Jeff Cornett Bio

Dr. Jeffrey W. Cornett
University of North Florida

Dr. Jeffrey W. Cornett is Chair of the Department of Foundations and Secondary Education at the University of North Florida. Prior to his present position, he was Professor of Curriculum and Instruction at the University of Northern Iowa and served from 2003-2007 as Dean of the College of Education. He was Professor and Chair of the Department of Educational Research, Technology, and Leadership and earlier was Chair of the Department of Instructional Programs at the University of Central Florida (UCF). He received his PhD from Ohio State University in 1987.

Dr. Cornett has been actively involved in civic and law-related education at the state, national, and international levels. He is recently was reappointed as an Advisory Commissioner for the American Bar Association’s Committee on Public Education. As co-founder of the Consortium for Social Responsibility and Character in Education at UCF, he worked to establish a state and national center that connected research and instructional efforts that linked civic and law-related education, conflict resolution, service learning, and character education for K-12 youth. He served as co-principal investigator of a $1 million dollar federal grant to the State of Florida for character education. These efforts continue in Iowa where he served as a delegate to the first and second United States Congressional Conferences on Civic Education and helped to establish Price Laboratory School as one of twenty national First Amendment School sites.

Dr. Cornett continues his international scholarship in civic education through ongoing evaluation of the civic education innovations of CIVITAS in Hungary for a decade and most recently Romania. The Florida-Hungary partnership has impacted over 1,000 teachers and 20,000 students in Hungary and the United States. Other primary areas of research include teacher and administrator theorizing and the impact of that theorizing on curricular decisions and leadership especially as they are connected with issues of social justice and democratic deliberation.