Spring 2020 continues to bring awards to members of the TC community.
Cally L. Waite, Associate Professor of History & Education and Director of the Social Science Research Council’s Mellon Mays Graduate Initiatives Program, has been named one of six recipients of the Spencer Foundation’s 2020 Mentor Awards.
Waite will play a prominent role in TC’s first-ever virtual Convocation ceremony, which will be held this coming Wednesday, May 20th, at 8 p.m.
An article on the Foundation’s website explains that had the awards been announced, as originally planned, at the 2020 meeting of the American Educational Research Association, which was canceled because of the COVID pandemic, “We would have noted how [the honorees] provide doctoral students and junior faculty with a wide range of professional experiences; how they carefully attend to issues of equity; how they help scholars negotiate their personal and scholarly identities; how they find ways to make structural or institutional change to improve the quality of mentorship for doctoral students and junior scholars beyond their immediate circles; and how they have done these things year after year after year, creating multi-generational webs of support.”
Patricia Dye, a student in TC’s Dance Education doctoral program, has been named to receive a 2020 Dance Teacher Award from Dance Teacher magazine. Dye directs, advises and teaches in the Dance Dpeartment at Science Skills High School for Science, Technology & Creative Arts’ Jow-Ile-Bailar Dance Companies in Brooklyn. She is also a dance faculty member for Ballet Hispanico and Lincoln Center Middle School Summer Audition Boot Camp.
Each year, Dance Teacher honors four outstanding educators who have made invaluable contributions to the field. Dye is tentatively scheduled to receive the award at an event in New York City during the weekend of July 31–Aug 2. She will also be celebrated in the next issue of Dance Teacher magazine, which will be published in September/October 2020.
Matthew Kautz and Alexa Rodriguez, Ph.D. students in TC’s History & Education program, have been named recipients of the National Academy of Education/Spencer Dissertation Fellowship.
Kautz’s dissertation project is titled “Punishing Promise: School Discipline and Carceral Expansion during the Era of Desegregation,” focusing especially on Boston, Massachusetts, where — as in many cities — desegregation was accompanied by discipline policies that disproportionately excluded black students from school. Kautz is a former high school teacher who taught in Detroit and Chicago.
Rodriguez's dissertation engages with social and transnational approaches to investigate the execution of education policies aimed at modernizing the Dominican Republic during the U.S. occupation from 1916 to 1924. Simultaneously employing top-down and bottom-up perspectives, she draws on archival sources from both the U.S. and the Dominican Republic to study the role of local education administrators and parents in the education reforms.
Silvia Alves-Nishioka has received a Teachers College Student Leadership Award 2020 for her outstanding work as a student in the Student Support & Counseling team in Student Affairs, collaborating in the development and refining of the office’s operation. Alves-Nishioka, a third-year doctoral student in Counseling Psychology, has served as Counseling Program Assistant, worked closely with Pierluigi Bellini, Mental Health Counselor, to refer TC students to mental health resources, revamp the College’s website detailing mental health resources available to students, and provide counseling when appropriate. During the COVID crisis, Alves-Nishioka has helped Bellini provide two online venues — one in the style of TV talk show, the other more in the mode of an issues forum, to help students with mental health concerns.
Ansley T. Erickson, Associate Professor of History and Education Policy and Co-Director of TC’s Center on History and Education, has been named as an Associate Editor for the American Educational Research Journal. Erickson was selected “for her high visibility, experience, and demonstrated engagement in the educational sciences,” wrote the journal’s editor-in-chief, Ellen Goldring, and other AERA officials in a letter to TC Provost and Dean Stephanie J. Rowley announcing the appointment. Erickson is co-editor with former TC faculty member Ernest Morrell (now at the University of Notre Dame) of Educating Harlem: A Century of Schooling and Resistance in a Black Community, recently published by Columbia University Press.
Professor Emerita Frances Schoonmaker has received the Agatha Award for Best Middle Grade/Young Adult Mystery for her 2019 novel, The Last Crystal (book three of her The Last Crystal trilogy, published by Auctus Publishers).
Schoonmaker (Ed.D.’83) directed the College’s graduate elementary and middle school teacher education program — which drew heavily on children’s literature and storytelling — for nearly twenty years.
In her trilogy, Schoonmaker combines research about World War II and early history of the Chumash People, who settled the Southern California costal lands, with mystery and fantasy to create a story that addresses current issues of racism and inclusion.
The Last Crystal begins as four children board the Los Angeles-bound Santa Fe Chief in Kansas City. before the train is half way to L.A., J.D., Mary Carol, Robert and Grace Harrison have crossed paths with a Nazi spy and one of the four has been kidnapped. The children are drawn into a quest that requires them to cross two thousand miles of prehistoric wilderness with nothing to guide them but their wits, each other, and an old map that only the youngest can read.
The Agatha Awards were announced by Malice Domestic, an annual fan convention that takes place each year in the Washington, D.C. area. Malice celebrates the traditional mystery books best typified by the works of the late Agatha Christie.