Latest Announcements

Taiylor Rayford, EPSY Ph.D. ’25, was named the American Educational Research Association (AERA) Division E Outstanding Dissertation Awardee in Human Development.

The reviewers for the award nomination noted that they found her work “to be of critical importance to the field, and of great importance to our division.” 

Her dissertation was entitled Hope for the Best, Expect the Worst: A Framework for Understanding Belonging Fulfillment Among Black Graduate Students. She examined factors surrounding the attrition of Black graduate students and how a lack of a sense of belonging can explain it.

She will be honored at the AERA Annual Meeting, April 8-12, in Los Angeles, CA.

Hyun-Sook Kang, associate professor, and Allison Hinds, an Ed.D. student in Education Policy, Organization & Leadership, have published a new paper, "Joint-Degree Language Programs for Future Business and Health Professionals: Student Perspective," in the journal Language Teaching Research.

Language programs face significant challenges in the U.S. and globally. Despite the growing demand for multilingual skills in today’s workplaces, language programs face declining student enrollment, a shortage of qualified teachers, and ongoing budget cuts. 

To help address this crisis, Kang and Hinds examined the motivations and experiences of undergraduate students enrolled in joint-degree language programs, such as Language + International Relations and Language + Health Sciences at a U.S. university. The findings highlight the potential of joint-degree language programs as a viable strategy for mitigating the plight affecting language programs in higher education and beyond.

Idalia Nuñez, associate professor Curriculum & Instruction, has received the Early Career Award from the American Educational Research Association (AERA) Bilingual Education Research SIG.

This award recognizes an individual in the early stages of their career—within 10 years of receiving the doctoral degree—whose research focuses on the role of bilingualism in education, including bilingual education policy, research, and practice. The Early Career Award Committee and the BER SIG Executive Committee commended the exceptional caliber and impact of Nuñez’s scholarship.

Her research is situated at the intersection of race, bi/multilingualism and bi/literacies, border crossing, education, and social justice. She examines the school experiences of bi/multilingual students from diverse backgrounds, exploring the everyday cultural and linguistic resources they bring into K–5 biliteracy classrooms.

She will receive her award at the 2026 AERA Annual Meeting, April 8-12 in Los Angeles, CA.

Leslie Ellis, program specialist for the Council on Teacher Education, and a Ph.D. student in Education Policy, Organization & Leadership, has received a Division A Foster-Polite Scholarship from the American Educational Research Association (AERA).

She will present her paper, Preparing 'Fierce Advocates’ for Racial Equity: Examining Educational Leadership Preparation, at the paper session titled Building Equity-Centered Leadership: Readiness, Reflection, and Systemic Support.

Ellis will be honored at the Division A business meeting at the AERA Annual Meeting, April 8-12 in Los Angeles, CA.

Devon Hedrick Shaw, assistant professor Curriculum & Instruction, was honored by the National Association for Bilingual Education (NABE) with a dissertation award. 

Hedrick-Shaw earned honorable mention for his dissertation, Learning to Become Language Policy Actors: A Qualitative Longitudinal Study of Bilingual Special Educators in Synchronous-Service Teacher Preparation.

The paper was judged on its research, the scholarly quality of the dissertation, and the significance of its contribution to knowledge in the field of bilingual education.

Hedrick-Shaw was recognized at the NABE conference in Chicago, February 9-13.

Dr. Lisa Jackson, LAS ’95, ENG, Elementary Education, was honored by the Illinois State Board of Education as the Special Education Teacher of the Year as part of the Teacher of the Year Cohort.

Jackson works for Woodland High School in Streator, Illinois, where she teaches high school and special education classes. She is one of just 12 teachers statewide to be selected for the cohort.

Teachers named to the Teacher of the Year Cohort must have demonstrated a commitment to equity and the success of all students. They regularly collaborate with colleagues, students, and families to create positive school cultures. They are lifelong learners who connect their schools to the community at large and who inspire other education professionals within and beyond their schools. 

Many of Jackson's students highlighted her commitment to helping students in interviews with WEEK-TV news: 

Senior Layna Wilcoxen said Jackson helped her feel like a leader through the freedom and independence she’s been given through having her as a leader in the school’s Key Club.

“She honestly has been such a figure in my life. She’s changed my life so much, I can’t even express it in words. She’s just always there and she helps us create like this sense of independence,” said Wilcoxen.

“She lets us create all our own ideas, and she helps us shape them into the best versions they can be, so when we carry them out for service projects, they’re always successful because we have her as our backbone and our support,” Wilcoxen said.

