Erica Halverson (PhD04), a graduate of SESP's Learning Sciences program, has won the Jan Hawkins Award from the American Education Research Association (AERA). She is an assistant professor at the School of Education at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where she researches how digital storytelling affects teens' identity formation and literacy.
The Jan Hawkins Award, presented by the learning and instruction division of the AERA, is given for early-career contributions to humanistic research and scholarship in learning technologies. The award recognizes a body of work that reveals powerful new ways to think about technologies in education and uses innovative research to discover the impact of those technologies.
Halverson was nominated by Mitchell Nathan, chair of the Learning Sciences department at the University of Wisconsin, who describes her work as focusing on how adolescents -- especially marginalized youth -- learn to make art about the stories of their lives and how this process impacts their identity development and literacy learning. "Since becoming a faculty member at UW, Erica has focused her efforts on digital art, specifically digital filmmaking as a medium for expression. She is building a body of empirical, theoretical and methodological work that describes digital artmaking in terms of organizational pedagogy, individual process, individual development, and the role of the product as a multimodal representation of one's emerging, dynamic identity," Nathan explains.
Halverson also studies the impact of technologies in fostering literacy in a broad sense. Her research explores the role of digital media production in promoting new literacies. Pointing out that Halverson's groundbreaking empirical work on the power of digital media for identity development serves a valuable role, Nathan notes, "Erica strives to break down the process of creating digital art based on autobiographical experiences and documents how this process enables young adults struggling with positive identity development to create complex representations of self."
A faculty member in the Learning Sciences program in the Department of Educational Psychology, Halverson is also a member of the Games+Learning+Society research group. Before she started as an assistant professor at the University of Wisconsin in fall 2006, she was a postdoctoral researcher with the University of Pittsburgh and a lecturer at University of Wisconsin.
Halverson's current research interest in storytelling for personal development and literacy learning has its roots in research she did at SESP. Her dissertation was entitled Telling, Adapting and Performing Personal Stories: Understanding Personality Development and Literacy Learning for Stigmatized Youth.
Eight years ago Halverson co-founded a theater and education group, Barrel of Monkeys, which teaches writing workshops in Chicago public schools and creates plays from the kids' writing. The group presents a production based on students' writing every Monday at Neo-Futurist Theater in Chicago. She continues to serve as a board member for the organization.