FELLOW NOTABLES

Monisha Bajaj (Postdoctoral 2008) was a plenary speaker at the Transforming Education Conference for Humanity in December 2019 hosted by the UNESCO Mahatma Gandhi Institute of Education for Peace and Sustainable Development in Vishakhpatnam, India. 

Bianca J. Baldridge (Postdoctoral 2017) was promoted to Associate Professor with tenure at the University of Wisconsin Madison. Dr. Baldridge was also one of ten finalists for the William T. Grant Scholars Award program. She recently published the article, “Negotiating anti-Black racism in “liberal” contexts: The experiences of Black youth workers in community-based educational spaces:” in the journal of Race, Ethnicity, and Education. This article is based on the research Dr. Baldridge conducted as a postdoctoral fellow.

Gert Biesta’s (Postdoctoral 1995) latest book, Educational Research: An Unorthodox Introduction was published in March 2020 by Bloomsbury. The book consists of eight chapters in which he tries to raise the more fundamental questions about educational research; questions that are often ‘forgotten’ in introductions that focus on the practicalities of doing research. The book is not meant to replace other introduction but to broaden the scope and to help newcomers in the field of educational research to develop an orientation on the possibilities and limitations of research.

Kathryn Boonstra’s (Dissertation 2017) doctoral dissertation was awarded the 2020 Outstanding Dissertation Award from AERA’s Early Education/Child Development Special Interest Group. Boonstra’s dissertation, entitled “First Time Out: An Ethnographic Multiple Case Study of Kindergarten Discipline,” examined routine kindergarten discipline practices as they intersect with race, disability, culture, and context.

Tolani Britton (Dissertation 2016) received a Russell Sage Foundation Pipeline Grant for a project exploring the relationship between demographic matching of college counselors and student postsecondary outcomes. https://www.russellsage.org/awarded-project/student-guidance-counselor-ethnoracial-match-and-postsecondary-outcomes

Maneka D. Brooks (Postdoctoral 2018) recently published her first book, Transforming Literacy Education for Long-Term English Learners: Recognizing Brilliance in the Undervalued. This book challenges incorrect characterizations of youth identified as long-term English learners and sheds light on students’ strengths to argue that effective literacy education requires looking beyond policy classifications that are often used to guide educational decisions for this population. By combining research, theory, and practice, this book offers a comprehensive analysis of literacy pedagogy to facilitate teacher learning and includes practical takeaways and implications for classroom practice and professional development. 

Jennifer Candipan (Dissertation 2018) joined the Department of Sociology at Harvard University in Fall 2019 as a postdoctoral research fellow. She recently published two articles in Urban Studies examining  links between neighborhoods and schools entitled “Neighbourhood Change and the Neighbourhood-School Gap” and “Social and Spatial Inequalities of Educational Opportunity: A Portrait of Schools Serving High- and Low-income Neighbourhoods in US Metropolitan Areas” (with first-author Ann Owens (Postdoctoral 2016). She has a forthcoming article in Sociology of Education called “Choosing Schools in Changing Places: Examining School Enrollment in Gentrifying Neighborhoods,” which examines links between school choice and gentrification. Beginning in Spring 2021, she will join the faculty at Brown University as an assistant professor of sociology.

Maia Cucchaira (Postdoctoral 2012) has published an article based on her NAEd/Spencer Postdoctoral Fellowship which came out in 2019 in the journal Sociology of Education:  “‘I Just Need a Job!'” Behavioral Solutions, Structural Problems, and the Hidden Curriculum of Parenting Education,” by Maia Cucchiara, Erin Cassar, and Monica Clark. Another article, also from the fellowship is forthcoming from the journal Social Problems. It is single authored and titled “‘Sometimes you have to pop them’: Conflict and Meaning Making in a Parenting Class”

Zoubeida Dagher (Postdoctoral 1994) was elected to the rank of Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science for her “distinguished contributions to improving K-12 science education through the study of representations of scientific epistemology in science curriculum and instruction across cultural contexts”. The induction for newly elected fellows took place last February at the AAAS Annual Meeting in Seattle, WA.

Sarah Dryden-Peterson (Postdoctoral 2015) has provided commentary on lessons from other historical and contemporary settings of uncertainty and disruption as connected to Covid-19 school closures and educational shifts, including with NPR and the Washington Post. Her initiative, REACH, launched in December 2019 aims to foster welcoming communities and quality education in settings of migration and displacement through collaborative research, education, and action. REACH has launched a Covid-19 Resources and Perspectives Series to share insights about the ways individuals, communities, and institutions are coming together to foster welcoming communities and quality education during school closures caused by Covid-19. Dryden-Peterson’s recently published work includes new work on refugee education, including as related to schools as sites of belonging among Syrian youth in Lebanon in Globalisation, Education and Societies (with Vidur Chopra) and early grade literacy outcomes among refugees in Kakuma camp, Kenya in the Journal on Education in Emergencies (with Benjamin Piper, Vidur Chopra, Celia Reddick, and Arbogast Oyanga). Dryden-Peterson reflects on researcher positionality over time as connected to a 20 year follow-up study of history teaching in South Africa in a special issue on portraiture of the Harvard Educational Review.

