AERA Presents Awards at Annual Meeting

Members of the Harvard Graduate School of Education community participated in and were honored at the 2014 Annual Meeting of the American Educational Research Association (AERA) held April 3–7 in Philadelphia.

Among those honored by AERA was Associate Professor Jal Mehta, who was awarded the Emerging Scholar Award by the Educational Change SIG of AERA. This award is presented to an individual or individuals who, within the first eight years of the postdoctorate career as an educational scholar, have demonstrated a strong record of original and significant scholarship related to educational change. Following their endorsement, the Educational Change SIG review committee noted being impressed by Mehta’s works The Allure of Order and The Futures of School Reform, as well as his “visibility as a first-rate public intellectual on matters of educational change.”

Assistant Professor Ebony Bridwell-Mitchell and doctoral candidate Dave Sherer were also honored by AERA with the Best Paper award for the Organization Theory Group. Their paper, “Institutional Complexity and the Embedded Logics of Public School Reform,” employs a unique methodological approach to examine how teachers' beliefs about instructional reforms are informed by the logics of broad cultural institutions.

Several alums were also honored as award winners in education research.

Liliana Garces, Ed.M.'06, Ed.D.'11, was presented with the Palmer O. Johnson Memorial Award, which recognizes the highest quality of academic scholarship published in one of the following AERA publications: American Educational Researcher or Journal of Educational and Behavioral Statistics. Garces was honored for her article, “Understanding the Impact of Affirmative Action Bans in Different Graduate Fields of Study,” which she published in the American Educational Research Journal in April 2013. Garces is currently assistant professor at the College of Education at Penn State.

Dorinda Carter Andrews, Ed.M.'01, Ed.D.'05, was honored with the Scholars of Color Early Career Contribution Award, which is presented to a scholar who is within the first decade of his or her career after receipt of a doctoral degree. Carter is associate professor in the department of teacher education at Michigan State University.

Christine Greenhow, Ed.D.’06, was awarded with the Division C Early Career Award. She is currently working as an assistant professor at the College of Education at Michigan State University, where she researches how social media affects teens' social relationships, identity formation, and literacy.

Finally, Mary Helen Immordino-Yang, Ed.M.'98, Ed.D.'05, was awarded with the Early Career Award, an award established to honor an individual in the early stages of his or her career, no later than 10 years after receipt of the doctoral degree, engaged in study in any field of educational inquiry.

An assistant professor of education at the Rossier School, Immordino-Yang is an affective neuroscientist and human development psychologist who studies the neural, psychophysiological and psychological bases of social emotion, self-awareness and culture and their implications for development and schools.