Vivian L. Gadsden, William T. Carter Professor of Child Development and Education at the University of Pennsylvania Graduate School of Education, has been voted president-elect of the American Educational Research Association (AERA). Her term as president begins at the conclusion of AERA’s 2016 Annual Meeting. Click here for complete 2015 AERA election results
An AERA Fellow, Gadsden served previously in two elected positions with AERA, as vice president of AERA’s Division G: Social Contexts of Education (2003–2006) and as an AERA Council member-at-large (2009–2012). She also was editor of AERA’s Review of Research in Education, Volume 33 (2009), and co-editor of the association’s Educational Researcher (2012–2015).
Gadsden is also director of the National Center on Fathers and Families and was associate director of the National Center on Adult Literacy. She serves on the board of the Foundation for Child Development and was a National Academy of Education/Spencer Foundation postdoctoral fellow, as well as a resident fellow at the Spencer Foundation. Gadsden also has served on advisory committees of the Spencer Foundation, the Goodling Center for Research in Family Literacy, and congressionally mandated review and advisory panels, including those of the Reading Excellence Program, Comprehensive School Reform, and the National Academy of Sciences. She currently chairs the Institute of Medicine/National Research Council’s Committee on Supporting Parents of Young Children.
Gadsden’s research interests focus on the cultural and social dimensions of learning, literacy, and well-being across the life course and within families. Her work addresses questions of context, race, gender, ethnicity, and poverty. Her framework, family cultures, forms the basis for her collaborative research projects, including studies on Head Start children and families (EPIC); young fathers in urban settings; health and educational disparities in low-income communities; children of incarcerated parents; and intergenerational literacy learning within African American and Latino families.
Gadsden’s other affiliations include, among others, the Society for Research in Child Development, the Literacy Research Association, and the American Association of Public Policy and Management. She holds an Ed.D. in educational psychology from the University of Michigan.
Gadsden will succeed Jeannie Oakes, who is Presidential Professor Emerita in Educational Equity at the University of California, Los Angeles. Oakes will assume the AERA presidency on April 21, 2015, after the close of the association’s 2015 Annual Meeting in Chicago.