Jason Ellis (Postdoctoral 2017) delivered an invited speech on January 30th, 2020 to the 26th Annual General Meeting of the British Columbia Public School Employers’ Association. The speech, “How the Educational Past Shapes the Educational Present,” was about the history of teacher collective bargaining and K-12 educational finance in British Columbia since the 1970s and that history’s effects on contract negotiations in the present.

Maithreyi Gopalan (Dissertation Fellow 2017) has published new work in Educational Researcher and the Review of Research in Education. She was also awarded a research grant from the Spencer Foundation to explore the impact of adult health insurance expansions through the Affordable Care Act on children’s development along with her colleagues Lindsey Bullinger and Caitlin Lombardi. 

Usha Goswami (Postdoctoral 1990), Professor of Developmental Cognitive Neuroscience at the University of Cambridge in the United Kingdom, has been awarded the Yidan Prize for Education Research 2019. Established in 2016 by Charles Chen Yidan, one of the founders of the internet-based technology and cultural enterprise Tencent, the Yidan Prize is the world’s most generous prize in education research and education development. Professor Goswami founded, and serves as Director of, the world’s first Centre for Neuroscience in Education. Her research focuses on children’s cognitive development, particularly the development of language and literacy.

DeLeon L. Gray (Disertation 2011) served as the lunch keynote speaker at the 2020 Equity and Excellence National Symposium which was hosted by Equal Opportunity Schools. The symposium was held on March 1-3, 2020 in Atlanta, GA. He also joined the editorial team of Contemporary Educational Psychology as Associate Editor. Gray and his collaborators also published a new article entitled, Why Black Adolescents Are Vulnerable at School and How Schools Can Provide Opportunities to Belong to Fix It, as well as a second article entitled, Engaging Black and Latinx Students Through Communal Learning Opportunities: A Relevance Intervention for Middle Schoolers in STEM Elective Classrooms.

Casandra Harper (Postdoctoral 2012) co-authored two articles related to parental and family engagement in college students’ lives.  One article currently in press at the Journal of Higher Education is a longitudinal study of how the families of first-generation college students experience a transition during their child’s first year of college (https://doi.org/10.1080/00221546.2019.1647583). This article was awarded the Outstanding Contribution to Literature award by the NASPA Parent and Family Relations Knowledge Community in March.  The second article, “Ideologies of invisibility impacting diverse families in parent and family orientation initiatives,” was published in the Journal of Student Affairs Research and Practice (https://doi.org/10.1080/19496591.2018.1490304). 

Cassandra Hart (Postdoctoral 2016) has an article on effects of access to Black teachers on Black students’ advanced course-taking behaviors forthcoming in Educational Evaluation and Policy Analysis (https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.3102/0162373719898470). This article reflects research supported by the NAEd/Spencer Postdoctoral Program.

J. Bryan Henderson (Postdoctoral 2018) began serving in January as an Associate Editor for the top science education research journal – the Journal of Research in Science Teaching (JRST). In March, he accepted an invitation to begin service on the Editorial Board for Educational Researcher (ER). Henderson continues to serve as the Program Chair of the AERA Science Teaching and Learning SIG. Since December 2019, he has had three articles accepted for publication by peer-reviewed journals in addition to papers accepted at four different educational research conferences. This includes a sole author piece in the Harvard Educational Review entitled: Beyond “Active” Learning: How the ICAP Framework Permits More Acute Examination of the Popular Peer Instruction Pedagogy. Henderson was also the featured guest on episode 221 of the science education podcast Lab Out Loud entitled: Discovery vs. Exploration: Learning Science with Evidence-Based Argumentation. This podcast can be found at: https://laboutloud.com/2020/02/episode-221-bryan-henderson/.

Anthony M. Johnson (Dissertation 2016) will join the faculty as an Assistant Professor in the Department of Sociology at The Ohio State University in summer 2020.

Michelle Knight-Manuel (Postdoctoral 2001) has been named Executive Editor of Teachers College Record.

