Alison Cook-Sather, the Mary Katharine Woodworth Professor of Education at Bryn Mawr, will receive the 2022 Alumni Excellence in Education Award on October 20 from Stanford University’s Graduate School of Education.
Cook-Sather earned an M.A. from Stanford in 1987. She holds a Ph.D. from the University of Pennsylvania’s Graduate School of Education and a B.A. from the University of California at Santa Cruz.
“The [selection] committee was deeply impressed by your profound contributions to the advancement of knowledge in education through your commitment to scholarship and teaching as an influential leader in the field of student voice,” wrote Daniel L. Schwartz, dean of Stanford’s Graduate School of Education in the award letter to Cook-Sather.
Cook-Sather’s research focuses on how differently positioned participants in education can work together toward more equitable and inclusive learning. She is an internationally recognized scholar on student voice work, particularly student voice in teacher education and professional development, and on pedagogical partnership in higher education.
“If we are truly going to be responsible to the diversity of students who are enrolled in higher education,” Cook-Sather said when interviewed about the award, “We have to create structures and practices through which students come to know that they matter as beings, as learners, as people.”
Since 2007, Cook-Sather has directed the Teaching and Learning Institute at Bryn Mawr and Haverford Colleges, which houses the Students as Learners and Teachers (SaLT) program. She is also the director of the Peace, Conflict and Social Justice Studies concentration at Bryn Mawr.
Former Bryn Mawr faculty member Katherine Rowe, who is now president of William & Mary, was among the five Bryn Mawr College faculty members to pilot the SaLT program in 2007.
“At a time when divisiveness increases and distrust can be easily exacerbated, work like Dr. Cook-Sather's not only reminds us of our humanity, but of the necessity of vulnerability and receptivity as well as clarity and commitment, and of the imperative that we must value one another, particularly across our differences,” wrote Rowe in her letter of support for Cook-Sather’s nomination for the award.
Cook-Sather has consulted on pedagogical partnership at more than 80 institutions on six continents and published over 100 articles and book chapters and eight books, including Co-Creating Equitable Teaching and Learning: Structuring Student Voice into Higher Education, Promoting Equity and Justice through Pedagogical Partnership, and Engaging Students as Partners in Learning and Teaching: A Guide for Faculty.
She regularly delivers keynotes and workshops. See her website, Developing Pedagogical Partnership, for more information, resources, and testimonials.