Georgia Southern professors awarded at global gathering of education researchers

June 14, 2023

Two College of Education professors at Georgia Southern University earned accolades at the 2023 American Educational Research Association (AERA) meeting, which serves as the world's largest annual gathering of education researchers and a showcase for groundbreaking, innovative studies in an array of areas. 

Amanda Townley, Ph.D., associate professor of middle grades and secondary education, won the Emerging Scholar Award in Religion and Education in AERA’s Religion and Education Special Interest Group (SIG). The award is for early-to-mid career scholars who have made a significant impact in the field of religion and education. 

"Her research and stakeholders — middle schoolers — are brave, novel and desperately needed in the field, as is the capacity for discussing religion and science, especially in public education and life in the American South,” noted a research reviewer.

Townley also served as a keynote speaker for the SIG meeting where she presented, "My Science or my Soul: Evolution Teaching and Learning in the United States."

Acknowledgment of her research is as important to her personally as it is professionally.

“As a scholar born and reared in the Southeastern United States, and who faced personal challenges with faith and science, it is a tremendous honor to be recognized by my peers for my research and outreach in these spaces,” Townley noted. “Scientific literacy, the ability to problem solve, evaluate evidence and make decisions based on that evidence, is critical to our society. Barriers to science literacy often come from the inability to bridge gaps between culture and beliefs that can be contradictory to what is learned in the classroom. Creating spaces for discourse among groups and teaching in ways that are considerate of the worldviews of students have a critical positive impact on science literacy. This recognition brings attention to spaces that are so important in moving our research into practice and to the public in meaningful ways.”

Townley, whose research centers around the intersections of science and society, has been featured on NPR and in Scientific American, among other publications. Currently serving as president-elect of the National Association of Biology Teachers, she is also a research collaborator with institutions such as the Smithsonian Human Origin Project and has served on the board for the National Geographic “Umsaka” project at the Cradle of Humankind in South Africa. 

Peggy Shannon-Baker, Ph.D., associate professor of curriculum, foundations and reading, was recognized by AERA for the impact of an article on mixed methods studies that they co-authored for the International Journal of Qualitative Methods. 

Invitations to write for the journal are extended to recognized experts who can summarize current thinking and practice around specific research practices or approaches. 

“It was a great opportunity to be invited to co-author the article affiliated with this award with one of my mentors, Cheryl Poth,” Shannon-Baker said. “We wrote about a type of inquiry called qualitatively oriented mixed methods, which is a type of research that centers on qualitative methods, such as interviewing and storytelling and using other methods to enhance the qualitative approaches that include surveys and quantitative testing.

“It was an honor to receive this award in recognition of the impact this article has had on the field of mixed methods and will have in the future. It is also a special privilege to receive this division's first award for a multi-method or mixed methods paper. I am grateful for the support Cheryl and I received in applying for this award through supporting letters from our mentors and colleagues in the field, who included Vicki Plano, Clark Linda Liebenberg and Timothy Guetterman.” 

Shannon-Baker specializes in the areas of international education, multicultural education and mixed methods research that explore how anti-oppressive frameworks can be used to inform research methods and the use of such methods in the study of oppressive systems in education. Their work has been published in the International Journal of Multicultural Education, Journal of Mixed Methods Research and American Behavioral Scientist, among others.