Kelly receives national honor for teaching theatre
The University Resident Theatre Association (URTA) awarded Baron Kelly with an URTA Award for Excellence in Undergraduate Training.
“This honor means that I continue to stand on the shoulders of my great acting teachers, Uta Hagen, Sandy Meisner, Lloyd Richards, and Stephen Strimpell, whose generosity of spirit and knowledge of craft helped me to find my creative way,” says Kelly, a Vilas Distinguished Achievement Professor in the School of Education’s Department of Theatre and Drama. “Now I can pay forward with my students the generosity and graciousness my teachers bestowed upon me.”
The URTA Excellence Awards recognize the outstanding work of individuals and institutions whose students show exceptional skill and professionalism in presentation and preparation at the URTA auditions and interviews. The awards seek to acknowledge the importance of helping young theatre artists develop the essential skills necessary to advance to the next level of their training, and ultimately the profession.
Lee receives Lifetime Achievement Award
Stacey Lee received the Taylor & Francis Lifetime Achievement Award from the American Educational Studies Association.
Lee is the associate dean for education with the School of Education, and is the Frederick Erickson WARF Professor with the Department of Educational Policy Studies. She also is a faculty affiliate with the university’s Asian American Studies program.
In recognizing Lee, members of AESA’s Lifetime Achievement Award Committee write, “Our committee noted from her nominator that Dr. Lee’s research has been ‘on the cutting edge of studies of race, immigration, and education for nearly 30 years.’”
Lee is a trailblazer as one of the first scholars offering critical sociocultural-political analysis of Asian American youth in U.S. schools. This work was through the lenses of race and ethnic studies, sociology, anthropology, cultural studies, gender studies, political science, and curriculum studies.
Faculty in Department of Educational Psychology among most productive in world
Martina Rau is one of the most productive researchers in the world in her field, according to an analysis published in September in the Educational Psychology Review. The analysis also ranked UW–Madison among the top 10 institutions globally for educational psychology research productivity.
The study examined the number of research publications in the top educational psychology journals between 2015 and 2021. The authors of the study argued measuring individual and institutional research productivity provides a clear way to gauge meaningful contributions to the field.
Rau, an associate professor in the Department of Educational Psychology, ranked sixth in the world for individual productivity when lead authorship position on articles is considered in the ranking calculation. Under the same calculation, Rau ranked second in the world among early career scholars who have received their doctorate since 2012. She ranked seventh among early career scholars in a raw count of published articles.
Rau, who studies learning with visualizations, said her research aims to improve learning in science, technology, engineering, and math.
The analysis also ranked UW–Madison ninth in the world for educational psychology faculty research productivity.
Around the School …
• Yeohyun Ahn, an assistant professor of graphic design in the School of Education’s Art Department, is the recipient of the 2022 Educator Award from the Society of Experimental Graphic Design (SEGD).
• Leslie Smith III, a professor in the School of Education’s Art Department, is a recipient of a 2022 Joan Mitchell Fellowship from the Joan Mitchell Foundation. The fellowship annually awards 15 artists working in the evolving fields of painting and sculpture with $60,000 each in unrestricted funds, distributed over a five-year period. Smith describes himself as an “African American abstractionist.”
• Ross Benbow, a researcher with the Wisconsin Center for Education Research, this past summer received a grant from the National Science Foundation (NSF) to substantially expand his ongoing, mixed-methods study of the college experiences of undergraduate students who are military members or military veterans. The original project, funded by a three-year, $556,000 grant from NSF in 2019, focused on how social support networks connect with the college-to-workforce paths of student military or military veterans at five UW System institutions. The second NSF grant, this one for $1,443,668 over the next four years, allows that same focus to expand to selected universities around the country.