As has been the norm at past AERA annual meetings, TC faculty, students and alumni will garner significant honors.

Nancy Lesko, TC’s Maxine Greene Professor for Distinguished Contributions to Education, is the 2019 recipient of AERA's Division B Lifetime Achievement Award. Lesko, who teaches in the Department of Curriculum & Teaching, is an authority on conceptions of children and youth in theory and practice, gender issues in education, and citizenship education in times of war.

Her book, Act Your Age!: A Cultural Construction of Adolescence, now in its second printing, analyzes the impact that race, class, gender and sexuality had during the 20^th century on the ways in which adolescence is conceived of as a stage of development. Act Your Age in one reviewer’s words, explores the social and political outlooks that led to the appropriation of adolescence as “an engine to drive the dominance of white male hegemony.” Lesko’s 2012 edited volume, Keywords in Youth Studies: Tracing Affects, Movements, Knowledges, systematically presents the areas of focus and approaches to research in youth studies, which has become an interdisciplinary field, including youth social exclusion, poverty, school underachievement, school violence, gang activity, sexuality, and youth's interactions with media and the Internet.

Michelle Knight-Manuel, Professor of Education and Associate Dean, will receive the 2020 Willystine Goodsell Award from AERA’s Women in Education Special Interest Group. Knight-Manuel is an authority on equity issues in urban education; teacher education; and qualitative research. She is co-author, with Joanne E. Marciano, of Classroom Cultures: Equitable Schooling for Racially Diverse Youth (Teachers College Press 2019) and College Ready: Preparing Black and Latina/o students for higher education – A Culturally Relevant Approach (Teachers College Press 2013), and is former Director of Culturally Relevant College and Career Readiness for the New York City Department of Education.  She also has studied and worked with a community organization called Sauti Yetu, which is helping teenage girls from Nigeria, Senegal, Mali, Gambia, Mauritania, Sierre Leone, Tanzania and Liberia achieve “academic literacies” at several of  New York City’s International High Schools.

Goodsell   was a nineteenth century activist teacher and faculty member at Teachers College who dedicated her life to advancing opportunities and equal education for women. Since 1981, the award has been given to women who have engaged in outstanding scholarship, activism, and community-building on behalf of women, girls, and education.  

TC alumna Jamila Lyiscott (Ph.D.’15), now Senior Research Fellow at TC’s Institute for Urban and Minority Education and Assistant Professor of Social Justice Education at University of Massachusetts Amherst, will receive AERA’s Award for Outstanding Public Communication of Education Research. The award recognizes education research scholars for “collaborative projects between researchers and practitioners that have had sustained and observable effects on contexts of practice.” Lyiscott’s work focuses on racial justice, community engagement, and youth activism in education through the lens of what she has termed, “Vision-Driven Justice.” She is also the founder and co-director of the Cyphers For Justice (CFJ) youth, research, and advocacy program, apprenticing NYC High School youth, incarcerated youth, and educators as critical social researchers through hip-hop, spoken word, and digital literacy. Her video on Ted.com, “3 Ways to Speak English,” has been viewed more than 4 million times. 

Jamila Lyiscott (Ph.D.’15)

Luronne Vaval, who is both a doctoral student in Science Education, working with Christopher Emdin, Associate Professor of Science Education, and a senior doctoral researcher who works in the research group of Alex Bowers, Associate Professor of Educational Leadership, has won an AERA doctoral dissertation grant. Vaval is interested in Physics Education Research and, more specifically, in identifying student difficulty with representational fluency at the undergraduate level. She uses data analytic techniques to investigate different growth or decline trajectories for students as they relate to STEM high school, college, and early career outcomes. Her dissertation in progress is titled “Is it as straightforward as it seems? Examining the STEM pipeline and persistence to the STEM workforce among high school students.”

Jill Barshay, a staff writer and editor for The Hechinger Report, the nonprofit, independent news outlet based at Teachers College, will receive AERA’s Award for Excellence in Media Reporting on Education Research. Established in 2016, this award recognizes a person who has made noteworthy contributions to reporting on findings, bodies of research, or scholarship in the field of education research in any medium of public communication.  Barshay writes the weekly “Proof Points” column about education research and data. Previously she was the New York bureau chief for Marketplace, a national business show on public radio stations. She has also written for Congressional Quarterly, The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times and the Financial Times and appeared on CNN and ABC News. During the 2013-14 school year, Barshay taught algebra to ninth graders.

[Click here to read a story about the conclusion of TC faculty member Amy Stuart Wells’ term as AERA President, and related programming at the meeting. Click here to read a full schedule of presentations at AERA by TC community members.]