Fellow recipient Jenny Sperling with Distinguished Emerita Professor Judith Green
Jenny Sperling of UC Santa Barbara’s Gevirtz School was named the recipients of the 2020 Philip & Helen Green Travel Fellowship. Established in the memory of Philip and Helen Green, this fellowship supports academic conference related travel for graduate students, with a preference for a student doing classroom research that supports democratic practices and equity of access for immigrant and second language students from working class backgrounds. An overarching goal of this fellowship is to make visible scholarly work that uncovers effective practices that support students in gaining access to American society.
Jenny Sperling is a doctoral candidate in the Department of Education. Her interests include educational policy studies, feminist ethnography, and high school youth. She examines the intersections of gender, race, and sexuality and its impact on neoliberal educational policies and exclusionary school discipline and instruction. She explores the experiences of youth and educators, centering perspectives of minoritized students, specifically girls and LGBTQ high school youth.
The photo features Sperling with Dr. Judith Green, who created the fund to honor her parents. Green is a Distinguished Professor Emeritus in the Department of Education, where she worked from 1990-2016. Her teaching and research focus on teaching-learning relationships, disciplinary knowledge as socially constructed, and ethnographic research and discourse studies of the patterns of everyday life in classroom.