Two Stanford doctoral students, Michael Jarry-Shore and Sebastián Otero, have been awarded the highly competitive National Academy of Education/Spencer Dissertation Fellowships for 2020.
Jarry-Shore and Otero are among 35 students selected nationwide for the fellowship and will each receive $27,500 to complete their dissertation. The fellowship program recognizes students whose work addresses critical issues in the history, theory or practice of education.
“We consider these fellows to be among the best in their respective fields,” said National Academy of Education (NAEd) president Gloria Ladson-Billings, PhD ’84, in an announcement about this year’s recipients.
Michael Jarry-Shore
Jarry-Shore is a doctoral student in curriculum studies and teacher education at Stanford Graduate School of Education (GSE). His dissertation research focuses on the concept of productive struggle, which is present when students must exert notable effort in solving challenging math problems.
“Every student should have opportunities to struggle productively in their learning,” said Jarry-Shore, a former middle-school math teacher, who noted that little research has examined the teacher’s role in ensuring that students have opportunities to do so. For his dissertation, Jarry-Shore is studying the evidence of struggle that teachers notice and how this informs their assessment of it. He is also developing a framework alongside teachers to guide the work of noticing struggle.
Jarry-Shore, advised by GSE professor Hilda Borko, currently works as a research assistant on two projects with the Center to Support Excellence in Teaching at Stanford: one involving a district-wide initiative to prepare teacher leaders to lead site-based professional learning, and another to examine the use of surveys that offer math teachers immediate and actionable feedback on their students’ learning experiences. He also works with elementary pre-service teacher candidates in the Stanford Teacher Education Program (STEP). He earned a bachelor’s degree in education from the University of Calgary, and a BS and MA from McGill University.
Sebastián Otero
Sebastián Otero is a doctoral candidate in economics at Stanford. His research focuses on labor economics, with a particular emphasis on education policy in Latin America. For his dissertation, advised by Stanford economics professors Pascaline Dupas and Caroline Hoxby, he is exploring the consequences of a large-scale affirmative action policy in federal universities in Brazil.
In other work, Otero studies how a large expansion of public schools impacted private schools in the Dominican Republic. He has also done research in Chile, where he analyzed the impacts of a national food labeling policy on the demand and supply of healthier food. Originally from Chile, Otero earned a BA and MA in economics from the Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile.
Two alumni of GSE master’s programs were also awarded 2020 NAEd/Spencer Dissertation Fellowships: David J. Knight, MA ’11, and Peng Yin, MA ’14.
GSE alumna Rebecca M. Taylor, PhD ’14, was named a 2020 NAEd/Spencer Research Development awardee, which provides scholars with a research stipend and funding to attend specific research meetings.
The following GSE alumni were among 30 education scholars nationwide to be awarded 2020 NAEd/Spencer Postdoctoral Fellowships, which provide $70,000 to early-career scholars:
- Travis J. Bristol, MA ’04
- Oded Gurantz, PhD ’18
- Julia C. Lerch, PhD ’17
- Jen Munson, PhD ’18
- Ethan Ris, MA ’10, PhD ’17
- Diego Roman, MA ’13 (linguistics), MS ’12 (biology), PhD ’14
- Ilana Umansky, MA ’13 (sociology), PhD ’15