The Illinois State Board of Education will announce the 2026 Illinois Teacher of the Year later this spring. All honorees will be recognized at the annual Those Who Excel and Teacher of the Year awards banquet on April 18.

Asif Wilson, assistant professor Curriculum & Instruction, has been awarded two grants from the State of Illinois

Wilson, along with Education faculty Theopolies Moton III, Tamara Bertrand-Jones, and Jon Hale, has received a $2 million grant from the Illinois State Board of Education. The grant will facilitate the implementation of resources for inclusive social studies and the engagement of teachers across Illinois in professional learning opportunities.

The second grant, from the Illinois Department of Human Services, is for Transforming sites of Black healing in Illinois into K-12 curriculum. The grant will allow Illinois Social Studies teachers to visit three sites of Black freedom and resistance in Illinois. This includes a stop in Champaign, at sites of the 1990’s school desegregation social movement led by Black parents. 

The Forum on the Future of Public Education is hosting an interactive morning workshop for K–12 teachers navigating Illinois’s new climate change education mandate on Saturday, March 7, from 8:30 a.m. - noon in the Campus Instructional Facility. 

Join Education faculty Sam Lindgren, Jon Hale, Stephanie Toliver, Oliver Tapaha, post-doctoral researcher Carine Verschueren, and Leon Liebenberg of the Grainger College of Engineering for a morning of facilitated activities and panel conversations. 

Participating teachers will examine what climate change education can look like in practice and the questions it raises for teaching and learning. The session will also offer an early introduction to new climate change and sustainability education professional learning opportunities at the University of Illinois. 

The workshop is open to Illinois teachers in all K-12 subject areas. The workshop is free, but space is limited, and advance registration by February 26, 2026, is required. Participating teachers will receive professional development hours.More information

The College of Education is leading the campus in expanding access to generative AI by launching a centrally funded AI licensing pilot in collaboration with the Office of the Chief Information Officer, which will run from February 2026 through February 2027. 

This pilot provides eligible faculty and staff with access to ChatGPT for Education while intentionally building skills for the responsible, effective use of ChatGPT in teaching, research, and administrative work. Eligibility is based on appointment type and percentage, job-function alignment, and completion of a required Canvas ChatGPT training course. 

Eligible employees received an invitation via their university email and/or Canvas notifications. This initiative positions Education at the forefront of thoughtfully integrating generative AI into daily academic and professional practice.

The program guidelines are in the Inside Education Teams Channel in the Shared files section of the Generative AI Ideas and Resources channel for more info.

Cameron Schwing, Ed.M. '20 C&I, will represent the University of Illinois in the Big Ten Academic Alliance (BTAA) Data Visualization Championship as part of their Love Data Week.

Schwing’s data dashboard summarizes who uses the Illinois app, how they engage with its features, and how they navigate between core services. It was selected as the winning entry for the University of Illinois and will compete against submissions from other Big Ten universities. Schwing is a Data Analyst for the University of Illinois Office of the Chief Information Officer.

The BTAA showcase is publicly accessible and open to the broader academic community. Voting for the Faculty/Staff submissions closes at noon on February 13 and can be found here.

Erin Gahimer, Ed.D '24 EPOL, has been named to the 2026 Cohort of the Early Career Research Fellows Program from GlobalEd.

Now in her 10th year in International Education, Erin spent 8 years working in Education Abroad, specifically developing and coordinating faculty-led programs. Since August 2024, Erin has worked in International Admissions at Indiana University Bloomington, recruiting international students from across Asia, Africa, and Latin America.

The ECRF program provides mentorship and guidance to promising researchers and scholar-practitioners in international education, along with a stipend. Fellows work on projects related to their research areas under the guidance of GlobalEd faculty.

Israt Z. Nipa, a Ph.D. student in Education Policy, Organization & Leadership, recently published an article in the Journal of Education. The 

Nipa examines the lived academic experiences of South Asian Bangladeshi and Indian international doctoral students at a U.S. midwestern university. The research underscored the institutional commitment to integrating the experiences of these marginalized student subgroups, developing relevant measures that address their specific needs, and fostering an inclusive campus climate.

Read the article here.

Mary Kalantzis, professor Education Policy, Organization & Leadership, is part of a group that was recently awarded funding from the Spencer Foundation.

The group was awarded $498,533 in funding for their research project, Fostering Translingual, Disciplinary Literacy Development Through Generative AI in U.S. Middle and High Schools. The project will run through March of 2029. 

The initiative explores the empowering and transformative potential of Generative AI to support translingual, Latinx students’ disciplinary literacy in U.S. middle and high schools, grounded in the “lived civics” framework.

