Mildred Boveda, associate professor of education (special education), has been selected as the 2022 Early Career Award recipient by the Division for Culturally and Linguistically Diverse Exceptional Learners (DDEL).
DDEL is one of 17 special interest groups of the Council for Exceptional Children (CEC), the largest international professional organization dedicated to improving educational outcomes for individuals with exceptionalities, including students with disabilities and those identified as gifted.
DDEL’s Early Career Award serves to honor an individual in the early stages of their career (no later than 10 years after receipt of the doctoral degree) whose scholarship serves to enhance the education and quality of life for individual culturally and linguistically diverse exceptional learners.
“The group of advocates, educators and scholars involved with DDEL have been a north star throughout all stages of my career,” Boveda said. “To receive this honor from the organization that publishes Multiple Voices — the only special education journal dedicated to the intersections of disability, race, culture and linguistic diversity — is a tremendous honor!”
In her scholarship, Boveda uses the terms "intersectional competence" and "intersectional consciousness" to refer to educators' understanding of diversity and how students, families and colleagues have multiple sociocultural markers that intersect in complex and nuanced ways. She designed the Intersectional Competence Measure to assess teachers’ preparedness for an increasingly diverse student population.
Her research interests are special education, teacher education, intersectionality and Black feminist epistemology, and urban education. Her research focuses on establishing the theoretical and empirical evidence of validity of the intersectional competence construct. Drawing from Black feminist theory and collaborative teacher education research, she interrogates how differences are framed across education communities to influence education policy and practice.
Boveda came to the Penn State College of Education this fall from the Mary Lou Fulton Teachers College at Arizona State University, where she was assistant professor of special education and cultural and linguistic diversity. She earned her Ed.D. (doctor of education) in exceptional student education from Florida International University, and her Ed.M. (master of education) in education policy and management from the Harvard Graduate School of Education.
She started her career as a special education teacher in Miami Dade County Public Schools. Boveda engages in various professional activities that allow her to examine the research, practice and policies involved with educating students with diverse needs. She is a past president of the DDEL and past chair of the Diversity Caucus for the Teacher Education Division of CEC.