Joseph W. Check, Ph.D. is Associate Professor and Chair of the Department of Educational Leadership in the Graduate College of Education, University of Massachusetts, Boston. He completed his B.A. at Boston College and his M.A. and Ph.D. in English at Tufts University. His prior publications include Politics, Language, and Culture: A Critical Look at Urban School Reform (Praeger, 2002), co-editorship of Writing Within School Reform, a monograph series of the Annenberg Institute for School Reform at Brown University, and book chapters and articles on literacy, practitioner inquiry, and urban school reform. He has supervised dissertations in school reform, professional development, literacy,… home/school interactions, and special education. He has served as Principal or Co-Principal Investigator for numerous grant-funded professional development programs including a 4-year, $4M practitioner inquiry project in 14 urban school districts, funded by the DeWitt-Wallace Reader's Digest Foundation. He is an experienced classroom instructor in master's and doctoral level research courses.
Russell K. Schutt (PhD, MA, BA, University of Illinois at Chicago; postdoctoral fellow in the Sociology of Social Control Training Program at Yale University) is professor and chair of sociology at the University of Massachusetts Boston and lecturer on sociology in the Department of Psychiatry at the Harvard Medical School. In addition to Investigating the Social World: The Process and Practice of Research, now in its Eighth Edition , and its co-authored adaptations for the disciplines of social work, criminal justice, psychology, and education, his books include Homelessness, Housing, and Mental Illness, Social Neuroscience: Brain, Mind, and Society (co-edited), and Organization in a… Changing Environment . His scholarship focuses on the bidirectional relationship between individuals and their social environment, its consequences for organizational change, cognitive functioning, and individual behavior, and its predictors in individual orientations and community contexts. His related articles have been published in journals ranging from the American Journal of Sociology, Social Problems, Law and Society Review, and the Journal of Offender Rehabilitation to the Journal of Community Health, Journal of Community Psychology, Schizophrenia Bulletin, Women and Health, Evaluation & Program Planning, and the Journal of Sociology and Social Welfare . His major research projects have been funded by the Veterans Health Administration, the National Cancer Institute, the Massachusetts Department of Public Health, the National Institute of Mental Health, the John E. Fetzer Institute, and state and local sources. In addition to research methods and statistics, he teaches the sociology of complex organizations and the sociology of law.