FACULTY AWARDS & HON ORS

Sade Bonilla received two grants. A $360,537 award from Arnold Ventures supports her and Columbia University Teachers College’s Veronica Minaya-Lazarte’s randomized controlled trial to evaluate a cost-of-living grant for low-income community college students. A $2,299,746 award from the Institute of Education Sciences—shared with co-PIs Nicole Edgecombe, Maria Cormier, and Catherine Finnegan from Columbia University—funds a project examining the Virginia Community College System’s central pandemic workforce recovery strategy. \ The Heising-Simons Foundation awarded Caroline Brayer Ebby and her co-PI Karina G. Diaz $399,854 for a mixed-methods study examining the efficacy of aligned formative assessment and professional learning on preK–3 teacher and student outcomes in a network of public elementary schools in Philadelphia. \ Gerald Campano, María Paula Ghiso of Columbia University Teacher's College, and members of the Communities Advancing Research in Education (CARE) initiative were awarded the 2023 Henry T. Trueba Award for Research Leading to the Transformation of the Social Contexts of Education from the American Educational Research Association. \ María Cioè-Peña was selected for a 2023 National Academy of Education/Spencer Postdoctoral Fellowship for her project “B is for Bilingual, Black, or Broken: Erasure and pathologization through school-based ethnic, linguistic, and disability classifications.” Additionally, her book, (M)othering Labeled Children: Bilingualism and Disability in the Lives of Latinx Mothers (Multilingual Matters, 2021), won the First Book Award from the American Association of Applied Linguistics. \ Amalia Daché received two grants with collaborator Juan Garibay from the University of Virginia. A $496,840 award from the Spencer Foundation will support their project “The Afterlife of Slavery on Campus: Black Student Experiences with University Histories of Slavery and their Views on Higher Education Reparations.” And $50,000 from the Russell Sage Foundation will support their project “Student Racial Justice Activism and Higher Education Reparations at Universities Founded Pre-Civil War.” \ Vivian L. Gadsden was honored with the David N. Dinkins Social Justice Award from the “I Have a Dream" Foundation.” \ Zachary Herrmann and Taylor Hausburg were awarded both a Penn Global Engagement Fund grant and a Penn Environmental Innovations Initiative Research Community grant. The former will support their work with the Project-Based Leaning for Global Climate Justice certificate program, and the latter will support them coordinating with scholars across Penn to develop programming and conduct research on this topic. Herrmann was also named a faculty fellow with the Penn Environmental Innovations Initiative and was selected for the Integrating Sustainability Across the Curriculum program, which helps Penn faculty introduce environmental sustainability into their courses. \ Nancy Hornberger received a Distinguished Alumni Award from the University of Wisconsin–Madison School of Education, recognizing her internationally known career in bilingualism and biliteracy, ethnography and language policy, and Indigenous language revitalization. \ Yumi Matsumoto received a $49,774 grant from the Spencer Foundation for her project “International Students’ Communicative Practice in US University Classrooms: Multimodal Analyses of Multilinguals’ Communicative Repertoires,” which will be funded through 2024. \ Nicole Mittenfelner Carl was awarded a $95,603 grant from the Pennsylvania Department of Education as part of the Aspiring to Educate STEM-CS grant program, which aims to diversify the pipeline of STEM and computer science teachers. Her project focuses on recruiting and supporting first-generation, low-income undergraduate students into the teaching profession in partnership with the Center for Black Educator Development, the School District of Philadelphia, Penn’s Netter Center for Community Partnerships, the Responsive Math Teaching project, and undergraduate student groups. \ Jennifer Morton was recently awarded a 2023 Guggenheim Fellowship. She is one of three fellows in the category of philosophy this year. Morton was also named winner of the 2023 University of Louisville Grawemeyer Award in Education for her ideas published in Moving Up Without Losing Your Way: The Ethical Costs of Upward Mobility (Princeton University Press, 2019). \ Michael Nakkula and Andy Danilchick earned a $488,201 grant to expand their Consortium for Mental Health and Optimal Development across Chester County. In collaboration with the Chester County Intermediate Unit, the consortium works to support mental health initiatives that foster optimal development for students and staff in 16 county school districts and organizations, serving over 165 participants this year. It builds off a similar consortium Nakkula and Danilchick have run at Penn since 2019 with regional school districts. \ Laura Perna received the AEFP-CUE Higher Education Award at the March meeting of the Association for Education Finance and Policy. The award celebrates scholars who are engaged in exemplary applied research in higher education and in broad dissemination of results and policy implications. \ Diane Waff was honored with the Helen O. Dickens Lifetime Achievement Award from the Women of Color at Penn. The award recognizes outstanding leadership, service, community impact, and commitment to improving the quality of life for and/or serving as a role model to women of color. \ Ericka Weathers was awarded a Russell Sage Foundation Presidential Grant for a project examining the effects of school-based policing in Pennsylvania. She was also selected as a 2022 outstanding reviewer for the journal Educational Evaluation and Policy Analysis \ Sharon Wolf was selected for a LEAP Research Fellowship. A joint program of the Jacobs Foundation and MIT Solve, Leveraging Evidence for Action to Promote Change (LEAP) is a global initiative that brings together researchers, social entrepreneurs, and education ventures to advance evidence-based learning solutions that help children thrive. \ Jonathan Zimmerman received a $43,000 grant from the Spencer Foundation to support archival research for his book on the history of schools and universities during epidemics and pandemics.

