Dr. Barr is a Professor (Collegiate Professor) in the School of Undergraduate Studies at the University of Maryland, University College. She received an undergraduate degree from Brown University, a Master of Fine Arts degree from University of Chicago and a Ph.D. in Child and Adolescent Development from Stanford University School of Education. After college, Dr. Barr served as a Peace Corps Volunteer in Cuzco, Peru, where she founded a center for nutritional recuperation for infants and their Quechua-speaking mothers. Living six years in Latin America, she is fluent in Spanish. After returning to the United States, she developed museum programs for school children and studied for her Ph.D. At Stanford she served five years as an Academic Advisor to undergraduates with significant health problems. Her dissertation, “Spare Children,” examined the use of children in orphanages as subjects of research in medicine, psychology, psychiatry, and education. She served as a Spencer Foundation Postdoctoral Fellow at Stanford University School of Education and a Postdoctoral Scholar in the Department of Psychiatry at the Stanford University School of Medicine. During her postdoctoral years Dr. Barr traveled to England, Sweden and Hungary to discuss possible ways to improve the outcomes of children living in institutions. She won an essay prize from the Society for Social Research in Medicine in England for a research paper on an early use of the incubator at the St. Louis World’s Fair in 1904. She has 12 years of teaching experience and experience designing courses in teacher education, multicultural education, multicultural child development, parenting, race relations, and global migrants and refugees. During this time she co-authored book-length modules published by University of Maryland University College for online courses in ethnic relations and in race relations. In her teaching, she works to reach disadvantaged and minority college students by using students’ own essays as text in her university courses. Dr. Barr is a mentor to faculty members who are new to online teaching at UMUC. Her most recent paper is “The New Nature of Knowledge and the New Pedagogy of Online Education,” a scholarly presentation of a paper in Coimbatore, Tamil Nadu, India, via live teleconferencing.

Author of: Through Children’s Eyes: President Obama and the Future Generation