2021 OU Faculty Awards
Kirsten Hextrum, Department of Educational Leadership and Policy Studies, Jeannine Rainbolt College of Education, Edith Kinney Gaylord Presidential Professorship
Kirsten Hextrum is a nationally recognized expert on college athletics. In 2020, her colleagues honored her with the JRCoE Pre-Tenure Faculty Award and the American Educational Research Association SIG 164 Emerging Scholar Award.
Her scholarship spans different spaces and contexts: classrooms, school communities, intellectual traditions, university life and other social contexts. In all of these areas, Hextrum is committed to transforming dehumanizing social orders where they exist in higher education. Specifically, her special interests address how structural inequities within and across social institutions instantiate, and intersect, through sport, college athletics and admission processes.
Hextrum’s research has received national and international acclaim through both mainstream media outlets, including The Atlantic, The Guardian, The Boston Globe, Bloomberg News and National Public Radio, as well as such scholarly publications as the Harvard Educational Review and Studies in Higher Education. Her forthcoming book, Special Admission: How College Sports Recruitment Favors White Suburban Athletes (Rutgers University Press), is positioned to reshape not only scholarship in college athletics but also policy and practices for decades to come.
Hextrum’s teaching pedagogy exposes students to frameworks, questions and experiences that enable them to understand how structural conditions in society, communities and schools reinforce inequitable and unjust social orders. She applies a critical framework to her teaching and advising, and in doing so moves from critique to action, action to study, study to transformation. For many students, this is their first exposure to concepts and frameworks that reveal and explain origins and entrenchment of discriminatory practices across race, gender, identity and economics.
Her service is an extension of her scholarship. She commits her time and talents to addressing issues of diversity, equity and justice within the OU Athletics Department by organizing and facilitating an ongoing racial justice professional development series, as well as hosting equity workshops in the community. Throughout her service, she is an unwavering voice for the well-being of individuals and communities oppressed by unjust conditions.
Kyong-Ah Kwon, Department of Instructional Leadership and Academic Curriculum, Jeannine Rainbolt College of Education, Rainbolt Family Endowed Education Presidential Professorship
Since joining the OU faculty in 2016, Kyong-Ah Kwon has established herself as an essential instructor and mentor for both graduate and undergraduate students. She teaches seven different courses in the early childhood program and the college's graduate program, serving students in Norman and Tulsa. She consistently receives outstanding course evaluations from her students, who comment upon her deep-based subject knowledge, inclusion of hands-on instruction, insightful and collaborative discussion, and sincere guidance and support.
Students describe Kwon as funny and kind and say that she genuinely learns each student’s research or teaching interests and adapts coursework and guidance toward those areas. She uses personal examples from her teaching and life to guide their understanding and connect to their experiences.
Kwon’s research examines parenting, classroom quality, program evaluation and teachers' well-being and their impact on children's development. She has published one book and 36 publications in such premier publications as the Journal of School Psychology, Teaching and Teacher Education, and Early Childhood Research Quarterly. She has led several external grants contributing to supporting teachers and improving classroom quality. She leads an innovative multidisciplinary research project (the Happy Teacher Project) on teachers' well-being, which has received national recognition. She was awarded the JRCoE Research/Scholarship Award in 2019.
Professionally, she is serving as co-editor of a special issue of the International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health and as an editorial board member for both the Early Education and Development Journal and the International Journal of Early Childhood Education.
She was an organizer of “The Constructivist Approach to Learning: Infants to 5th Grade Conference” last year and is a consultant on the Development of the BEST Logic Model Committee for the George Kaiser Family Foundation in Tulsa. She served as a research consultant for the Early Learning Inventory feasibility study for the Oklahoma Partnership for School Readiness in Oklahoma City.
Sally Beach - 30 years of service at OU
Xun Ge - 20 years of service at OU
