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Jeremy Murphy

Assistant Professor

Areas of Expertise

Teachers’ Professional Lives History of the Teaching Profession Complexities of Teaching School Reform and Change

Education

Ph.D., Harvard Graduate School of Education

Biography

Jeremy’s interest in education is rooted in his former work as a middle and high school English teacher. Prior to pursuing his doctorate, Jeremy taught at the Nativity Preparatory School of New Bedford, Massachusetts, as well as in the Worcester Public Schools and the Baltimore City Public Schools. 

Jeremy’s research focuses on K-12 teaching and the teaching profession. He uses qualitative and historical methods to explore teachers’ professional lives, teachers’ complex relationships with school reform efforts, and the complexities of classroom life and teaching. He is currently working on a historical project exploring Philadelphia’s controversial efforts to recruit more men into elementary school teaching in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries after the teaching profession became heavily feminized. 

Jeremy is passionate about improving teaching in higher education. Before coming to ̳ in 2022, he worked as Lead Pedagogy Fellow on the Instructional Moves (IM) project at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. This work with grew into a book, Instructional Moves for Powerful Teaching in Higher Education, which he co-wrote with Meira Levinson and published with Harvard Education Press in 2023.

In his own teaching, Jeremy engages students in scrutinizing taken-for-granted schooling practices, critically reflecting on their own schooling histories, and traversing the gap between our ideals about education and the realities of school.

Courses

  • Our Public Schools
  • Complexities of Urban Schools
  • Research Methods in Education

Publications

Murphy, J.T. (2024). “Losing My Craft”: Teachers’ Relational Work with Students During a Pandemic. American Journal of Education. 130(3), 395-426.

Murphy, J. T., & Levinson, M. (2023). Instructional Moves for Powerful Teaching in Higher Education. Harvard Education Press.

Murphy, J.T. (2024, August 15). Helping Students to Not Snub Each Other in Class. Inside Higher Ed. https://www.insidehighered.com/opinion/career-advice/teaching/2024/08/15/encouraging-students-engage-whole-class-discussions

Murphy, J.T. (2023, July 18). 5 Ways to Ease Students Off the Lecture and Into Active Learning. The Chronicle of Higher Education. https://www.chronicle.com/article/5-ways-to-ease-students-off-the-lecture-and-onto-active-learning

Murphy, J.T. (2021). From Teacher Improvement to Teacher Turnover: Unintended Consequences of School Reform in Quincy, Massachusetts, 1872-1893. History of Education Quarterly, 61(4), 1-31.

Murphy, J.T. (2020). “But Aren’t We Extinct?”: Inhabited Reform and Instructional Visibility in an Open Space School Forty Years Later. Teachers College Record, 123(2), 1-44.

Murphy, J.T. (2020). Wearing Policy: Uniform Foolishness in the Public School. Schools: Studies in Education, 17(1), 28-42.