Professor Carol Lee, together with her husband, Haki Madhubuti, will receive the President's Pacesetters Award from the American Association of Blacks in Higher Education. The award will be presented at the organization's National Conference on Blacks in Higher Education on March 26.
"The President's Pacesetters Award is given to those individuals whose accomplishments are cutting edge and are unique in their mission and scope by seeking to enhance the Black educational experience," says Sheila Baldwin, president of AABHE. Past recipients include Frank Matthews and Bill Cox, founders of Black Issues in Higher Education; Samuel A. Floyd, Jr., director emeritus of the Center for Black Music Research at Columbia College Chicago; and Roy T. Jones, executive director of Call Me MISTER at Clemson University.
Lee and Madhubuti will be the first husband and wife team to receive the award for their many contributions that include addressing social and educational issues through scholarship and by founding charter schools, initiating Third World Press, and serving on boards for organizations such as the National Association of Black Book Publishers and the American Educational Research Association. The couple will also serve on the AABHE African American Achievement Panel that will be held earlier that day.
The AABHE conference will be held in Atlanta, Georgia, at the Atlanta Marriott Buckhead Hotel and Conference Center. This year's conference theme will be "Educational Collaborations and Networks: Bridges to Learning and Leading."
Over the past three years, the AABHE has made a transition from the Black Caucus of the former American Association for Higher Education. The mission of the American Association of Blacks in Higher Education is to pursue the educational and professional needs of Blacks in higher education with a focus on leadership, access and vital issues impacting students, faculty, staff and administrators. AABHE also facilitates and provides opportunities for collaborating and networking among individuals, institutions, groups and agencies in higher education in the United Sates and internationally.
A professor of Learning Sciences at Northwestern University's School of Education and Social Policy, Lee is president of the American Education Research Association. She is the author of Culture, Literacy and Learning: Taking Bloom in the Midst of the Whirlwind and Signifying as a Scaffold for Literary Interpretation: The Pedagogical Implications of an African American Discourse Genre.
Lee is active in the school reform movement in Chicago Public Schools and taught in both public and private schools before assuming a university career. She is a founder of three African-centered schools in Chicago. Lee is also past president of the National Conference on Research in Language and Literacy and the chair of the standing committee on research of the National Council of Teachers of English. She is a former trustee of the Research Foundation of the National Council of Teachers of English and former co-chair of the NCTE Assembly on Research.