Graduate Students Honored with Awards, Fellowships
Northwestern University alumna Sarah Crawford (MS20), who introduced mindfulness into her eighth-grade Chicago Public Schools’ classroom, received the graduate Alumni Leadership Award for her efforts prioritizing the social and emotional needs of children.
“They would cheer when I told them to get into their comfortable mindful positions and be eager to discuss how great and relaxed they felt after each session,” said Crawford, who enrolled in a six-week mindfulness course so she could learn the skills herself before passing them along to students.
Crawford received a Golden Apple Award for Excellence in Teaching in 2017. During the Golden Apple seminar at Northwestern, she developed a new teachers’ toolkit with nine-other award winners to provide preservice and beginning teachers with concrete, research-based practices to help them transition into the profession and classroom.
After completing the Golden Apple sabbatical, Crawford joined the MSEd program and now teaches Middle Grades Social Studies Methods to pre-service teachers in the School of Education and Social Policy. She added a certificate in teacher leadership to her teaching arsenal.
“I am always looking for new ways to help my students understand and manage their emotions, improve their attitudes and beliefs about themselves and others, and make responsible decisions,” she wrote in Mindfulness in the Classroom, which details her journey with mindfulness training.
Crawford was one of several graduate students who were honored for their work during 2019-20. Read more about their efforts:
- Naomi Blaushild, who is pursuing her doctorate in human development and social policy,received the David L. Clark National Graduate Student Research Seminar in Educational Policy.
- Jen Cowhy, a doctoral student in the Human Development and Social Policy program, was selected for The Graduate School’s (formerly the SSRC's) Dissertation Proposal Development program.
- Olivia Healy, a doctoral student in the Human Development and Social Policy program, was named a research scholar with the Child Care Graduate Student Research Program.
- Allison Lindroth, a two time Academic All-Big Ten and Big Ten Distinguished Scholar Honoree on the women’s volleyball team, won a Big Ten Post Grad Scholarship to pursue a master’s degree in criminal justice at Lewis University. Lindroth majored in human development and psychological services with a minor in sociology. She studied psychology and criminology in London before being forced home by COVID-19 travel restrictions. “Human behavior and investigation work has always intrigued me, and these particular subjects have meshed so well in my studies,” she said. The Plainfield, Illinois native was named a 2018 Irving Kabiller Memorial Award Winner through the David G. Kabiller NU for Life Program that prepares student-athletes for their post-collegiate careers through the Wildcat network.
- Nicholas La Grassa was named to the National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship Program, a multi-year fellowship which recognizes and supports outstanding graduate students in NSF-supported STEM disciplines who are pursuing research-based master's and doctoral degrees at accredited US institutions.
- Amber Luczak, who received her master’s in education, received a five-year fellowship from the Knowles Science Teaching Foundation. The Knowles Teaching Fellows Program network is designed to support early-career, high school math and science teachers who aspire to become leaders in the classroom and beyond.
- Julissa Muñiz and Cora Wigger, human development and social policy doctoral students, received the 2020 NAEd/Spencer Dissertation Fellowship.
- Michael Spikes, a doctoral student in learning sciences, received the Cognitive Science Advanced Fellowship for your research project "Using Cognitive Apprenticeship as a Model for Improved News Literacy: An Interdisciplinary Research Proposal"
- Richard Paquion-Morel (PhD19) won the dissertation award from the Politics of Education Association. He’s currently a postdoc at the Learning Research and Development Center at the University of Pittsburgh.
- Daniel Rees Lewis (PhD18), a postdoctoral fellow at Northwestern’s Segal Institute for Design and David Weintrop (PhD16), now assistant professor at the University of Maryland, were awarded National Academy of Education/Spencer Foundation Postdoctoral Fellowships.
For more information on fellowships, visit Northwestern's Office of Fellowships.
To be added to this list, email Julie Deardorff, director of communications.