Photo caption: (top row l to r) Feng Yang, Ewa McGrail, Chantee Earl, Diane Truscott and Cirleen DeBlaere; (bottom row l to r) Kathryn McCarthy, Daphne Greenberg and Janice Fournillier. Not pictured: Maggie Renken.
story and photo by Claire Miller
The College of Education & Human Development is pleased to announce the recipients of its 2020 Faculty Awards.
These faculty have published extensively, mentored numerous educators and peers, secured significant grant funding, and represented Georgia State University and the College of Education & Human Development in school systems, community organizations and in their disciplines.
The 2020 recipients are:
Outstanding Faculty Teaching Award for Undergraduate Teaching
Maggie Renken, associate professor, Department of Learning Sciences
This award recognizes a full-time faculty member in the college for outstanding achievement in the area of teaching.
Maggie Renken’s research has made significant contributions to understanding, scaffolding and measuring students’ science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) knowledge. Her projects explore the acquisition and revision of knowledge in domains like biology and physics; studies address the mechanisms underlying knowledge acquisition and the development of these mechanisms. This work is intended to inform approaches for assessing and improving scientific thinking and learning in formal and informal STEM learning environments, particularly those that integrate technology use. While the emphasis is on adolescents in grades sixth through twelve, projects often span Pre-K through grade 16 and often narrow in on considering outcomes for students from populations typically underrepresented in STEM.
Outstanding Faculty Teaching Award for Graduate Teaching
Ewa McGrail, associate professor, Department of Middle and Secondary Education
This award recognizes a full-time faculty member in the college for outstanding achievement in the area of teaching.
Ewa McGrail is a leader in literacy research whose publications and work reflect ground-breaking research in literacy and technology in teaching and learning. Her work has appeared in a variety of top-ranking journals, including English Education, Teachers College Record, Journal of Research in Childhood Education, Assessing Writing, Journal of Academic Ethics, Innovate, Action in Teacher Education, Kappa Delta Pi Record, The Reading Teacher and Educational Leadership. She is a 2020 co-recipient of Georgia State University’s Instructional Innovation Award and a co-founder of a multi-disciplinary international multimodal online journal, Ubiquity: The Journal of Literature, Literacy and the Arts that publishes thought-provoking research, analyses of practice and creative work from urban, rural and international perspectives and contexts. In her research, McGrail examines digital writing and new media composition; copyright and media literacy; multiliteracies and multimodal assessment; and technology use in teaching and learning. She also explores the experiences of students and educators from outgroups or who are otherwise not in the mainstream.
Outstanding Faculty Service to the Profession Award
Cirleen DeBlaere, associate professor, Department of Counseling and Psychological Services
This award recognizes a full-time faculty member who fulfills in an exemplary way the college’s commitment to service and has consistently demonstrated exemplary service to their profession at a national level.
Cirleen DeBlaere examines the experiences of individuals with multiple and intersecting marginalized identities, with a particular emphasis on the experiences of women of color and sexual minority people of color. To date, her work has focused on the links of minority stressors (e.g., discrimination, prejudice, stigma) to mental health. Her research has been published in premier journals in her field, such as the Journal of Counseling Psychology, The Counseling Psychologist and Psychology of Women Quarterly. DeBlaere is co-chairing a special task group with the Society of Counseling Psychology to develop a model of social justice and advocacy for counseling psychology and co-founded (and is the inaugural co-chair of) the Division on Asian Americans with Multiple Heritages of the Asian American Psychological Association. She recently received the Outstanding Early Career Professional Supervisor/Trainer Award from the Society of Counseling Psychology’s Supervision and Training Section and the 2019 Woman of the Year Award from the society’s Section for the Advancement of Women.
Outstanding Faculty Service to the Community Award
Chantee Earl, clinical associate professor, Department of Middle and Secondary Education
This award recognizes a full-time faculty member who fulfills in an exemplary way the college’s commitment to service and has consistently demonstrated exemplary service to the community and/or campus.
Chantee Earl is passionate about education and is committed to improving the educational landscape for all people. A former high school social studies teacher, Earl has more than 10 years of K-12 classroom teaching experience. She has taught in various comprehensive and alternative educational school settings in California, Pennsylvania and Georgia. Earl is very active within the metro Atlanta community and the greater international educational community. She has sponsored teacher professional development workshops, monthly social studies days and weekly tutoring sessions at various after-school programs. Earl has hosted summer reading events in collaboration with the Mayor’s Summer Reading Club and reading clubs for struggling readers sponsored by the Dollar General Grant. In addition, she sponsors an annual study abroad program to the Dominican Republic entitled, “Service Learning: Connecting Classroom Learning to Local and Global Experiences.” She is dedicated to the field of education and hopes through her teaching and service, she is able to provide opportunities that develop the skills and talents of all people.
Innovation in International Education Faculty Award
Janice Fournillier, associate professor with tenure, Department of Educational Policy Studies
This award recognizes a full-time faculty member in the college for their outstanding achievement in international education.
Janice Fournillier teaches and writes about qualitative research methodologies and works as a program evaluator and research methodologist on state- and nationally-funded grants. She published several articles and book chapters exploring the use of qualitative research methodologies from the perspective of a “native” ethnographer, using data from her Ph.D. dissertation on Carnival mas’ making in her native country Trinidad and Tobago. She has a research interest in auto-ethnography, case studies, teaching and learning in non-school spaces like Trinidad and Tobago Carnival mas’ camps, teacher education, urban contexts and issues related to writing in-between frames in an international context.
Outstanding Faculty Research Award
Feng Yang, assistant professor, Department of Kinesiology and Health
This award recognizes a full-time faculty member in the college for outstanding achievement in the area of scholarship.
Feng Yang holds a Ph.D. in ergonomics from Beijing University of Aeronautics and Astronautics. Yang and his team conduct research related to biomechanics, motor disorders and rehabilitation. Currently, his research focuses on fall prevention and neurorehabilitation among older adults and individuals with movement diseases, such as multiple sclerosis, stroke, etc. Specifically, Yang and his team try to identify the underlying mechanisms of falls from the perspectives of biomechanics and motor control among healthy and pathological populations. They also work to develop novel, effective yet cost-efficient training paradigms, like vibration training, perturbation training, etc., to prevent falls among individuals with elevated falling risk. Yang’s research has been supported by various funding agencies and he has published more than 50 articles in prestigious journals.
Outstanding Faculty Research Mentoring Award
Daphne Greenberg, distinguished university professor, Department of Learning Sciences
This award recognizes a full-time faculty member who fulfills in an exemplary way the college’s commitment to providing mentoring in the conduct of research to faculty colleagues and doctoral students.
Daphne Greenberg is the director of the CEHD’s Adult Literacy Research Center. Her current research focuses on adults who read below the eighth-grade level. She is interested in uncovering their strengths and weaknesses, as well as studying the best instructional approaches for them. She is currently the principal investigator of the Center of the Study of Adult Literacy, a national research center on adult literacy funded by the U.S. Department of Education’s Institute of Education Sciences. Greenberg has received funding from the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, the National Institute for Literacy, the U.S. Department of Education, the Komen Foundation and the Department of Defense. Her articles have appeared in several journals, such as the Scientific Studies of Reading, Journal of Adolescent and Adult Literacy, Journal of Learning Disabilities, Journal of Research on Educational Effectiveness and Annals of Dyslexia. She has served on numerous expert panels, such as the Institute of Education Sciences Reading, Writing and Language Peer Review Panel and the National Center for Education Sciences Focus Group on Adult Education and Training Data Collection.
Amy R. Lederberg Award for Outstanding Research in Educational Psychology
Kathryn McCarthy, assistant professor, Department of Learning Sciences
Established by Dr. Carol Springer Sargent to honor her dissertation chair, Dr. Amy R. Lederberg, this award is given to a new faculty member to support the development of their research agenda and recognize research-related accomplishments.
Kathryn McCarthy earned her Ph.D. from the University of Illinois at Chicago in 2016. Prior to joining the CEHD faculty, she was a postdoctoral scholar in the Science of Learning and Educational Technology Lab at Arizona State University. Dr. McCarthy’s basic research examines the higher-order cognitive processes involved in reading comprehension and how these processes vary across readers and across disciplines. Her applied research explores how both in-person interventions and educational technology can be leveraged to support successful learning from text.
Outstanding Faculty Scholarship Mentoring Award
Diane Truscott, associate professor, Department of Early Childhood and Elementary Education
This award recognizes a full-time faculty member who fulfills in an exemplary way the college’s commitment to providing mentoring in junior faculty’s programs of scholarship.
Since joining the Georgia State faculty in 2005, Diane Truscott has served as the principal investigator or co-principal investigator of four U.S. Department of Education grants focused on teacher preparation and support for urban schools serving marginalized populations. She has partnered with urban professional development schools and professional learning sites across four states. Truscott served as director and co-director of an interdisciplinary urban graduate research collaborative for early scholars supporting research in urban schools. Her publications are found in high-ranking journals, such as Phi Delta Kappan, Action in Teacher Education, Urban Education, Peabody Journal of Education, Race Ethnicity and Education, Teacher Education & Practice, Multicultural Perspectives and the International Journal of Social Research Methodology. Her research examines urban teacher dispositions and culturally-responsive educational practices.
Award recipients were recognized at a luncheon in their honor on March 11.