Penn GSE researchers receive international acclaim

The start of a new year and a new semester offers an opportunity to celebrate the achievements of members of the Penn GSE community. Join us in recognizing those who have received distinguished awards, honors, and grants for their service and scholarship.

Here are some of the recent accolades, in alphabetical order, that have come our way.

Bonnie Botel-Sheppard, Executive Director of the Penn Literacy Network (PLN), has received a $40,000 grant from the Philadelphia Health Management Corporation to support four early childhood courses for forty teachers through PLN.

H. Gerald Campano, with María Paula Ghiso of Teachers College, Columbia University and Bethany Welch of the Aquinas Center, has received the 2018 David H. Russell Award for Distinguished Research in the Teaching of English from the National Council of Teachers of English for the book, Partnering with Immigrant Communities: Action Through Literacy. Dr. Campano is the Reading/Writing/Literacy Division.

Caroline Ebby and Caroline Watts have received a grant of $2,993,280 from the National Science Foundation for their four-year project "Building Sustainable Networked Instructional Leadership in Elementary Mathematics through a University Partnership with a Large Urban District." Dr. Ebby is an Adjunct Associate Professor in the Teaching, Learning, and Leadership Division and Senior Researcher at the Consortium for Policy Research in Education. Dr. Watts is the Director of School and Community Engagement at Penn GSE and a Senior Lecturer in the Human Development and Quantitative Methods Division.

Nelson Flores, with Penn GSE graduate Sofia Chaparro of the University of Colorado Denver, was awarded the James E. Alatis Prize for Research on Language Policy and Planning in Educational Contexts for the paper, "What counts as language education policy? Developing a materialist anti-racist approach to language activism." The Alatis Prize is awarded annually by TIRF — The International Research Foundation for English Language Education in recognition of an outstanding publication in the field. Dr. Flores is an Associate Professor in the Educational Linguistics Division.

Manuel S. González Canché, Associate Professor in the Higher Education Division, has received a $70,000 grant from the National Academy of Education for his project “Overcoming the Geography of Disadvantage: A Spillovers Framework to Identify Structural Means to Enhance Community College Students’ Educational Outcomes Despite Their Location.”

Nancy Hornberger, Professor in the Educational Linguistics Division, has been awarded an honorary doctorate by Umeå University in Sweden. Since 2012, Dr. Hornberger has served as Visiting Professor to Umeå University's Department of Language Studies, consulting and collaborating on the development of Sámi language teaching, teacher education, and research in support of Sámi Indigenous language revitalization.

Yasmin Kafai, Lori and Michael Milken President’s Distinguished Professor and Chair of the Teaching, Learning, and Leadership Division, has received a $97,000 grant through Google's Computer Science Education Research Awards. The grant will support the MADE (Music Art Design with Etextiles) program, which will introduce students in Career and Technical Education courses to more advanced computing concepts through electronic textile designs. With Co-Principal Investigators Orkan Telhan of PennDesign and Karen Hogan of Biorealize, Dr. Kafai has also received a $99,855 grant from the National Science Foundation to support the project "Learn.design.compute with bio: A Workshop for Connecting Computational Thinking with Synthetic Biology Applications in K-16 Education."

Kate Kinney Grossman, Director of the Teacher Education Program, has been granted $182,368 by the Philadelphia School Partnership for incubation of specialized coursework and fieldwork that supports pre-service teachers in the Urban Teaching Apprenticeship Program to enact Project Based Learning and/or use Design Thinking approaches in their classrooms.

Laura Perna has received three grants to support her research on equity and access in higher education. Dr. Perna has received a $300,000 subcontract from Research for Action, funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, to support the project “Evaluating free college programs,” which is designed to advance understanding of design, implementation, and effects of selected state and local free community college programs. She has also received a subcontract from the Pell Institute, funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation; this one-year, $250,000 grant — $60,000 of which is to Penn GSE — will support the production of the annual Indicators of Higher Education Equity report.  With project partners Robin LaSota of Development Services Group and Joshua R. Polanin of the American Institutes for Research, she is additionally the recipient of a $600,000 grant from the Institute of Education Sciences. Their two-year project, “The Effects of College Aid Programs: A Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis” aims to estimate the relationships between different types of financial aid programs and student progress through postsecondary education. Dr. Perna is the James S. Riepe Professor, Chair of the Higher Education Division, and Executive Director of the Alliance for Higher Education and Democracy (AHEAD).

Abby Reisman, Assistant Professor of Teacher Education in the Teaching, Learning, and Leadership Division, is the recipient of two grants to support her work in teacher education and professional development. She received a $19,993 grant from the Library of Congress Teaching with Primary Sources Program for the project “The Life of African Americans in 19th Century Philadelphia: Using Library of Congress Resources to Uncover Hidden History.” This initiative will establish a professional development series to support 10th grade history teachers in Philadelphia in using the Library of Congress’ collection to design lessons in this topic area. She has also received a $49,942 grant from the Spencer Foundation for the project "Using Online Professional Development Modules to Support Practice-Based Coaching for Document-Based History Instruction: A Design Experiment." This grant will support a two-year, design-based study in which Dr. Reisman is working with a team of instructional leaders to first design online professional development modules that target instructional practices in history and then embed the modules in a coaching intervention.

Janine Remillard and Caroline Ebby have received a $50,000 grant from the Spencer Foundation for the project "Transitions to the First Year of Teaching in Urban Schools: Learning to Enact Dialogic Instruction in Mathematics." Dr. Remillard is a Professor in the Teaching, Learning, and Leadership Division, and Dr. Ebby is an Adjunct Associate Professor in TLL and a Senior Researcher at the Consortium for Policy Research in Education.

Emily Schwab, doctoral student in the Reading, Writing, and Literacy program, received the 2018 J. Michael Parker Award from the Literacy Research Association. The award recognizes a student or early career scholar for a paper on adult literacy.

Amy Stornaiuolo, with Anna Smith of Illinois State University and Nathan Phillips of the University of Illinois at Chicago, has been awarded the 2018 Arthur Applebee Award for Excellence in Research on Literacy for the article "Developing a transliteracies framework for a connected world." The award is presented annually by the Literacy Research Association to honor the previous year's outstanding article in the field of literacy research. Dr. Stornaiuolo is an Associate Professor in the Literacy, Culture, and International Education Division.

Krystal Strong, Assistant Professor in the Literacy, Culture, and International Education Division, has received a $50,000 grant from the Spencer Foundation to support the next 14 months of the project "Education and Political Change: Mapping Contemporary School Protests in Africa." Dr. Strong's research team will complete the first comprehensive, cross-national database of the incidence and causes of school-based protests in Africa since 2000 and will use interactive mapping technology to make this data publicly accessible to global researchers and practitioners.

Susan Yoon, with Blanca Himes and Matthew Breitenstein, both of Penn Medicine, has received a grant of $1,036,108 from the National Science Foundation for the project "Professional Development Supports for Teaching Bioinformatics through Mobile Learning." The project aims to help create an engaged population of informatics-informed students who are capable of critically analyzing information and able to solve local problems related to their health and well-being. Dr. Yoon is a Professor in the Teaching, Learning, and Leadership Division.

Thanks to all staff and faculty members who notified us of these awards. If we have missed any awards, please use this form to notify us of a new or missed award, and we will be happy to add it to this page.