By Brianna Liang

Sara Rutherford-Quach (MA ’06 Education, MA’10 Anthropology), a doctoral candidate in Educational Linguistics and Anthropology of Education, was awarded a 2011-2012 National Academy of Education Spencer Dissertation Fellowship.

These distinguished and highly competitive awards are given each year to approximately 20 students whose dissertations demonstrate potential for improving education worldwide by bringing new perspectives to the history, theory, or practice of education. Fellows receive $25,000, and they are invited to professional development retreats with members of the National Academy of Education, the Spencer Foundation and other senior scholars. This is the first year that the Spencer Foundation is partnering with the National Academy of Education to administer these awards.

Rutherford-Quach’s dissertation, “Hands Up, Mouths Shut: Silence and Speech in a Second Grade Classroom of English Learners,” examines the role of silence in classrooms serving language-minority students. She found that two basic types of silence were salient in the second grade classroom that she studied: a) communicative silence, which students use to creatively comply with and re-establish patterns of interaction, and b) “that which is not said”--silences that related to issues of race, ethnicity, presumption, inequity, and opportunity in this classroom and the greater school community. Through her research, she hopes to identify and understand the circumstances and contexts that contribute to silence in classrooms that serve English Learners, as well as the role of silence as a non-verbal communicative tool. Ray McDermott and Guadalupe Valdes serve as her advisors.

Rutherford-Quach, who will be graduating this fall, has always been interested in social interaction and language, and how they relate to learning. Her experiences as a bilingual kindergarten teacher piqued her interest in the role of silence in the classroom.

“One day, I was in the playground and one of my students – who barely said a word in class all year – was chattering non-stop to his classmates. I wondered, ‘Why didn’t he talk in class?’ said Rutherford-Quach.

Her observations in many different classrooms throughout the years, as a teacher and a teacher supervisor for the Stanford Teacher Education Program, further developed her interest in the role of silence in the classroom.

“Through these observations, I have noticed that silence seems to play a significant role in instruction, regardless of the actual amount of silence in a specific classroom,” said Rutherford-Quach.

Rutherford-Quach felt surprised and extremely honored to receive the fellowship.

“It was a welcome validation of my research proposal, which doesn’t necessarily fit neatly into mainstream educational research,” said Rutherford-Quach. “More importantly, receiving the fellowship has opened me up to an incredible community of collegial support and feedback.”

According to Rutherford-Quach, the fellowship network offers valuable opportunities for forming connections with other fellows and professors conducting similar research.

“I find these interactions extremely educative; they have challenged me and pushed my work forward,” said Rutherford-Quach.

Rutherford-Quach received her BA in Spanish and Peace and Global Studies from Earlham College. At Stanford, she received an MA in Anthropology and an MA in Social Sciences in Education. She is finishing her doctorate in the Linguistic Anthropology of Education. She has taught kindergarten and first grade at Aspire East Palo Alto Charter School, and taught bilingual kindergarten in Houston, TX.