Photo caption (l to r): Associate Professor Nadia Behizadeh and doctoral students Cheryll Thompson-Smith and PJ Miller.
story by Claire Miller
Associate Professor Nadia Behizadeh and doctoral students Cheryll Thompson-Smith and PJ Miller were named the 2022 recipients of the English Language Arts Teacher Educators (ELATE) Janet Emig Award, which recognizes researchers studying English teacher education.
ELATE – part of the National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE), a professional organization for English language arts teachers and researchers – awards this honor annually to an English Education journal author(s) whose article “most contributes to our thinking about English teacher education and most informs our research,” according to their award letter.
This year’s award recognizes their April 2021 article entitled, “‘Peeling Off the Mask’: Challenges and Supports for Enacting Critical Pedagogy in Student Teaching,” which explores how to support teacher education students who are striving to implement culturally relevant and critical teaching practices in a middle school language arts classroom.
“Behizadeh, Thompson-Smith and Miller’s article offers an honest and compelling exemplar of critical pedagogy for our field,” the award selection committee wrote. “This exploration will resonate with teacher educators across contexts and offer insights to inform program development about how to navigate complex tensions with an abiding commitment to criticality and cultural relevance in English classrooms.”
As the 2022 ELATE Janet Emig Award recipients, Behizadeh, Miller and Thompson-Smith will have the opportunity to make a presentation related to their award-winning article at the NCTE Annual Convention in November.
For more information about the award, visit https://ncte.org/awards/elate-janet-emig-award.
To read their article, click here.