In Celebration of Graduate Research Excellence @FairfieldU and for Graduate Student Elisabeth Muller, Fairfield Warde History Teacher

Yesterday I had the honor of seeing Elisabeth Muller receive the Library Research Prize at Fairfield University for her graduate work, but to also see that Sydney Williams, an undergraduate, was also honored. I post this morning with my remarks about Elisabeth Muller and celebrate her tremendous accomplishment. I am extremely proud.

It is a true pleasure to celebrate the research of Ms. Elisabeth Muller, the recipient of the 2019 Library Research Prize. Elisabeth is a graduate student in Teaching and Foundations in the Graduate School of Education and Allied Professions, an advanced professional degree for experienced educational professionals and community educators who wish to deepen and expand their knowledge of teaching and learning in a socio-cultural context. 

Last summer, Elisabeth was selected to participate in the Connecticut Writing Project’s Invitational Leadership Institute, a five-week program that works in collaboration of the National Writing Project at Fairfield University. The 90-hour institute provides a location for teachers to build their own writing portfolios and to create a teaching demonstration/workshop to bring back to their own schools and districts. Without a doubt, Ms. Muller’s work last summer excelled. At the time, she was interested in visual literacy and used the summer institute to explore ways to prompt writers with historical documents.

A semester later, Elisabeth continued her research in ED 501: Practicum for Literacy Teacher Consultants. In this course, she implemented new practices from the summer and continued her research with a design for data collection. Here, she began to explore the concept of building historical empathy amongst her students and began to critically assess her own instructional practices and the student work that resulted.  I had the privilege of visiting her classroom at Fairfield-Warde, and saw her scholarship in action –  She not only designed a brilliant study, she’s an incredible, inspiriting teacher.

Her academic talents are plentiful, as she is keen on detail and astute with intellect. I’ve already asked her share preliminary findings to graduate students a content literacy course and encouraged her to submit her work to local and state conferences. This spring, too, she presented portions of her study at The Literacy Essentialsat Central Connecticut State University with colleagues across the state. 

What pleases me most with Ms. Muller’s work is that she lives it, and often moves beyond course expectations and objectives. She moved through numerous texts from the CWP-Fairfield library and frequented the collection at the DiMenna-Nyselius Library, including numerous online journals. Her study, action research at its core, with a formative experiment design, allowed her to make changes as data was collected. Her work has grown from curiosity for improving student writing in a history class to use of multimedia work to promote an empathetic understanding of history. With implementation of a National Writing Project workshop approach, she promoted reflective writing, research, and document analysis with her own students. Additionally, she experimented with historical fiction to complement the argumentative objectives she wanted to reach. As she analyzed student work that initiated the study, her study proactively created a plan to improve their compositional practices. The result is the work she’s submitting for consideration: Reflective Practice: Continued Improvement of Writing Instruction in the Social Studies Classroom to Promote Historical Understanding.

The research by Elisabeth Muller is original, sophisticated and timely. This semester, too Elisabeth has built upon her work even more in ED 552: Participatory Action Research. In this study, she is triangulating new data with materials collected last semester. I suppose, too, that after she leaves today’s ceremony, she’ll probably be saying to herself, “Oh, Gosh. I have another paper due to Crandall this weekend!” 

Please join me in celebrating the tremendous accomplishments of Elisabeth Mueller. She is an outstanding graduate student from our Teaching and Foundations program.

Congratulations to Elisabeth Muller, but also a round of applause to all who serve on Fairfield University's Library Committee for their yearlong dedication to research excellence and dedication to our University faculty and students.