In connection with the establishment of the Spencer Forum in June 2005 the Foundation began a pilot Resident Fellows program housed at its Chicago offices. Like the Forum, the Resident Fellows program intends to promote cross-disciplinary collaboration and interaction among researchers, policy analysts and practitioners.
The first cohort of fellows were in residence at the Foundation in the Fall of 2006. The pilot phase of the Resident Fellow program will continue through June 2010.
Applications for this program are accepted by invitation only.
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2008 | 2007 | 2006 |
2008 Resident Fellows
Please choose a resident fellow to view their biography.
Arnetha F. Ball, Stanford University
Stefanie Ann DeLuca, Johns Hopkins University
Constance A. Flanagan, Pennsylvania State University
Carl F. Kaestle, Brown University
Elizabeth Hollander, DePaul University
Diana C. Pullin, Boston College
Richard A. Settersten, Oregon State University
Lee S. Shulman, The Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching
Judith Shulman
Elizabeth Hollander is the former director of Campus Compact, a national organization that advocates for student service learning and for the civic mission of universities and colleges. While at Spencer, Liz wrote a number of articles regarding civic engagement for various publications. Her expertise on civic involvement provided Foundation staff with valuable knowledge in support of its initiative on civic engagement. She prepared a report including a historical perspective and scan of current foundation and government investments in the field of civic engagement and organized two meetings of researchers and practitioners to examine what we know and what we need to learn about how young people develop lifelong civic skills and inclinations.
Carl Kaestle is University Professor Emeritus at Brown University where he held appointments in Education, History and Public Policy. His scholarly record on issues from literacy development in the U.S., to the evolution of urban school systems, to the federal role in school reform place him among the top education historians in the nation today. During his five month fellowship he continued work on a book about the federal role in elementary and secondary education from 1940-1980. He also pursued several projects that complemented his study including examinations of equal educational opportunity in the U.S. and continuation of the work he pursued in conjunction with the Advanced Studies Fellowship Program at Brown on federal and national strategies of school reform.
Arnetha Ball is a professor of education at Stanford University. She is working on a project that will advance theoretical and practical knowledge in the areas of teaching, teacher education, and literacy studies. She plans to conduct an in-depth analysis of the final data she collected from U.S. and South African teachers that focuses on the preparation of teachers to teach low income students of color in culturally and linguistically complex classrooms. The analysis of this data will allow her to complete a longitudinal study of teacher development and change and will result in the writing of a volume that she is currently working on entitled Studying Diversity in Teacher Education.
Stefanie DeLuca is an assistant professor of sociology at Johns Hopkins University. Her recent fellowship allowed her to bring together her research in the sociology of education with her research on neighborhood effects, housing programs and residential mobility. She is particularly interested in the way housing decisions and residential mobility affect the educational and social outcomes of young people. While at Spencer she completed several articles. DeLuca also spent time reconsidering the high school to work and high school to college transition and how best to prepare young people for postsecondary life. With some colleagues and the Foundation’s support, she wrote a book prospectus, Should Everyone Go to College? Reconsidering the Risks and Rewards of Postsecondary Education in America and an article, “Post-Industrial Pathways: Redefining Secondary and Postsecondary Career Preparation and the Transition to Work" (an abbreviated version of this has been invited for The Chronicle of Higher Education).
Connie Flanagan is a professor of youth civic development in the Department of Agricultural and Extension Education at Penn State University. She is working on a book entitled Adolescents’ Interpretations of the ‘Social Contract’. It is based on her program of research on how adolescents theorize about and make sense of their social order, how they interpret the ties that bind citizens of a polity together, and how their views of the social contract (the rights and responsibilities of citizens) are refracted through lenses of race, gender, and social class. Youths’ experiences in mediating institutions (especially schools and community based organizations) figure prominently in their views of the ‘social contract’. The book will be published by Harvard University Press.
Diana Pullin is Professor of Education Law and Public Policy at Boston College. She also coordinates the Joint Degree Program in Law and Education at the Law School and the Lynch School of Education at the University. While at Spencer she will be working on a project entitled Opportunity to Learn: Law, Social Science and the Promotion of Educational Attainment and Equity. It seeks to address these questions: How have judges and legislators attempted to impact the provision of learning opportunities for the nation’s children? What role has social science evidence played in education law? What are the future prospects for improving opportunity to learn through the use of legal mandates based upon social science evidence? Can new legal theory be built that could utilize social science knowledge to improve opportunity to learn, particularly for children most at risk of educational disadvantage? The project employs an interdisciplinary approach using legal and public policy analysis coupled with a review of relevant social science literature.