Cheryl Logan, GRD’17, is returning to Penn GSE, where she will oversee the launch of the new McGraw Center for Educational Leadership as its first executive director. A former chief academic officer at the School District of Philadelphia, Logan was most recently the superintendent of Omaha Public Schools, where she led the district through a groundbreaking COVID-19 testing pilot study with the University of Nebraska Medical Center that enabled Omaha to be one of the first large, urban school districts in the nation to return to inperson learning in 2020. That leadership was one of the defining factors cited when she won the McGraw Prize for K–12 Education in 2022.

“With her wealth of experience and expertise in the field of education, Dr. Logan is poised to play an instrumental role in the development of the next generation of education leaders,” said Dean Pam Grossman. “We believe that her innovative and visionary approach will help shape the direction of our Center and ensure that the Center becomes a driving force for positive change in the field of education.”

The McGraw Center was announced last fall as part of a recordsetting gift by the Harold W. McGraw, Jr. Family Foundation, and its focus will be on creating next-level education leaders across all sectors of learning.

Eight Penn GSE professors made Education Week’s 2023 Edu-Scholar Public Influence Rankings list. This annual list recognizes universitybased scholars whose voices shape educational policies and practices. Angela Duckworth , a professor of psychology with a secondary appointment at Penn GSE, ranked second on the list, which also included GSE faculty members Vivian L. Gadsden

Gonzales, Dean Pam Grossman , Richard M. Ingersoll

Provost for Faculty Laura W. Perna , Howard C. Stevenson

Jonathan Zimmerman.

Two recent graduates of the Independent School Teaching Residency (ISTR) program received significant teaching awards as early career teachers.

Sabrina de Brito, C’21, GED’23, works as an upper school humanities teacher at St. Anne’sBelfield School in Charlottesville, Virginia. She was recently awarded the Golden Apple Award for Excellence in Teaching for the 2022–2023 school year, a prize whose winners represent less than two percent of all teachers in public and private schools in Charlottesville and Albemarle County, Virginia. She was also recently selected for a prestigious Fulbright English Teaching Assistantship in Thailand, which begins this summer after her current fellowship ends.

“Receiving the Fulbright news was so surreal, I still can’t believe that it’s actually happening,” she said. “I feel incredibly grateful for the immense support that I’ve received both at St. Anne’s-Belfield School and through the ISTR program at Penn. I really am so very lucky.”

Jamiah Bennett, GED’23, was honored with the Class of 1959 Fund for a Career in the Classroom award from Miss Porter's School in Farmington, Connecticut. The award recognizes excellence in teaching by a faculty member in the first years of their teaching career. In addition to being a humanities teacher, Bennett has worked in the Miss Porter’s summer programs, run the Serious Fitness program, coached the volleyball team, and is now the advisor to an affinity group.

“As someone who is passionate about education and puts 110 percent into my career as an educator, it was rewarding to receive such recognition of that work early in my career,” said Bennett, who became a full-time faculty member at Miss Porter's after her fellowship there ended.

Penn GSE launched a new partnership with the Jacobs Foundation last year to support and empower the next generation of education entrepreneurs. A cornerstone of this collaboration is the Jacobs Education Impact Prize, which awards a selected cohort of Penn GSE Education Entrepreneurship master’s students practical and financial support to develop and launch their own education social impact venture. Over a year, these fellows receive $10,000 to $20,000 in funding for their venture, coaching from industry experts, professional development opportunities, and access to the global network of Jacobs Fellows who are also working to transform learning through social entrepreneurship.

The first six recipients of the Jacobs Education Impact Prize are (pictured below from left) Aqeela Allahyari, Sidra Alvi, Psacoya Guinn , Neha Gupta , Heidi Mitchell, and Natalia Rodriguez . (All are set to earn their master’s degrees in the coming months.) Their projects differ in geographic and educational focuses but share the collective goal of addressing individual learning needs to fully support education.

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Allahyari is working on a bilingual, instructional-level-based educational model in Saudi Arabia instead of the traditional grade-level-based one. Alvi’s venture forms partnerships with Islamic preK–12 schools in the US to provide accommodations in faith-based learning environments for children with disabilities. Through tutoring, mentoring, and intergenerational drama therapy, the nonprofit that Guinn created helps K–5 students experiencing homelessness combat chronic absenteeism and enhance learning and development. Gupta brings her tutoring and consulting experience to equip second-generation students with future-ready skills. Hearth and Home Education, created by Mitchell, mentors families in their transition to homeschooling. Rodriguez is the founder of FAM Academy, which helps girls and women in Colombia access critical knowledge about their bodies, sexuality, and relationships. Learn more at penng.se/jacobs1

Gordon Divine “Dee” Asaah, GR’21, a Reading/Writing/Literacy (RWL) doctorate, won the 2023 Jolley Bruce Christman and Steven S. Goldberg Award for Best Dissertation in Urban Education for his qualitative practitioner research study on the learning experiences of Black African and Caribbean immigrant and refugee youth.

The award celebrates research with a commitment to social justice in education and takes into consideration both the methodological and substantive aspects of the honoree’s dissertation. Asaah’s groundbreaking work explores community cultural wealth, transnational knowledge, and systematic challenges for Black immigrant and refugee youth, examining the role community-based organizations play in mediating students’ transnational literacy practices and the potential partnerships they can forge with schools.

To lay a solid research base and build trust with a historically underexamined population, Asaah spent years studying extant literature and languages and working in community-based organizations and nonprofits. “For two years, I immersed myself as a student and teacher in social justice work alongside multilingual, multiethnic Black immigrant and refugee youth and their families in Philadelphia,” he said.

by Rebecca Raber