Immediate Past President  

Carol D. Lee
Northwestern University  

Carol D. Lee, Professor of Learning Sciences and African American Studies at Northwestern University, has completed her term as president of the American Educational Research Association (AERA). She now serves as immediate past president through the concluding day of the 2011 Annual Meeting on Tuesday, April 12, in New Orleans, Louisiana.

Carol D. Lee, Professor of Learning Sciences and African American Studies at Northwestern University, has assumed the presidency of the American Educational Research Association (AERA). Her term as president started April 17, 2009 at the conclusion of the 90th Annual Meeting in San Diego, California.

Professor Lee succeeds Lorraine M. McDonnell, an education policy expert who teaches political science at the University of California-Santa Barbara. Dr. McDonnell now serves as Immediate Past President of AERA through May 4th, the concluding day of the 2010 Annual Meeting in Denver, Colorado.

Professor Lee has been on the faculty at Northwestern University’s School of Education and Social Policy since 1991. Her research interests center on urban education, cultural supports for literacy, classroom discourse, and instructional design. She has developed a design framework, Cultural Modeling, that draws on prior knowledge that underserved students, particularly African American and other students of color, bring to classrooms.

An AERA member for almost 20 years, Professor Lee was Vice President of Division G (Social Contexts of Education) and served on AERA’s Council, the Association’s governing body, and its Executive Board.  She participated in the Association’s Task Force on International Exploration, which advised the President and Executive Director on the internationalization of education research.  She also has served on the Outstanding Book Award Committee and several AERA Standing Committees, including as chair of the Social Justice Action Committee.

Professor Lee is the author of two books—Culture, Literacy and Learning:  Taking Bloom in the Midst of the Whirlwind and Signifying as a Scaffold for Literacy Interpretation:  The Pedagogical Implications of an African American Discourse Genre. Also, with Peter Smagorinsky, she co-edited Vygotskian Perspective on Literacy Research. Her scholarship on literacy, urban education and other subjects has been published in many journals, including the Reading Research Quarterly, American Educational Research Journal, Research in the Teaching of English, The Journal of Black Psychology, and the Journal of Negro Education.

Professor Lee is active in the school reform movement in the Chicago Public Schools. Before assuming her university career, she worked as a teacher in both public and private schools.  She is a founder and former director of an African-centered independent school in Chicago, the New Concept School.  She also is also a founder of an established African-centered charter school, the Betty Shabazz International Charter School, with three campuses.  She engages in professional development activity for teachers both locally and nationally.

Her professional recognition is significant. She is an elected fellow of both the National Academy of Education and the National Conference of Research on Language and Literacy.  In 2004-2005, she was a fellow at the prestigious Center for Advanced Studies in the Behavioral Sciences in Stanford, California. She also has received the Spencer Mentor Award and the National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE) Distinguished Service Award.

Among her professional activities, Professor Lee has served as president of the National Conference on Research in Language and Literacy. She is a former trustee of the NCTE Research Foundation and a former co-chair of the NCTE Assembly on Research.

Professor Lee holds two degrees from the University of Chicago—an M.A. degree in English (1969) and a Ph.D. degree in education/curriculum and instruction (1991). She received a B.A. degree in the teaching of secondary school English at the University of Illinois, Champaign-Urbana in 1966.