Rick Settersten is Professor of Human Development and Family Sciences in the College of Health and Human Sciences at Oregon State University. During his fellowship Rick worked on a forthcoming book, tentatively titled Slouching toward Adulthood: Why Young People Are Taking So Long to Grow Up and What It Means for Society (with co-author Barbara Ray). The book is based on ten years of research and interviews and shows how fast-paced changes underfoot in society have left some youth blind-sided and others free to create a new playbook for what it means to be an adult. It shatters many stereotypes of this generation and gets to the heart of why youth are living at home longer, delaying marriage, and, as some suggest, dodging the responsibilities of adulthood. The book informs several of the core emphases of the Foundation including education and social opportunity, purposes and values of education, and the civic engagement initiative. It emphasizes that education is a key reason that youth are taking longer to “grow up,” and that education has never been more important to life’s outcomes. Educational attainment is tied to the pace and sequence of work positions, earnings potentials, debt, and consumption. It is also connected to the pace and sequence of family transitions; relationships with parents, friends, romantic relationships, spouses, and children; and civic engagement. It showcases what a longer and highly individualized transition to adulthood means for civic engagement of young people and the civic health of our nation.
Judy Shulman served as WestEd’s Director of the Institute for Case Development and the National Board Support Network. Her time at Spencer will focus retrospectively on these two big initiatives: 1) the pioneering approach of supporting teachers to write teaching cases that could be used as tools for professional development and teacher preparation; and 2) a regional initiative to support those who coach candidates for National Board Certification. She plans to revise two papers for publication that deal with how case methods--particularly case writing--and the process of going through candidacy for National Board Certification transformed the way some teachers analyzed and reflected on their teaching methods.
Lee Shulman is President Emeritus of The Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching as well as the Charles E. Ducommun Professor of Education Emeritus and Professor of Psychology Emeritus (by courtesy) at Stanford University. Lee will be working on a book entitled Professing: Teaching and Learning for Responsible Action. He will be exploring what has been learned from a decade of Carnegie studies on education for the professions of law, teaching, engineering, the clergy, nursing and medicine, as well as studies of scholarly professing, the preparation of scholars for the PhD. The book will focus on such themes as the signature pedagogies of the professions, the dynamic balance between routine and innovation in teaching, the continuous tension between visibility and anonymity in learning, and the multiple meanings of "accountability" at the level of the institution, the program, the teacher and the student.
2007 Resident Fellows
Please choose a resident fellow to view their biography.
Walter Feinberg, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
David J. Frank, University of California, Irvine
Vivian Gadsden, University of Pennsylvania
Lingxin Hao, Johns Hopkins University
Suet-Ling Pong, Pennsylvania State University
Pamela Barnhouse Walters, Indiana University
Walter Feinberg is the Charles Dun Hardie Professor of Education at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. Dr. Feinberg's scholarship focuses on the relationship between democracy, work and education. His first book, Reason and Rhetoric: The Intellectual Foundations of Twentieth Century Educational Reform (John Wiley, 1975) examined the concept of equality of educational opportunity and its relation to liberal educational reform. Recent publications include School Choice (forthcoming), For Goodness Sake: Religious Schools and Education for Democratic Citizenry (2006); and Education and Citizenship in Liberal Democratic Societies (2003). Dr. Feinberg is also co-founder of the Institute of Philosophy of Education, Fudan University School of Philosophy in China and a recent John Dewey Lecturer. His current Spencer project is entitled Current Initiatives to Teach Courses on Religion in Public Schools: Visions of American Citizenship Education.
David Frank is Professor of Sociology at the University of California, Irvine, with a courtesy appointment in Education. During his eight-month fellowship at Spencer, David conducted research on the university's global expansion over the 20th century. His project, in particular, examines worldwide explosions in university knowledge and student enrollments from the late 1800s to the present. In contrast to functionalist views, it argues that university expansion represents recent extensions of Modern culture -- i.e., notions that nature is universalistic and law-like and that humans are imbued with capacities to discover and know. The argument is explored with longitudinal and comparative data drawn from university course catalogs and directories.
