Student News Fall 2014

JaNay Brown-Wood 

JaNay Brown-Wood (PhD) published her first children’s picture book, Imani’s Moon, in October. The book has been selected as the National Association of Elementary School Principals’ Children’s Book of the Year and publisher Charlesbridge named it “Picture Book of the Month.”

The main character in the book, Imani, is a young Maasai girl with a loving mother and a desire to do something great. When she decides she wants to touch the moon, she works hard to reach her goal, even in the face of teasing from the naysayers around her. Learn more about Brown-Wood’s writing.

Visnja Milojicic

Visnja Milojicic (MA in education policy) has received the Segal Ameri- Corps fellowship from City Year Los Angeles. Recipients must complete more than 1,700 volunteer hours for City Year. UC Davis Graduate Studies has matched the fellowship award to cover Milojicic’s fees to attend the School’s year-long Master of Arts program in education policy. City Year’s mission is to end the high school dropout crisis, by providing tutoring for low-performing students in grades 3-9 in the areas of English and math. (Dean Harold Levine serves on the board of City Year Sacramento.) Learn more about City Year at http://www.cityyear.org.

BernNadette Best-Green

BernNadette Best-Green (PhD) has been selected for participation in the California Council on Teacher Education’s (CCTE) 2014-2015 “Quest for Teacher Education Research” to conduct an ethnographic research study titled “Understanding How New Teachers Can Augment the Academic Achievement of Culturally, Linguistically, and Socioeconomically Diverse Learners.” Best-Green is the principal investigator on this study working under the collaborative sponsorship and supervision of School of Education professors Karen Watson-Gegeo and Danny Martinez. She will also work closely with her CCTE mentor, Ronald Solorzano, a professor of education at Occidental College.

Best-Green received the 2014 Mark Cary Reflective Learner Award, the Graduate Group in Education’s 2014-2015 Teacher Educator-Scholar Fellowship, and a UC Davis and Humanities 2014-2015 Graduate Student Research Award.

Follow the results of another of Best-Greene’s research studies, “Thriving While Black,” on Facebook and read more about her other research.

Five School of Education Students Awarded Research Fellowships

Five School of Education students have been awarded competitive fellowships to conduct research on a wide range of issues important to youth and education. Kevin Gee, assistant professor of education, advises on each of the projects listed below:

• Kelsey Krausen, PhD student, has been appointed a research fellow with the UC Davis Center for Poverty Research. Her research examines trends in student absenteeism and truancy using data from the California Healthy Kids Survey.
• Ijeoma Ononuju, PhD student, has been selected to conduct an impact evaluation of a school nutrition intervention for 2014-15. His fellowship is supported by the Healthy Youth/Healthy Environment (HY/HE) initiative on campus and comes with a $1,000 stipend.
• Mark Theile and Visnja Milojicic, students in the MA in education policy program, have also been awarded similar fellowships by HY/HE to conduct research for 2014-15.
• Michael Hill, PhD student, spent five weeks this fall (October to December) evaluating an elementary reading program called Literacy Boost in the Philippines, as a research fellow for Save the Children’s Save-University Partnership Program.