Description:

International Women's Day with guest speaker Teresa Wasonga.

Teresa Wasonga is a Distinguished Engagement Professor of Educational Leadership at Northern Illinois University. She is a Fulbright Scholar (Kenya) and US Ambassador’s Distinguished Scholar (Ethiopia). She is also the founder of an all-girls secondary school in Kenya – “Built for the richest, open to the poorest.” She received her doctorate in Educational Leadership and Policy from University of Missouri, Columbia, and has taught at NIU for 20 years. Her research seeks to explain the role of school leadership in student achievement, and capacity building to enhance outcomes for all students, with specific focus on girls and the underserved. Outcomes of her research in Tanzania, Kenya, Ethiopia and the USA continue to inform her practices.  

In the last ten years, she has collaborated with national and international colleagues in two major research projects: 1) Voices from the field, a University Council for Educational Administration (UCEA) Project on Educational Leadership; and 2) International Successful School Principals Project (ISSPP), an international study of successful school leadership across continents. Through the Fulbright Scholars Program, she spent a year working as visiting professor at The University of Eastern Africa-Baraton, Eldoret – Kenya and The Institute for Educational Development-East Africa, Aga Khan University in Dar es Salaam – Tanzania. Most recently, she spent a year in Ethiopia working with faculty at University of Gondar to develop a PhD program in Educational Leadership.