Amy Stuart Wells Voted AERA President-Elect; Ernest Morrell Chosen as Member-at-Large
Amy Stuart Wells, Professor of Sociology & Education at Teachers College, has been voted President-elect of the American Educational Research Association (AERA). Ernest Morrell, the College’s Macy Professor of Education, has been elected to one of two Member-at-Large positions on the AERA Council. Wells’ term as AERA President will begin on April 17, 2018, following the conclusion of the organization’s 2018 Annual Meeting, while Morrell will begin his three-year term as Member-at-Large in 2017-18.
Amy Stuart Wells, Professor of Sociology & EducationWells is a nationally recognized authority on the intersection of racial inequality and educational policies aimed at serving the rapidly changing “public” of public education. She has conducted large-scale projects on school desegregation; charter schools; tracking; and, most recently, the relationship between the changing demographics of suburban and urban communities and their public school enrollments, opportunities and reputations. At Teachers College, where she earned her Ph.D. in 1991, Wells directs The Public Good, a Public School Support Organization that uses research to help sustain equitable and socially just integrated K-12 schools. Wells and an inter-disciplinary group of TC faculty and students also organize an annual professional development Summer Institute on teaching and learning in racially diverse schools that applies research to the creation of meaningful school and classroom integration.
Wells is an AERA Fellow and a member of the National Academy of Education. She has been a Visiting Fellow at The Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences and the Russell Sage Foundation. She is the recipient of the 2016 AERA Presidential Citation for Outstanding Contributions to Educational Research and the 2000 AERA Early Career Award.
Upon becoming AERA President in 2018, Wells will succeed Deborah Loewenberg Ball, the William H. Payne Collegiate Professor in Education and an Arthur F. Thurnau professor at the University of Michigan. Ball will assume the AERA presidency on May 1, 2017, after the close of the association’s 2017 Annual Meeting in San Antonio, Texas.
Ernest Morrell, Macy Professor of EducationMorrell, who directs TC’s Institute for Urban and Minority Education (IUME), is widely known for his research and teaching in the fields of literacy, critical pedagogy, cultural studies, urban education and ethnic studies. He is a former President of the 40,000-member National Council of Teachers of English and in 2014 was named an AERA Fellow.
Morrell also chairs the Planning and Advisory Committee of the African Diaspora Consortium and, through IUME, is playing a lead role in the Consortium’s creation of a high school advanced placement course on the diaspora. Morrell will serve as AERA Member-at-Large along with Stella M. Flores, Associate Professor of Higher Education at New York University’s Steinhardt School of Culture, Education, and Human Development.
