Several Teachers College faculty members have received significant honors in recent months. They are:
Melanie Brewster, Associate Professor of Counseling Psychology and Co-Founder of TC’s Sexuality, Women, & Gender Project, received the 2020 Fritz & Linn Kuder Early Career Award for Distinguished Scientific Contributions to Counseling Psychology. Given by Division 17 of the American Psychological Association, the award honors outstanding contributions to the science and practice of counseling psychology by an early career psychologist.
Brewster is Director of Clinical Training for TC’s Counseling Psychology Ph.D. program. She also directs identityLORE (Laboratory for Oppression, Resilience, and Empowerment), which conducts research on minority stress theory, or how societal structures and attitudes shape identity development and psychological health for members of marginalized groups.
In 2014, Brewster published Atheists in America (Columbia University Press), a collection of more than two dozen narratives by atheists from different backgrounds across the United States.
Sonya Douglass Horsford, Associate Professor of Education Leadership, received the 2020 Critics’ Choice Book Award of the American Educational Studies Association for The Politics of Education Policy in an Era of Inequality: Possibilities Toward Democratic Schooling (co-authored with Janelle T. Scott and Gary L. Anderson).
Horsford’s work focuses on racial inequality in K-12 schools and how race is conceptualized and understood by leaders for equity and social justice in the United States. She is the Founding Director of TC’s Black Education Research Collective and Co-Director of the College’s Urban Education Leaders Program.
Her previous books include Intersectional Identities and Educational Leadership of Black Women in the USA (Abingdon: Routledge 2014) and Learning in a Burning House: Educational Inequality, Ideology, and (Dis)integration (Teachers College Press), which received the 2013 Critics’ Choice Award from the American Educational Studies Association.
Jeffrey Henig, Professor of Political Science & Education, received the 2020 Dennis Judd Best Book Award for Outside Money in School Board Elections: The Nationalization of Education Politics (Harvard Education Press 2019), along with his co-authors, Rebecca Jacobsen (Ph.D. ’07) and Sarah Reckhow, both of Michigan State University. The award, for the best book published in urban politics, is given by the Urban Politics Section of the American Political Science Association.
Henig’s research focuses on the boundary between private action and public action in addressing social problems. Among his numerous books are Between Public and Private: Politics, Governance, and the New Portfolio Models for Urban School Reform, co-edited with Katrina E. Bulkley and TC Professor Emeritus Henry M. Levin (Harvard Education Press 2010), which received the 2012 Districts in Research and Reform SIG Best Book Award, and Spin Cycle: How Research Is Used in Policy Debates, The Case of Charter Schools (Russell Sage Foundation/The Century Foundation 2008), which received the American Educational Research Association’s 2010 Outstanding Book Award.
Associate Professor of Practice Amra Sabic El-Rayess’s memoir, The Cat I Never Named: A True Story of Love, War, and Survival (Bloomsbury, 2020), was named a Junior Library Guild Gold Standard Selection for 2020. The Cat I Never Named has received six starred reviews (reserved for books of exceptional quality) from Foreword Reviews, Kirkus Reviews, School Library Connection, School Library Journal, Booklist and Publishers Weekly.
Sabic-El-Rayess, who teaches in TC’s Department of Education Policy & Social Analysis, is an interdisciplinary scholar who leverages fields of economics, sociology and political science to address the questions of radicalization, discrimination, Islamophobia, social mobility, corruption, social transformations and exclusion of women.
Sabic-El-Rayess is Project Director of TC’s Center for Benefit-Cost Studies in Education and Affiliated Faculty at Columbia University’s Harriman Institute for Russian, Eurasian and Eastern European Studies.
Laura Smith, Professor of Psychology & Education, was elected to Fellow status in the American Psychological Association by the APA Council of Representatives.
Smith’s work focuses on social inclusion/exclusion and emotional wellbeing, social class and poverty, anti-racism and Whiteness, and participatory action research.
Smith is the author of Psychology, Poverty, and the End of Social Exclusion: Putting our Practice to Work (Teachers College Press 2010) and Counseling the Culturally Diverse: Theory and Practice (Wiley 2019), co-authored with TC psychologist Derald Wing Sue, David Sue and Helen A. Neville.