College of Education spring 2023 news in brief

Professor of Education Kai Schafft earns
second Fulbright U.S. Scholar award

Kai Schafft, professor of education (educational leadership and rural sociology), has been selected as a Fulbright U.S. Scholar for 2023-24 for Romania. This is Schafft’s second Fulbright U.S. Scholar award. His first was in Hungary in 2014-15.

Fulbright Scholar Awards are prestigious and competitive fellowships that provide unique opportunities for scholars to teach and conduct research abroad. The Fulbright U.S. Scholar Program is the U.S. government’s flagship international educational exchange program.

This second award is a research and teaching Fulbright that will have Schafft spending the entire 2023-24 academic year in Romania at the Transilvania University of Brasov in the Carpathian Mountains.

“It’s amazing to get this second Fulbright,” Schafft said. “The work I hope to do will extend the earlier work I did in Hungary, teaching and doing research on educational access for Roma students at the K-12 level in both urban and rural contexts. Roma students in rural Romania and elsewhere in the region face a kind of ‘double jeopardy’ because of anti-Roma discrimination more broadly, and rural-urban spatial inequalities in education and poverty status.”

Read the full story at http://bit.ly/3FGvMwF.

Distinguished Professor Murphy elected
to National Academy of Education

P. Karen Murphy, head of the Department of Educational Psychology, Counseling and Special Education in the Penn State College of Education, has been elected to the National Academy of Education (NAEd), an honorific society consisting of U.S. members and international associates who are elected on the basis of outstanding scholarship related to education. Election to the NAEd is the highest honor that could be bestowed on an educational researcher.

“To be elected to this esteemed community by those scholars whose ideas and writings have been transformational to education is deeply humbling. Professionally, this honor stands as an indication that those scholars I have long admired see value and worth in my theoretical and empirical work. That recognition is an honor in itself,” said Murphy, who also is distinguished professor of education (educational psychology) in the college.

“On a personal level, I am still processing the transition from a rural high school kid who earned money for college by bailing hay and working in the rice fields of Texas, to membership in the National Academy of Education. What I know is that this honor is not solely mine. My academic journey would never have been possible without the guidance and support of my family, mentors, colleagues, students and friends,” she said.

Read the full story at https://bit.ly/42rYDyz.

College of Education researchers lend
expertise to Pa. K-12 school funding case

 A ruling by a Pennsylvania Commonwealth Court judge in early February that declared Pennsylvania’s K-12 school funding system unconstitutional is an opportunity to set the stage for students from lower-wealth communities to succeed academically, according to College of Education researchers who participated in the case.

In the case, William Penn School District et al. v. PA Department of Education et al., filed in 2014 by multiple school districts, parents and advocacy groups, Commonwealth Court Judge Renée Cohn Jubelirer ruled that the state’s public education system is unconstitutional due to its inequitable and inadequate funding across districts.

Although the state stopped publicly releasing data on adequacy shortfalls in 2010-11, Matthew Kelly, assistant professor of education (educational leadership), provided updated estimates for recent school years. He calculated that districts, overall, had $4.6 billion less than they needed to reach their adequacy targets.

Kelly served as an expert witness for the plaintiffs, who were challenging the fairness of Pennsylvania’s school funding system. In the expert report he provided, he emphasized that although expectations the state has for school districts have increased over time, the state has increasingly turned toward local taxes to pay for its schools.

Ed Fuller, associate professor of education (educational leadership), reviewed other expert witness reports, provided data to the attorneys for cross-examinations, and discussed strategy with the attorneys.

Read the full story at https://bit.ly/3EZtpEO.

Education faculty member among
Social Science Research Institute Fellows

Jimena Cosso, assistant professor of education in the College of Education, is one of five Penn State faculty members named Social Science Research Institute (SSRI) Mentored Faculty Fellows for 2023-24. The program supports the career development of early career Penn State faculty in social and behavioral sciences to engage in new areas of research and/or the development of new interdisciplinary collaborations aimed at building sustainable research and securing external funding.

The fellowship will support Cosso’s research to advance knowledge of Latine parents’ engagement with their children at home in mathematics. Her goal is to address educational inequalities by improving the commonly used measures to assess the home mathematics environment that do not consider cultural differences. Cosso will focus on creating partnerships with Latine communities in the area and conduct confirmatory factor analysis of a new scale that she developed to properly measure the home mathematics environments of Latine families.

Read about the other SSRI Mentored Faculty Fellows at http://bit.ly/3TdaJr4.

Education faculty to take their own
learning abroad to South Africa

Ashley Patterson and Efraín Marimón, champions of equity and anti-racist pedagogy in the Penn State College of Education, are taking their social justice work to the next level.

Patterson, associate professor of education (curriculum and instruction), and Marimón, associate teaching professor of education (curriculum and instruction), will travel this summer to South Africa to meet with higher education faculty and students and learn about various social justice efforts they’re currently undertaking.

“We were serving on the Committee for Truth and Reconciliation set up through the Penn State Presidential Commission on Race, Bias and Community Safety and we started brainstorming, ‘Wouldn’t it be great if we could learn from countries with similar racial wounds and use that professional experience to inform the work, both at the University level and college level?’” said Marimón.

Patterson and Marimón have been recognized for their leadership and achievements in community engagement and social justice work. They also each won the college’s Cotterill Leadership Enhancement Award — Marimón in 2019 and Patterson in 2020. Neither Patterson nor Marimón had been able to use the Cotterill funding they received because of the COVID pandemic, so it’s available to fund this project.

Patterson and Marimón chose South Africa for a number of reasons that relate to their social justice work in the college. “We’re visiting both Johannesburg and Cape Town to explore South Africa’s rich — and recent — history in making strides to reconcile its racist societal institutions,” Patterson said.

The faculty members are hoping to bring back the knowledge they gain in South Africa to continue exploring themes or possibly implement some of what they learn in some of the programs in the college. They also hope to be able to inform “some still unanswered questions around the University about how we move forward toward being an institution where racial injustice is recognized and where we’re setting out a pathway for how we can positively impact the wrongs that racial injustice have done to our community,” Patterson said.

Read the full story at http://bit.ly/3n6WJDh.

Fellowship program with Sergeants
Major Academy extended through 2026

The U.S. Army Sergeants Major Academy Fellowship has been extended through 2026 through the partnership with the Penn State College of Education and Penn State World Campus.

The program provides scholarships for up to 15 sergeants major to enroll in the online Master of Education in Lifelong Learning and Adult Education program while stationed at the academy at Fort Bliss, Texas. Upon graduating, the fellows teach the Sergeants Major Course, which prepares the military’s next generation of leaders with skills they need on and off the battlefield and helps them earn college credit.

“When the fellows stand in front of their students for the first time, they will be prepared to use the knowledge they learned throughout this program,” said Will Diehl, associate teaching professor of education and director of the online adult education program in the College of Education.

Read the full story at https://bit.ly/3KyxGCL.