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149 AN T I OC H CO L L E G E C L A S S O F 19 6 5 5 0 t h A N N I V E R S A R Y B O O K A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z S H E I N G O L D SHEINGOLD KAREN [EISENBERG] THEN AND NOW 4 B.A. Sociology and Anthropology 4 Ph.D., Social Relations, Harvard FAMI LY 4 Partner, Michael Robbins 4 Sons, Peter and David ADDRESS 4 21 Hop Brook Rd. Amherst, MA 01002 CONTACT 413 253-0313 ksheingold@gmail.com A T M Y D E S K on this last day of 2014, I look over the wetlands and hills of the Pioneer Valley behind my house and consider how my life has evolved and how central to it Antioch has been. While at Antioch, majoring in sociology and anthropology, I was unsure who I was or what I wanted to do exactly but had no doubt that I wanted to change the world. My experiences at Antioch, including a self-designed year in India, made me confident that I could do what I turned my mind and energy to, even if it meant inventing something new. At Antioch, courses in child de- velopment captured my interest. They were taught by Jerry Kagan, then a young research psycholo- gist at the Fels Research Institute. Kagan left Fels to establish a Ph.D. program in developmental psychol- ogy in the department of social rela- tions at Harvard. I was accepted into his program and earned a Ph.D. in 1971. By then I was married to Carl Sheingold, a graduate student in the same department, and had given birth to my first son, Peter. As a family, we moved first to Buffalo, then to Ithaca, as my hus- band with professorial positions at SUNY Buffalo and at Cornell. I held part-time research and teaching po- sitions, attempting both to parent and have a career in an era when such combined ambitions had little support. My second son, David, was born in 1974 while we were living in Ithaca. From there, I took a full- time teaching position in psychol- ogy atWellesley College.While there I developed deeper interests in how media affect children’s learning and development. For me, Antioch connections were central to what happened next. Richard “Dick” Ruopp, who had been in an advisory position my first year at Antioch, had just become president of Bank Street College of Education in New York City. I reconnected with Dick, and he offered me a job as his special as- sistant. Perceptively, he commented that I wouldn’t want to remain in that job long. Through Dick, I re- ceived a hands-on, intense education in all of the things they didn’t teach me in graduate school—how orga- nizations really work, how to create change and get support and fund- ing for new initiatives. In short, he brought me back to my Antiochian self and helped me gain some of the practical knowledge that one needs to change the world. In 1980, the Center for Children and Technology was founded, with me as its director.We began a pro- gram of research to probe how the then new technologies “microcom- puters” could contribute to learn- ing and teaching. And in 1988 we won the national competition to be- come the DOE’s National Center for Technology in Education. Through my work at Bank Street,my interests became focused on education and its reform.These interests expanded to include assessment and its redesign in my next position. At Educational Testing Service (ETS) I helped to es- tablish the Center for Performance Assessment and became its director. At around the time I was leav- ing Bank Street, my marriage ended. It was a tumultuous phase of my life. Fortunately, by then my sons were in college and high school. In my decade at ETS I learned more about assessment and its pow- ers—both positive and negative— and supervised research staff in both New Jersey and California. Single and age 50, I began to realize that in my personal life I could take on and enjoy things that I wasn’t nec- essarily good at. I became involved in many physical activities—hik- ing, cycling, yoga—and traveled, of- ten combining the travel with these physical activities. Over time, I became more deeply interested in yoga, recogniz- ing and experiencing its emotional