Candidates are considered for the quality and impact of their work over a lifetime and their research and its rigor, insight and contribution to policy.
E.S. Gambrell Professor of Educational Studies Dr. Craig Kridel, who is also the Curator of the USC Museum of Education, received the American Educational Research Association (AERA) Division B Lifetime Achievement Award in Curriculum Studies April 17 at the 2015 AERA National Meeting in Chicago.
The AERA is a national research society with an international scope that strives to advance knowledge about education, encourage scholarly inquiry related to education, and promote the use of research to improve education and serve the public good.
This AERA Division B award recognizes a lifetime of achievement in educational policy research. Kridel’s research interests include documentary film, progressive education, and educational biography. His expertise is in educational foundations and inquiry, history of education, and educational biography.
Lifetime Achievement Award Committee Chair Dr. William C. Ayers conferred the award to Kridel and stated,
“Craig Kridel has a synoptic vision of education that is generous and caring, generative, wise, and humane. His modesty and authentic humility is matched by and contrasts with his prodigious and singular contribution: the preservation and expansion of our collective memory. Without Craig Kridel the field would be anemic and impoverished; with him we have an expanded sense of our complexity and depth, our energy and our contradictions, a gathering confidence in our intellectual possibilities and our moral purposes.”
In addition to Kridel, McMaster University Professor Dr. Henry A. Giroux also received this esteemed award. Ayers noted, “The willingness of each to challenge rather than to confirm what the powerful or the conventional have to say, their active and conscious resistance to orthodoxy or dogma or easy formulas of any kind marks them as engaged intellectuals and propulsive teachers.” Past recipients include Ralph W. Tyler, Maxine Greene, Elliot W. Eisner, Michael W. Apple and Nel Noddings.