Jan Hawkins Award, 2008 - Call for Nominations

SUBMISSION DEADLINE IS FEBRUARY 25TH, 2008

The Jan Hawkins Award of Division C of the American Educational
Research Association is given for Early Career Contributions to
Humanistic Research and Scholarship in Learning Technologies. The
award carries a stipend of $500 and the opportunity to present a talk
at the award session at AERA in the following year.

Nominations are now open for the 2008 Jan Hawkins Award. This award
recognizes an individual or small collaborative team that is engaged
in research that combines in some way practice and advocacy. While
research must play a central, informative role in the work of the
nominee, the nominated individual or group may include practitioners,
directors of innovative educational programs or individuals in
informal or non-traditional educational environments who are blending
research, practice, and advocacy.

The award is intended to recognize a body of work that:

• explores and demonstrates powerful new ways to think about
  technologies in contexts of learning and education, and uses
  innovative research techniques to understand the impact of those
  technologies.
• places young people and/or practicing educators at the center
  of the problem-solving process by making their meaning-making
  process, their needs and constraints, and their priorities central to
  the project of making technology useful to teaching and learning.
• strikes an effective balance between innovation -- inventing
  new approaches to K-12 learning with technologies -- and
  understanding -- examining existing educational environments and
  changes that occur when technologies are introduced or used in novel
  ways.
• uses technology to bring about broad improvements in
  educational systems with a focus on issues of diversity, equity, and
  learning for all.
• is an early-career contribution with the above orientations
  (the award will emphasize recognition for those individuals who are
  at the pre-tenure stage in academic careers, or pre-tenure-level
  equivalents in non-university contexts).

Dr. Jan Hawkins (1952-1999) was a developmental psychologist with a
cognitive, cultural, and social-interactionist orientation, and was
well known for her respectful, humanistic conceptions of appropriate
roles for using technology in K-12 learning environments. Her work
illustrates the balance that can be achieved in recognizing the
innovative, emergent properties of new technologies while
simultaneously respecting the individuals and conditions of the
learning environments in which these new technologies are being used.
She also was concerned with how complex social systems interact with
emerging technologies to provide or prevent access to information for
various groups of people based on gender, race, and cultural and
ethnic background. Her work helped researchers, practitioners, and
policy makes alike to think critically about technologies and
learning, encouraging them not to seek out technology as a panacea or
avoid it as a deterministic influence. She was also exemplary in her
nurturing of young research scholars in learning technologies, and
has been a model for them through her research and leadership.

Any member of Division C may make a nomination, including
self-nominations. The recipient(s) of the award need not belong to
Division C.

The nomination process includes the following information:
1) LETTER: A nomination letter introducing the nominee or small
team, detailing how this nominee's work relates to the themes
identified above (including how the work combines research and
advocacy).
2) VITA: The vita of the nominee (for individual nominations) or
a description of the team, its history, and a vita for team members
(for small group nominations).
3) REPRESENTATIVE WORK: One to three examples of work (research
papers, publications, or other forms of professional work) that
demonstrate the key contributions of the nominee's recent research.
For a small group, the examples of representative work should consist
of collaborative work authored by the team.

Please assemble and submit these materials in one of the following
ways (electronic nominations only):
1) A web portfolio with links to the nominating letter, vita,
and work. (The reviewers will use links to web sites as illustrations
and will not extensively explore websites unless there are clear
indications of how the sites relate to the program of research of the
nominee.) Be sure to send the chairs an email note informing them of
the nomination and that the web portfolio is complete.
2) Attached electronic materials in commonly shared formats
(MS-WORD, PDF, JPG, GIF, etc) sent though email.

The submission deadline is February 25th, 2008. Please send all
electronic nominations (including self-nominations) to this year's
co-chairs, Rand Spiro <rspiro@msu.edu> and Barry Fishman
<fishman@umich.edu> with "Jan Hawkins Award" in the subject header.