Judith Green, Professor of Education at UC Santa Barbara’s Gevirtz School, was honored with the inaugural John. J. Gumperz Memorial Award for Lifetime Scholarship by the Language and Social Processes Special Interest Group (LSP SIG) of the American Educational Research Association (AERA). The award was presented to her at the AERA convention held in Philadelphia in April.
Dr. Green has devoted her nearly fifty-year career to teaching and research that examines language-in-use in educational settings, particularly for purposes of exploring issues of access and opportunities provided to students for learning. Lesley Rex of the University of Michigan states, “Judith Green’s research and the methodology she developed for it are her greatest gifts to our field, and ultimately to teacher educators and classroom teachers. What came to be called Interactional Ethnography combines the wide, holistic lens of culture with tight close-ups on interaction, to give us fresh insights into the lived realities of classrooms.” Dr. Green is an international scholar who engendered conversations of complementary methods and created space for other voices. Marnie O’Neill of the University of Western Australia says, “Her intellectual generosity and spirit of connection creates opportunities for synthesizing ideas across cognate fields defying confining compartmentalization of ‘specialisms’ without diluting the value of expertise.”
The Dr. John J. Gumperz Memorial Award for (Distinguished Lifetime Scholarship) was established in memory of Dr. John Gumperz, linguist, anthropologist, and developer of Interactional Sociolinguistics, whose lifelong commitment to learning and developing ideas served as a role model as well as laying a foundation for deconstructing deficit models of education based on linguistic performance. This award recognizes and honors the lifelong distinguished scholarship of a senior scholar whose program of research in language and social processes and professional service have made significant contributions to our field and to the work and vision of the Language and Social Processes Special Interest Group. The LSP SIG has a long tradition of encouraging the future of our field as well as making visible the roots of and routes to current and future research.
“John Gumperz’ sensitivity to cultural and linguistic differences is a model for all as is his way of uncovering the meaning to members of a social group or particular interactional setting,” Judith Green says. “His willingness to step back from ethnocentrism and to seek ‘emic’ or insider interpretation of discourse processes and communicative practices is a lesson that I have taken with me over the past four decades.”
Judith Green, a professor in the Department of Education at the Gevirtz School, has been teaching for more than 4 decades across levels of schooling (K-20). She received her M.A. in Educational Psychology from California State University, Northridge and her Ph.D. from the University of California, Berkeley, where she explored the relationships between teaching and learning, literacy and knowledge construction. Green’s recent research focuses on how classroom practices support access to students across academic disciplines in classrooms and in virtual communities. Green is a fellow of the American Educational Research Association.