Matthew Kraft‘s (Dissertation 2012) working paper, “Interpreting Effect Sizes of Educational Interventions” was recently accepted for publication Educational Researcher.  The article offers five broad guidelines for interpreting effect sizes and propose new empirical benchmarks. Together, these tools provide a practical approach for incorporating study features, costs, and scalability into the process of interpreting the policy importance of effect sizes. 

Kathryn Lanouette (Postdoctoral 2017) will be beginning this Fall as an Assistant Professor in STEM Education at William & Mary. 

Tisha Lewis Ellison (Postdoctoral 2015) received promotion to associate professor with tenure at the University of Georgia (UGA). Tisha Lewis Ellison is co-author of book, in press with Routledge, Whitewashed critical perspectives: Restoring the edge to edgy ideas in literacy education with Drs. Cathy Compton-Lilly, Kristen Perry, & Peter Smagorinsky. Tisha Lewis Ellison was awarded the Junior Faculty Seed Grant in STEM Program award for her work “Investigating African American Father and Daughter Dyads’ Computational Thinking and Self-Efficacy Skills in STEM.” She examined the digital and STEM literacy practices of 19 African American fathers and daughters with UGA doctoral student Tairan Qiu. Dr. Lewis Ellison, along with two doctoral students Brad Robinson & Tairan Qiu, published “Examining African American girls’ literate intersection identities through journal entries and discussions about STEM” in the Written Communication  journal.

Cindy Nguyen (Dissertaton 2018) was recently awarded the Pattana Kitiarsa Paper Prize by the Southeast Asia Council for her research on the Hanoi Central Library. She has a forthcoming journal publication in the Journal of Vietnamese Studies, titled “Reading Rules: The Symbolic and Social Spaces of Reading in the Hanoi Central Library, 1919-1941” in August 2020. In February she was invited to deliver two talks: 1) a historical presentation on the history of colonial Indochina at Middlesex Community College and 2) an artist talk, translation workshop, and screening of her film at Harvard University. She is currently a Postdoctoral Fellow in history at Brown University working on her book manuscript, Misreading: The Social Life of Libraries and Colonial Control in Indochina, 1865-1958. 

Bonny Norton (Postdoctoral 1994), a Professor in the Department of Language and Literacy Education at the University of British Columbia, Canada, has been recognized as the 2020 Academic of the Year by the Confederation of University Faculty Associations of British Columbia (CUFA, BC). Dr. Norton (FRSC) was recognized for her leadership of the Global Storybooks project (https://globalstorybooks.net/), which provides free digital stories in multiple languages to children and youth worldwide. See the January 2020 article in The Conversation at https://theconversation.com/global-storybooks-from-arabic-to-zulu-freely-available-digital-tales-in-50-languages-127480.

Django Paris (Postdoctoral 2013) with co-editors, Alayna Eagle Shield, Rae Paris, and Timothy San Pedro (Postdoctoral 2018), are pleased to announce the publication of their new book, Education in Movement Spaces: Standing Rock to Chicago Freedom Square (Routledge). They are grateful for the lessons offered by scholars, organizers, artists, and young people (and some who are all of these!) on Native and Black education, social movements, and solidarities.  After three years of work (connected to centuries of work), they never imagined the book would be published in the midst of a pandemic. And yet they believe what is shared in this book is deeply needed as we care for our communities in the present and build the future we need.

Frank Reichert (Postdoctoral 2016) authored a public report about digital citizenship development in Hong Kong. The report was co-authored by Mr. Patrick Lam, Dr. Elizabeth Loh and Professor Nancy Law. It was released at a well-attended online press conference and can be accessed via https://ecitizen.hk/publications/reports in English and in traditional Chinese. Frank also recently received two research grants. One grant was jointly awarded by the Hong Kong Research Grants Council and the German Academic Exchange Service through the Germany/Hong Kong Joint Research Scheme. This project is a collaboration with Professor Dirk Lange at the University of Hannover (Germany) to investigate digital citizenship education from teachers’ perspectives. The other grant was awarded by the Public Policy Research Funding Scheme in Hong Kong. Informed by social psychological theory, this project’s aim is to understand university students’ participation in the recent anti-extradition bill social movement in Hong Kong and to inform public policy and civic education.

Todd Ruecker (Postdoctoral 2015) and Vanessa Svihla (Postdoctoral 2014) recently published an edited book with Routledge titled Navigating Challenges in Qualitative Education Research: Research, Interrupted. Inspired by Dr. Ruecker’s postdoctoral research, the chapters recount narratives of challenges researchers have faced throughout the process, from planning to publication, and how they navigated these challenges, a timely topic as Dr. Ruecker’s Fulbright experience and Dr. Svihla’s sabbatical research with the Air Force Research Laboratories have been interrupted by the COVID-19 pandemic.

