News/Research

Jenni Higgs & Kyle Booten Receive National Academy of Education/Spencer Dissertation Fellowships

30 Aug, 2016

Jenni Higgs & Kyle Booten Receive National Academy of Education/Spencer Dissertation Fellowships

Congratulations to BCNM Designated Emphasis students Jenni Higgs (Education) and Kyle Booten (Education), who have both recently received the National Academy of Education/Spencer Dissertation Fellowships for 2016-2017! About 30-35 fellows are selected from a pool of 600+ candidates across the country each year. For a link to bios of the complete cohort and dissertation project blurbs, visit here.

Jennifer Higgs is a doctoral candidate in the Graduate School of Education and the Berkeley Center for New Media at the University of California, Berkeley. Her research, which focuses on technology integration in the language arts classroom, adolescent literacies, and pre- and in-service teacher education, employs mixed methods and is informed and inspired by her experiences as a middle and high school English teacher in Virginia and Illinois public schools. She holds a B.A. in English from Cornell University, an M.A. in Literature from Northwestern University, and an M.S. in Education and Social Policy from Northwestern University.

Kyle Booten is a doctoral candidate at UC Berkeley’s Graduate School of Education and the Berkeley Center for New Media. His research blends an ethnographic perspective with the techniques of the digital humanities in order to understand online literacy practices. His computational research has appeared in the conference proceedings of CHI and NAACL, and he contributed to a chapter on the future of writing instruction in the Handbook of Research on Teaching (5th ed.). Kyle holds an AB (English) from Princeton University and an MFA (Poetry) from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor.