Anna Neumann, Professor of Higher Education, has been named the recipient of the Edward S. Evenden Professorship of Education beginning with the 2023-2024 academic year.
The Edward S. Evenden Professorship of Education, established in 1980, is reserved for those who prepare scholars and scholar-practitioners with high standards of professional service, to foster the preparation and professional development of teachers as administrative officers or instructors. “It is as if the professorship was designed to specifically honor Neumann for her extraordinary record of scholarly productivity and for her preparation of generations of scholars and college and university leaders,” said William Baldwin, Interim Provost of Teachers College.
Neumann’s work is focused on improving first-generation students’ learning in first- and second-year college courses as well as in post-graduate studies, including law school. Through her scholarship, she examines what effective college teaching looks like and she develops practices and programs for supporting teaching improvement. Neumann’s research also explores professors’ intellectual careers, doctoral students’ learning of research, and academic organization and leadership.
“It could easily be argued that Professor Neumann founded, fostered and fermented the learning sciences within the field of higher education,” said Provost Baldwin. “She was the first to combine theories of pedagogical content knowledge with theories that allow us to understand the learning experience of first-generation college students from minoritized communities.”
Neumann is a Fellow of the American Educational Research Association and an elected member of the National Academy of Education. She has also been the recipient of her field’s top two research awards: the Research Achievement Award of the Association for the Study of Higher Education, and the Exemplary Research Award of the American Educational Research Association, Division J. She has served as president of the Association for the Study of Higher Education. For well over a decade, she directed the Program in Higher and Postsecondary Education at Teachers College, where she also served as chair of the Department of Organization & Leadership.
“Professor Neumann’s service at Teachers College has been consequential and impactful,” said Interim Provost Baldwin. “As program director of Higher and Postsecondary Education for over a decade, she created a unique theoretical framework to guide the program’s curriculum—and shaped a higher education master’s program that is unparalleled in the nation.”
Neumann’s seven books include Convergent Teaching: Tools to Spark Deeper Learning in College (with Aaron M. Pallas, Johns Hopkins University Press, 2019), a reconceptualization of undergraduate teaching with implications for improvement; Professing to Learn: Creating Tenured Lives and Careers in the American Research University, an analysis of 40 university professors’ scholarly learning and intellectual identity development in the early post-tenure career (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2009); and Learning from Our Lives: Women, Research, and Autobiography in Education (co-edited with Penelope L. Peterson, Teachers College Press, 1997), a study of the personal meaning of research in academic women’s lives in the field of education. Her work has been funded by the Spencer Foundation, the Teagle Foundation, the U.S. Office of Education, the Lilly Endowment, TIAA-CREF, and others.
Teachers College has been Neumann’s academic home for nearly three decades, having started her postdoctoral work at the College and then returning as a full professor more than 20 years ago. She is the third recipient of the Edward S. Evenden Professorship of Education.
Asked to comment, Neumann said, “I am deeply honored to be appointed to the Edward S. Evenden Professorship, given its core emphasis on teaching and on teachers who seek to support and advance students’ and their own learning and growth across the span of their lives. The award holds special meaning for me in light of my lifetime work at a place that is, in fact, called Teachers College.”