Aaron Saiger (Postdoctoral 2006) reports the following publications:  The Tactics of Title IX, 13 Journal of School Choice 438 (2019) (reviewing R. Shep Melnick, The Transformation of Title IX: Regulating Gender Equality in Education (2018))  (VoR here); Unbundling School, 5 Education Law and Policy Rev. 1 (2019); and Deconstitutionalizing Dewey, 13 Fla. Int’l. U. L. Rev. 765 (2019).  His book manuscript in progress, suddenly extremely timely, is Schoolhouse in the Cloud  (forthcoming Oxford U.P.). 

Crystal R. Sanders (Postdoctoral 2017) received the 2020 Connor Award from the Historical Society of North Carolina.  The Connor award is given for the “best” article in the North Carolina Historical Review.  Sanders published “‘Pursuing the Unfinished Business of Democracy’: Willa B. Player and Liberal Arts Education in the Civil Rights Era,” in the January 2019 issue of the journal.  During the 2020-2021 academic year, Sanders will be a Fellow at the National Humanities Center where she will complete her book manuscript tentatively titled, America’s Forgotten Migration: Black Southerners’ Quest for Graduate Education in the Age of Jim Crow.  Sanders remains an Associate Professor of History and Director of the Africana Reserch Center at Pennsylvania State University.

Amy Stornaiuolo, (Postdoctoral 2017) will serve as the PI for a new grant from the McDonnell Foundation. With the 2.5 million dollar grant to study Teachers as Learners, Stornaiuolo will work with an experienced team, including former former NAED/Spencer Postdoctoral Fellow Ebony Elizabeth Thomas (Postdoctoral 2014), to study how teachers learn to facilitate online discussions using a variety of digital tools and platforms. Focusing specifically on English Language Arts teachers leading discussions about literature, the team will generate materials to guide teachers in facilitating digital discourse — especially pressing given how many educators are moving to online instruction in these challenging times.   https://www.jsmf.org/about/press/2020_JSMF_Press_Release.pdf?fbclid=IwAR0PaN1toCTttCgm82PZWZoBNEJ7VyNp9i-cX4UQoyta3HkACuS7gbQiMW8

Elizabeth Todd-Breland (Postdoctoral 2016) was honored with the University of Illinois at Chicago’s Scholar of the Year Award-Rising Star in Arts & Humanities on March 4, 2020.

Shirin Vossoughi (Postdoctoral 2016) published the following paper:

• Vossoughi, S., Jackson, A., Chen, S., Roldan, W., & Escudé, M. (2020). Embodied Pathways and Ethical Trails: Studying Learning in and through Relational Histories. Journal of the Learning Sciences, 1-41.

She also received the Northwestern University Graduate School’s Ver Steeg Award for excellence in working with graduate students.

Xiaoyang Ye (Dissertation 2017) won the 2020 Jean Flanigan Outstanding Dissertation Award from the Association for Education Finance and Policy. The award is intended to recognize exemplary dissertation research by doctoral students in the area of education finance and policy. He also received the 2020 Stanley E. and Ruth B. Dimond Best Dissertation Award from the University of Michigan. He is currently a postdoctoral researcher at Princeton University and will join Brown University’s Annenberg Institute as a postdoctoral researcher in the fall of 2020.

Chenyi Zhang (Postdoctoral 2016) has published the following:

• Zhang, C., Bingham, E. G, Zhang, X*, Purpura D., Schmitt S., & Yang, F. (2019). Untangling Chinese preschoolers’ early writing development: associations among early reading, executive functioning, and early writing skills. Reading and Writing.  doi:10.1007/s11145-019-10006-3

• Zhang, C., & Quinn, M. (in press). Preschool Children’s Interest in Early Writing Activities and Perceptions of Writing Experience, The Elementary School Journal.

This project is a Spencer small research grant project studying how young children develop interest in writing activities and whose report of interest (i.e. parents, teachers, and children) is associated with early reading and writing skills. Two presentations developed from preliminary analyses were accepted in AERA conference this April and National Research Conference on Early Childhood conference in June, but both conferences are cancelled. Zhang is also co-pi on a research project evaluating how an online literacy instruction professional development website (Cox Campus) may have impact on early childhood teachers’ classroom teaching practices.

• Bingham, G. E., & Zhang, C. (2019-2021). Examining the impact of Read Right from the Start: Associations between classroom practice and teacher knowledge. Rollins Center for Language and Literacy, $500,000. Co-Principal Investigator.

Jonathan Zimmerman‘s (Postdoctoral 1999) next book, The Amateur Hour: A History of College Teaching in America, will be published in October by Johns Hopkins University Press.