Mara Tieken has been awarded the 2016 Ernest A. Lynton Award for the Scholarship of Engagement. The award recognizes early-career faculty who practice exemplary engaged scholarship through teaching and research. Recipients are selected on the basis of their collaboration with communities, institutional impact, and high-quality academic work.
Dr. Tieken is an associate professor of education at Bates College. A former third-grade and adult basic education teacher, her research focuses on racial and educational equity in rural schools and communities. Her book, Why Rural Schools Matter (UNC Press, 2014), is an ethnographic study of two rural Arkansas communities, examining the roles that rural schools play in rural towns—specifically how they shape a particular community and how they shape the racial landscapes of these towns. Her more recent project, funded by the Spencer Foundation, examines the factors shaping the college experiences—aspirations, transitions, and persistence—of rural, first-generation students.
Tieken also studies community organizing for education reform, publishing an essay in A Match on Dry Grass: Community Organizing as a Catalyst for School Reform (Oxford University Press, 2011). In addition, she co-authored Inside Urban Charter Schools: Promising Practices and Strategies in Five High-Performing Schools(Harvard Education Press, 2009), a study of five urban charter schools, and has an essay about teaching antiracist history in all-White classrooms included in Everyday Antiracism: Getting Real about Race in Schools (The New Press, 2008). Tieken received her Doctorate of Education from the Graduate School of Education at Harvard University.