Christine Lotter, Ph.D., Professor in the Department of Instruction and Teacher Education, and her student, Amber Adgerson, a doctoral candidate in the Teaching and Learning, Ph.D. program at the University of South Carolina were recognized for their accomplishments by the Southeastern Association for Science Teacher Education (SASTE) at their virtual conference on October 3, 2020.
Lotter received The Deborah Tippins Mentor award. The Deborah Tippins Mentor award is bestowed upon someone who, according to SASTE, “embodies mentoring relationships or who demonstrates exemplary mentoring of junior SASTE members.” The award is named after Deborah Tippins, who has “an international reputation for mentoring colleagues locally, nationally and internationally.”
Adgerson nominated Lotter for the award because of the relationship the two of them formed over the course of the program, describing it as “a mentorship journey of growth, challenge, and encouragement that I will forever be grateful for as a first-generation college student.”
Amber Adgerson received the Eddie Griffen Memorial Award for Outstanding Graduate Student Position Paper for her paper titled Utilization of Executive Functioning Skills to Address Black Male Achievement in Science. When asked about her paper, Amber explained:
“I entered into writing this position paper with the goal of helping myself to begin to define and state the purpose of my research agenda to my colleagues in science education. … The position put forth in my paper acknowledges the importance of culturally-sustaining pedagogy and multicultural awareness in the science classroom. However, it also proposes and defends the ways in which intrinsic and extrinsic acts of racism at the individual and institutional level may play a part in the lowering of these executive functioning skills of the Black male child … Skills which are important to the demands of the science classroom. Therefore, my paper's stance was that if explicit instruction for those skills is given, within the science classroom specifically, we will begin to reach the untapped potential of many students. The STEM workforce should match the demographics of the population as a whole, and by breaking down the barriers of low executive functioning skills, we may see that possibility within our lifetime.”
The Eddie Griffen Memorial Award honors an outstanding position paper submitted by a graduate student.