Shana E. Rochester, an AACTE/Holmes postdoctoral associate at BU Wheelock, has been awarded the 2019 Dimond Best Dissertation Award from University of Michigan School of Education for her dissertation, Learning Together in Context: Attending to Culture in Early Childhood Family Engagement Initiatives. 

The Dimond Award recognizes the premiere doctoral dissertation completed by a University of Michigan School of Education student in the prior year. The award recipient is selected by the school’s Graduate Affairs Committee from a pool of doctoral dissertations chosen as best-in-program by faculty in each of the school’s program units.

In addition to receiving the Dimond Dissertation Award, Rochester was recently selected for the American Educational Research Association’s (AERA) Society for Research in Child Development (SRCD) Early Career Fellowship in Middle Childhood Education and Development. This award places her a select group of the strongest early career scholars in the field, as recognized by the AERA and SRCD.

As a postdoctoral associate at BU Wheelock, Rochester engaged in scholarship focused on how schools and family-based educational programs can support the academic and social development of prekindergarten through third-grade learners. She is interested in supporting children from historically minoritized backgrounds and children from under-resourced communities. Her work investigates the multiple contexts in which development takes place (e.g., home, school, community) and explores how children’s cultural knowledge and out-of-school experiences can be leveraged in ways that improve their learning.