2022: New faculty, administration and research to further our mission
General School News
In 2022, U.S. News and World Report ranked the School of Education at 32nd in the nation, among the top 12% of education schools.
Anne Jones joined the School as Assistant Dean of Student Affairs and Community Partnerships. As a key advisor to the Dean and member of the senior leadership team, Jones plays a central role in student and academic program planning, policy setting, outreach, strategic planning, organizational development, and risk management.
Professor Cynthia Carter Ching was named Associate Dean of Academic Programs. She returned to the School after serving as interim vice provost and dean for undergraduate education from 2020 to 2022.
The Dean’s Board of Advisors announced the appointment of five new members including Chief Product Officer at PowerSchool Marcy Daniel, employment attorney and mediator Geoff Hash, retired educator Sharon Takahashi (BA ’74, Cred. ’75), founder of STG Techsource Sophie Boroditsky and retired educator and administrator Marilyn Reisen (BA, ’70, Cred., ’71).
Research
The School of Education assembled a research guide that tracks faculty and staff findings on the impacts of COVID-19. This body of work examines pandemic-related challenges and offers strategies for addressing COVID-19 in education. The School’s Graduate Group in Education also conducted 13 live research seminars with campus and visiting professors, including Profs. Maximus Sefotho, Tony Albano, Jennifer Higgs, Lee Martin, Elizabeth Montaño and Darnel Degand, postdoctoral researchers Shulong Yan, Michael W. Moses II and Kayce Mastrup, and PhD students Hodari Davis, Stacy Wittstock, Ambar Hernandez Negrete, Izamar Ortíz-González, and Sombo Koo.
Collaboration
The Center for Applied Policy in Education (CAP-Ed) hosted a delegation of members of Bavarian State Parliament from Germany. The Center team, German delegates, and Chancellor Gary May met to discuss CAP-Ed’s Superintendents Collaborative Network and education reform in California, and lay the groundwork for future partnerships and research. The School also received visitors from the University of Johannesburg, who met with Dean Lindstrom and the MIND Institute to discuss research into neurodevelopmental learning needs in children.
Alumni Support
Education leader and alum Marsha Gurney-Speck, Ed.D. (Cred., ‘69) created the Teacher Education Fund: Fostering Teaching & Learning with Equity, Inclusion & Justice. Longtime supporters Sandi Redenbach (‘72, Cred. ‘73) and Ken Gelatt (‘67, Cred. ‘68) provided a generous gift to renovate and upgrade two School of Education classrooms.
In Other News:
- The Center for Community and Citizen Science continued its “Collabinar” research seminar series with two presentations on data science and the Living Snow project.
- The School of Education released the Research and Innovation Centers Impact Report which highlights the programming and scholarship of our nine centers.
- The ongoing Expanding Equity in Educational Research series featured UC Riverside School of Education Professor Rita Kohli and University of Wisconsin–Madison Professor Erica Halverson.
Faculty News
We added two faculty members in July:
- Dr. Alicia Rusoja joined the School of Education faculty as an assistant professor. She studies the literacy, teaching and learning practices of Latinx immigrants organizing for their own and others’ human rights.
- Dr. Yianella Blanco joined the faculty as an assistant professor in the language, literacy and culture emphasis area.
Dr. Rusoja also received an honorable mention for the 2022 Alan C. Purves Award, which recognizes articles published in the Research in the Teaching of English journal of National Council of Teachers of English.
Prof. Margarita Jimenez-Silva was promoted to full professor, Prof. Nicole Sparapani was promoted to associate professor and Prof. Torry Winn was promoted to associate professor of teaching.
Professor and Associate Dean for Academic Programs Maisha Winn, co-director of the Transformative Justice in Education Center, was named a Stanford University Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences 2022-23 residential fellow in the field of education.
Prof. Danny Martinez was named a 2021-22 UC Davis Chancellor’s Fellow, which awards a select cohort of outstanding faculty working to solve complex and pressing problems $25,000 in funding each.
