive environment and improve teaching quality in her new role.
“Community and climate are at the heart of everything we do at Penn GSE — from our research to our partnerships across Philadelphia and around the world,” Strunk wrote to the DP.
Strunk added that the GSE’s Committee on Community and Climate gathered feedback from the school and recommended that community, climate, and doctoral education needed to be elevated to the senior leadership level to “ensure the infrastructure to support it.”
Remillard wrote that the committee’s work made it evident that “fostering community is ongoing work” and “requires intentional stewardship.” She added that this was due to the “harmful effects of the rhetoric and policies” across the country, which Penn is “not immune to.”
In nearly 30 years at Penn, Remillard has held numerous senior leadership positions at GSE. From 2017 to 2023, she was the founding director of the Collaboratory for Teacher Education, which aims to “elevate the status of, respect for, and interest in the teaching profession.”
Remillard added that her role is deeply connected to GSE’s identity.
“As a school of education and a community of educators, GSE seeks to nurture an institutional culture where everyone feels a genuine sense of belonging — valued for who they are and what they bring to teaching, learning, and research,” Remillard wrote.
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She added that the office’s three areas of focus — community and climate, doctoral education, and teaching quality — should not be viewed as separate initiatives, but “emerge from a unified commitment to furthering education as a humane and democratic endeavor.”
Remillard wrote that her office plans to start by “gathering input from our community.”
“The initiatives we launch will present opportunities for faculty, staff, and students to come together around our core commitments and to play a role in accomplishing our mission,” she wrote.
