Hazel E. Reid is a Jamaican-American educator, writer and anthropologist.  She has lived, studied and worked in New York City since 1970, and is currently teaching at colleges in the City University of New York (CUNY).

       Professor Reid's education began in Jamaica, Caribbean, where she was born, continued in the late 1960s in Ottawa, Canada, at Carleton University; and subsequently in the United States.  After receiving a B.A. degree in English literature with a Spanish minor from Carleton, she came to the United States on a Ford Foundation fellowship in journalism and did her internship with The African American Newspaper chain.  She later studied filmmaking in a program that was offered by Channel 13 in the early 1970s, and enhanced her skills as a writer in the John Killens Writers Workshop and in theater companies in New York City.   Since the 1970s, she has earned graduate degrees from Columbia University - in comparative religion from the Graduate School of Arts and Science, and in Anthropology and Education from Teachers College.  For her Ph.D. dissertation research she did an anthropological study of relationships between Jamaica's post-colonial attempts to use education to promote national development, and related learning outcomes among students.
 
       As a veteran educator, most of Professor Reid's contributions have been to New York's CUNY colleges.  At Hunter College, she teaches African American literature and has also taught African American history and Caribbean literature; at the Borough of Manhattan Community College, she teaches anthropology, and at The City College, she prepares candidates for the teachers' license test in language arts and science (LAST).   She has also taught Caribbean and Pan-African literature at Rutgers University, Newark.   Additionally, over the years she has been a guest lecturer at several colleges/universities, and a presenter at conferences on: Caribbean culture, reggae music, Pan African literature, and anthropology and education.  

       In others areas of her work as an educator and anthropologist, Professor Reid served as an evaluator of special programs in New York City's Department of Education (1986-94 - then the Board of Education).  Her responsibilities in the Department's Office of Research, Evaluation and Assessment, involved collaborating in teams that designed assessment tools for school-based projects, conducted research, and wrote reports with recommendations that were used to inform educational policy makers. 

     As a writer, she has contributed articles to publications including Essence and Black Enterprise magazines and Freedomways Journal; and her comments on a selection of spiritual books appear in Sacred Fire: The QBR 100 Essential Black Books (ed. by Max Rodriquez, et. al., John Wiley & Sons, 1999).  She has also written plays including Ritual for: A New Liberation Covenant and scripts for Vegetable Soup, a 1970s children television program.  She is currently completing a book of life stories of ethnically diverse students from a first year English class she taught at The City College, and is also working on a book on the legendary Reggae prophet, Bob Marley.  She invites comments on Marley.  

       Professor Reid's volunteer contributions have included her role as founder/director for Across-Culture - Caribbean American (ACCA), and as a board member and educator in the Sojourner Truth Adolescents Rites Society  (STARS).  She directed ACCA, a cultural exchange program, during the 1980s, and is now planning to revive that organization.   To STARS, an organization that helped to prepare girls to further develop as students and responsible citizens, her contributions 10 years (1990s) of involvement in planning programs and in developing and implementing curricula.

       Aside from her formal education, Professor Reid has approached life as an independent learner, gathering information from a variety of sources and activities.  Those sources/activities have included: traveling, reading, watching educational television, interacting with informed community peoples and her students, and observing diverse peoples and nature involved in the processes of life.  She asserts that through these life-long learning activities, she has acquired more information about life's realities outside of academia, than inside.  Her expanding vision of life has led here to assert that: "although we now live in a world of severe conflicts, I strongly believe, along with an increasing number of people, that "another world is possible". 

       According to Professor Reid, we will only move toward that possible world when those who dream to save the planet and its human and other species from further destruction, have the courage to seize opportunities to advance human transformations.  She holds that we can make that advance through implementing effective methods of diversity education and critical thinking, and through development of skills in conflict resolution and independent approaches lifelong learning.  She believes that these methods are keys that opening doors to more harmonious human relations and peace in the world.  Her conclusions are based on the fact that she incorporated this transformative vision in her approach to teaching and has seen very positive results in her students.  Consequently, Professor Reid plans to write about the teaching-learning experiences in her classes and the impact her on her students, and to use the experiences to design and implement human development programs for children and youth.                                  

Contact:  H. Reid, P.O. Box 1739, New York, N.Y. 10032