Prof. Alexis Patterson Williams received the Post-Tenure Start-Up Award from the UC Davis Office of Diversity, Equity & Inclusion’s Center for the Advancement of Multicultural Perspectives on the Social Sciences, Arts, and Humanities.
At the 2022 annual meeting of the American Educational Research Association (AERA), Prof. Marcela Cuellar was awarded the AERA Latina/o/x Research Issues (LRI) Special Interest Group (SIG) Award for significant contributions in elementary, secondary, or postsecondary education research.
Dr. Orlando Carreón received a Chancellor’s Award for Diversity and Community. He was recognized in particular for his social justice and decolonial framework for teacher education.
The UC Davis Office of the Chancellor and the Academic Senate Committee on Affirmative Action & Diversity named Prof. Torry Winn a 2022 Chancellor’s Fellow for Diversity, Equity and Inclusion.
Prof. Kevin Gee received the 2022 Outstanding Faculty Award from the UC Davis chapter of the Asian Pacific American Systemwide Alliance (APASA).
Prof. Heather Rose was one of four UC Davis faculty chosen to serve on the newly created Graduate School of Management Board of Fellows.
Faculty presented on a wide variety of topics across education practice and policy. Some of the presentations included:
- Prof. Heidi Ballard gave the opening keynote address at the Engaging Citizen Science Conference at Aarhus University in Denmark, where she presented her talk “Engagement and Learning Through Community and Citizen Science: Why, How and the Evidence of Outcomes.”
- Prof. Marcela G. Cuellar presented her work exploring and investigating emergent themes within Hispanic-Serving Institutions, as well as recommendations for progress toward equity within HSIs, at two recent events. At UCLA, she spoke to a multicampus forum on “Creating Hispanic-Serving Institutions: Insights from Research and Practice.” At UC Davis School of Law, she presented “Interrogating the Intersection of Organizational Identities within Hispanic-Serving Research Institutions” as part of the Aoki Center HSI Speakers Series. Prof. Cuellar also presented at Touro University’s ongoing Deep Equity Now speaker series, and gave her talk “Leading for Equity and Hispanic-Serving Institutions.”
- Prof. Jimenez-Silva, Dean Lindstrom and Director of Research and Partnerships/ Executive Director of REEd Carlas McCauley led a virtual discussion on how COVID-19 has changed K-12 education.
- Prof. Jimenez-Silva joined national teacher and educational leader experts for a panel discussion hosted by Microsoft’s PowerSchool on best practices to support K-12 teachers and staff in their profession, to increase retention, and ultimately to improve student outcomes. Prof. Jimenez-Silva also gave a talk on her book Latinx Experiences in U.S. Schools: Voices of Students, Teachers, Teacher Educators, and Education Allies in Challenging Sociopolitical Times at Harvard’s Gutman Library.
- Dean Lindstrom presented “Paths 2 the Future: Improving Career Outcomes for Young Women with Disabilities” as part of the UC Davis MIND Institute’s Research Seminar series. She was also the keynote speaker on at the 2022 Annual Hybrid Colloquium hosted by the newly established Centre for Neurodiversity at the University of Johannesburg.
- Prof. Martinez was a featured speaker on the topic of “Leveraging Black and Latinx Youth Ingenuity for Linguistic Solidarity” for the UC Davis Hispanic Serving Institution Speaker Series.
Grants
Profs. Michal Kurlaender and Paco Martorell will lead a team of researchers awarded $3 million by the U.S. Department of Education’s Institute for Education Sciences to assess pandemic recovery inside community colleges.
UC Davis Upward Bound, administered by the School’s REEd Center, was awarded five federal grants totaling more than $8.7 million to continue serving 348 high school students in Sacramento, Solano, Shasta and Siskiyou counties over the next five years.
The California Education Lab was awarded a $488,000 grant from the College Futures Foundation to support ongoing research about the college pipeline in California, including a focus on financial aid for community college students.
Prof. Cuellar and colleagues were awarded a $275,000 College Futures Foundation grant to fund research to create a racial equity framework for select California community college baccalaureate degree programs.
