About

Jack Dougherty, a digital strategy coach in Boston, shares over thirty years of experience in partnering with community organizations to make change more visible through data and digital storytelling. Email him or schedule a free 30-minute Zoom meeting on his calendar.

Jack retired as Professor of Educational Studies at Trinity College in Hartford, Connecticut, where he worked from 1999 to 2026. Most recently in his Data Visualization for All course, students partnered with community organizations to dig into data on different policy topics (such as affordable housing, educational equity, public health, environmental justice) and published their data stories with interactive charts and maps.

Jack also directed the Educational Studies Program and collaborated with faculty across campus to develop its robust interdisciplinary major, with a focus on experiential urban learning and research training. He created new courses such as:

• Educ 200: Analyzing Schools, an introductory course where students investigate learning and inequality while doing participant-observation in Hartford public school classrooms.
• Educ 300: Education Reform Past & Present, a mid-level course where students interpret system-wide change through historical sources and policy lenses.
• Educ 308: Cities Suburbs and Schools, a seminar and research project where over 25 Trinity undergraduates co-authored publications and/or presented works at national conferences.
• Educ 350: Teaching and Learning, a seminar where students design and teach inquiry-based math or science lessons in Hartford elementary and middle schools.
• Educ 400: Senior Research Seminar, a capstone experience where all majors design, conduct, and present their thesis research using primary sources and qualitative, quantitative, and/or historical methods.

As a long-time contributor to the Community Learning initiative at Trinity, Jack served as the first faculty director of the Liberal Arts Action Lab and led the team that launched the Center for Hartford Engagement and Research in 2018. With 9 CHER staff and a combined annual budget of $1 million, CHER strengthened educational partnerships between the campus and the city’s diverse neighborhoods, with several key accomplishments:

• established clearer student pathways for curricular and extracurricular community engagement, including Mellon Foundation funding for the Public Humanities Collaborative summer research program with Hartford organizations
• expanded professional development for faculty who teach Community Learning courses with academic connections to Hartford
• richer quantitative and qualitative assessment of Trinity’s engagement with Hartford through community partner focus groups and neighborhood resident door-to-door interviews in Spanish and English
• improved communications between campus and the city through social media, short videos, and a monthly newsletter

Jack received his B.A. in philosophy from Swarthmore College in 1987, taught high school social studies in Newark, New Jersey, then earned his Ph.D. in educational policy studies, with a minor in U.S. history, from the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 1997. His books and major articles include:

• On The Line: How Schooling, Housing, and Civil Rights Shaped Hartford and its Suburbs (with student contributors), an open-access work-in-progress that blends historical narrative with digitized primary sources and interactive maps.
• Hands-On Data Visualization: Interactive Storytelling from Spreadsheets to Code, co-authored with Ilya Ilyankou, published by O’Reilly Media, 2021.
• Web Writing: Why and How for Liberal Arts Teaching and Learning, co-edited with Tennyson O’Donnell, open-access book published by University of Michigan Press, 2015.
• Writing History in the Digital Age, co-edited with Kristen Nawrotzki, open-access book published by University of Michigan Press, 2013.
• Shopping for Schools: How Public Education and Private Housing Shaped Suburban Connecticut, Journal of Urban History, 2012.
• School Choice in Suburbia: Test Scores, Race, and Housing Markets , co-authored with Trinity College economics professor Diane Zannoni and students, American Journal of Education, 2009,
• More Than One Struggle: The Evolution of Black School Reform in Milwaukee University of North Carolina Press, 2004) See all publications with abstracts and links, and see also CV academic resume

When not in front of a computer, you’ll likely find Jack on his bike in the Boston area or on one of his longer-distance adventures.