Teacher Education
Leafgren dissertation wins third award
School of Education, Health, and Society
12/16/09
Sheri Leafgren, who joined Miami’s teacher education department in 2007, has had her doctoral dissertation published as a monograph by the International Institute of Qualitative Methodology (IIQM) after winning its outstanding dissertation competition.
Reuben’s Fall: A Rhizomatic Analysis of Moments of Disobedience in Kindergarten is available from Left Coast Press.
“Sheri Leafgren is a gifted teacher and inveterate kid-watcher whose antennae are finely attuned to the lives of children,” said reviewer Kathleen Kesson, a faculty member in education at Long Island University.
The IIQM honor is the third outstanding dissertation award that Leafgren has received from professional organizations for her research, which challenges the presumptions that teachers often make about the actions of young children as either “good” or “bad.”
Other awards include the 2008 Outstanding Dissertation Award at the annual Curriculum and Pedagogy Conference in Decatur, Ga., and the 2008 Outstanding Dissertation Award from the National Association of Early Childhood Teacher Educators.
Leafgren, who received her Ph.D. from Kent State University, studies the possibilities within and complexity of children's disobedience.
Most research on such behavioral issues has focused on “fixing” the problem, said Leafgren, but she wanted to look beyond that. “There is more to ‘goodness’ than compliance—there is also the goodness of joy; of awareness and wonder; of sensuality and sensing; of valuing, mystery and awe; and of engagement and belonging,” said the former kindergarten teacher.
The goal of her study was to help teachers see the everyday disobedience of kindergartners as many things, so that they would be more apt to consider that they have choices in their responses to such disobediences.