Vivian Gadsden is the William T. Carter Professor in Child Development and Education and the director of the National Center on Fathers and Families at the University of Pennsylvania. Dr. Gadsden’s research interests focus on cultural and social factors affecting learning and literacy across the life-course and within families, particularly those at the greatest risk for academic and social vulnerability. Her writing focuses on intergenerational learning, particularly on the relationships between literacy in families and issues of culture, race, gender, and poverty in diverse learning contexts. Dr. Gadsden’s research studies examine the intergenerational and cross-cultural nature of learning, literacy, and identity within families and the relationship between family members’ beliefs and practices around learning, educational access, and educational persistence. She is co-author of a forthcoming publication entitled Incarcerated Parents and their Children and author of Defining and Improving Quality in Adult Basic Education: Issues and Challenges.
Lingxin Hao is a Professor of Sociology at Johns Hopkins University. Her research focuses on the impact of contemporary immigration on the social mobility of immigrants and the native born and the resulting changes in social inequality in American society. She is developing two new projects concerned with immigration and health. The selectivity of immigrants from different countries, their unique migration and settlement dynamics, the drastic changes in their health environment upon arrival in the U.S., and their seemingly downward trend in health status offer research opportunities for providing answers to difficult questions in the health inequality literature. She is also expanding her research on the impact of immigration on the host society to include the impact on the home society. Dr. Hao will study the large aggregate capital flows of emigrants' investment in their home countries and their impact on the home and host societies. She is the author of Color Lines, Country Lines: Race, Immigration, and Wealth Stratification in America and co-author of Quantile Regression.
Suet-ling Pong is Professor of Education, Sociology, and Demography at Pennsylvania State University as well as a former Spencer/NAEd Postdoctoral Fellow. Dr. Pong’s work focuses on educational assimilation of children from immigrant families. Her research interests are in comparative education policy, family structure, student achievement, immigration issues, and demography. She is also a 2007 Fulbright Scholar for research on mainland Chinese immigration to Hong Kong. Some recent works include "Self-Fulfilling Prophecy" in Blackwell Encyclopedia of Sociology (forthcoming) and “Neighborhood and School Factors in the School Performance of Immigrants' Children,” in International Migration Review. She is also working in collaboration with another Spencer Resident Fellow, Lingxin Hao.
Pamela B. Walters is the James H. Rudy Professor of Sociology at Indiana University. She teaches and conducts research on social inequality, with a particular focus on American education. In her research she explores the tensions between the role of education as one of the most important forms of state social provision in modern societies – a social right, an entitlement that follows from citizenship – and the ways in which education reproduces and legitimates existing social inequalities. Dr. Walters is a former Spencer/NAEd Postdoctoral Fellow and has served as editor of Sociology of Education, the major journal in her field. She currently co-chairs the Study Committee on Education Research co-sponsored by the Social Science Research Council and the National Academy of Education and directs the Indiana University Center for Education and Society, an innovative cross-field research center and graduate training program that brings together faculty and graduate students in education and in the social sciences. Dr. Walters recent work includes “Betwixt and Between Discipline and Profession: A History of Sociology of Education,” in History of Sociology in America. She also has a book manuscript in preparation entitled Recasting Inequality: The Color-Blind Foundation of Apartheid Schooling in America.
2006 Resident Fellows
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Charles M. Payne, Duke University
William T. Trent, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Mark Smylie, University of Illinois at Chicago
Charles Payne is the Sally Dalton Robinson Professor of History, African American Studies and Sociology and is the Director of the African and African American Studies at Duke University. He is the author of Getting What We Ask For: The Ambiguity of Success and Failure in Urban Education; Debating the Civil Rights Movement and the award-winning I've Got the Light of Freedom: The Organizing Tradition and the Mississippi Freedom Movement and the co-editor of Time Longer Than Rope: A Century of African American Activism, 1850-1950. His scholarly focus remains urban education, the Civil Rights Movement, social change, and social inequality.
Bill Trent is Professor of Educational Policy Studies at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. His research focuses on: 1) Educational Inequality: school desegregation effects (K-12, postsecondary), benefits and consequences, social organization of school, status attainment research, co- and extracurricular activities, comparative education; 2) Race and Ethnicity: social stratification and mobility, equality of opportunity; and 3) Complex Organization/Social Change/Policy. He is currently working on an Educational Reform Project focused on understanding the role of race, ethnicity, class and gender in school reform.
Mark Smylie is Professor and Chair of Policy Studies Area at University of Illinois at Chicago. His research interests include school organization, leadership, and change; teacher learning and professional development; and urban school improvement. He has worked with numerous school systems, state educational agencies, and national educational organizations across the country, helping them in designing research and evaluation projects, school improvement planning, and policy development. Smylie is Secretary-Treasurer for the National Society for the Study of Education (NSSE) which is dedicated to engaging the nation's leading education scholars with leaders of public education in study of major educational issues.