Former Education Studies Scholar Dan Rubins (Pierson ‘16) currently resides in NYC and is the Executive Director of Hear Your Song (www.hearyoursong.org), a national nonprofit he co-founded at Yale in 2014 that empowers children and teens with serious illnesses and complex health needs to make their voices heard through collaborative songwriting. Before expanding Hear Your Song last March, Dan taught elementary school for about three years, mainly 4th and 5th grade, and received an MA at Columbia’s Teachers College in their Teaching Social Justice program. These experiences made him believe in himself as a teacher and, more importantly, gave him infinite belief in his young students and their boundless capacity for creativity and compassion.
During his time as an Ed Studies Scholar, Dan’s favorite memory was conducting field research for his capstone by visiting schools and choral programs in New Haven, and his favorite course was Inequality in America with Vida Maralani. Dan recalls that Lizzy Carroll, the first program director of Ed Studies, completely shaped his career by encouraging him to apply for the Dwight Hall Public School Interns program as a first-year. That experience led him to start his career as an elementary school teacher. All of his teaching experiences helped lead him back to Hear Your Song about a year ago and is now doing that full time. Today, Hear Your Song has six college/high school chapters and partnerships with hospitals and organizations in New York, Connecticut, Massachusetts, Ohio, Florida, New Hampshire, and Michigan!
Dan encourages current scholars and those passionate about education studies to not compromise who you are and the kind of educator you want to be for anything, citing Chris Emdin, a professor he learned under during grad school, as a driving force behind his journey becoming a teacher.