Kalantzis is collaborating with Kris D. Gutiérrez, a professor, and Gabriella C. Zapata, an associate professor, both of the University of Nottingham, and with John W. Jones, an assistant professor at the State University of New York-Cortland.

Asif Wilson, assistant professor Curriculum & Instruction, will host a screening of his new documentary, Against the Current.

The screening will take place on February 11 from 5:30 - 7:30 p.m. at the Spurlock Museum Auditorium.

The film follows Kyla, a high school senior and community organizer, who journeys across Illinois in search of ways Black people have resisted oppression throughout history. Drawing on interviews and archival research, the film illuminates Black resistance in Illinois and around the world, with the hope of inspiring others to remember the past and reimagine their role(s) in shaping the future.

The screening is free to attend. Please register to attend. 

The Marketing and Communications team is proud to announce new templates and tools that provide self-service options for your promotional needs.

You have access to professionally designed, branded templates and downloads for easy-to-create fliers, presentations, and more through Adobe Express. This drag-and-drop design program is available to all University of Illinois employees. Just sign in with your university NetID and password. Please email the Communications Inbox to request access to our templates.

We have also created a Project Request form to help streamline our collaboration process. Submit a project request as soon as you know MarCom support is needed; it gets your work in the queue and on our schedule. The link to the request form is at the top of the Weekly College Announcements.

Our Internal MarCom Website has also been updated with detailed information on the services we offer and ways we can help publicise your work. We’d like you to think of us as your in-house public relations and marketing agency. You don’t have to know everything about marketing to utilize our services. Just bring us your ideas, and we’ll help you shape them into an ideal campaign. We're here to help!

On February 19, Carlos Alberto Torres, Distinguished Professor at UCLA and former director of UCLA's Latin American Center, will give a lecture celebrating the extraordinary humanitarian career of Paulo Freire, author of Pedagogy of the Oppressed, in which he compared the relationship of colonizer and colonized to that of teacher and student, asking about the political distribution of power. The lecture will take place at 5:15 PM at the Plym Auditorium in Temple Buell Hall. A reception will follow the lecture.https://calendars.illinois.edu/detail/7041?eventId=33535111

Giselle Martinez Negrette, assistant professor Curriculum & Instruction, has been selected to receive the Early Career Reviewer award from the Bilingual Research Journal. 

Martinez Negrette’s research interests center on bilingual/multilingual education, English as a Second Language (ESL), sociolinguistics, and International Comparative Education.

The award ceremony will take place during the Bilingual Research Journal Editorial Board Meeting at the National Association for Bilingual Education Annual International Conference in Chicago, on February 12.

Paul Bruno, assistant professor, and Haeryun Kim, Ph.D. student, Education Policy, Organization & Leadership have published a new paper on teacher hiring in the journal Leadership and Policy in Schools.

The research uses unique data from an unidentified school district in Central Illinois to study how teacher hiring committees work: how much they agree, what characteristics they look for in applicants, and how successful they are at hiring their preferred candidates. They also provided summary memos and results to our partner district to support their internal improvement efforts.

This research was conducted as part of the College of Education’s Public Engagement Faculty Fellows program.

Read their paper here.

Oliver Tapaha, assistant professor Education Policy, Organization & Leadership, and Nathan Tanner, Ph.D. '25 EPOL, have a new paper that was published in the American Educational Research Association’s Educational Researcher journal.

Their article, "A Different Brown Story: Black Teacher Recruitment to Navajo Reservation BIA Schools During the Desegregation Era," tells the story of the black educators recruited to Navajo Nation schools in the wake of the Brown v. Board of Education decision. 

Tapaha and Tanner share one former student’s story and contextualize it along with the broader history of Brown.

Read their full paper here.

Education Policy, Organization & Leadership Professors Bill Cope and Mary Kalantzis are co-authors on a new book on literacy and modern technology.

Literacies in the Age of AI: Teaching and Learning in the Digital Era will be published by Wiley on February 17. 

From the publisher: "Literacies: Learning and Teaching in the Age of Digital Media and Artificial Intelligence" responds to a critical need in contemporary education by redefining literacy in light of digital transformation and the rise of generative AI. Moving beyond traditional definitions of reading and writing, this innovative volume situates literacy as a complex, multimodal practice involving text, image, sound, space, and gesture. Through a compelling historical and theoretical account of literacy's evolution―spanning from oral traditions and early writing systems to today’s AI-integrated learning environments―the text equips readers to navigate a shifting communicative landscape shaped by emerging technologies."

The book is co-authored with Gabriela C. Zapata, associate professor of Education at the University of Nottingham.