The Association for the Study of Higher Education (ASHE) honored Anna Neumann, the Edward S. Evenden Professor of Education, with the Howard R. Bowen Distinguished Career Award at its 50th anniversary conference this November in Denver, Colo.
The award is the organization’s highest honor and recognizes Neumann’s extraordinary scholarship and career contributions which have “significantly advanced the field [of higher education] through extraordinary scholarship, leadership and service.”
“With its commitment to improve all facets of higher and postsecondary education through research, ASHE promotes the idea that all people can learn, and that learning is at heart of the educating enterprise,” said Neumann, who served as president of the Association for the Study of Higher Education in 2011-2012. “I think of the Howard Bowen Award as punctuating this important idea and am deeply grateful to have had the opportunity to help bring it to life,” said Neumann.
Neumann has dedicated her career to improving learning for first-generation college students. She examines what makes for effective college teaching and develops methods and programs to help instructors improve. Neumann’s scholarship also examines the intellectual careers of professors, doctoral students’ learning of research, and college and university leadership during financially trying times.
Her impactful work has been published in the American Educational Research Journal, Journal of Higher Education, Teachers College Record and Review of Higher Education, among others. Neumann is author of seven books and dozens of articles including Convergent Teaching: Tools to Spark Deeper Learning in College, a reconceptualization of undergraduate teaching that applies strategies derived from the learning sciences to improve higher education, written with TC’s Aaron Pallas, and Professing to Learn: Creating Tenured Lives and Careers, in the American Research University, an analysis of 78 university professors’ intellectual identity development in the early years of their post-tenure career.
Neumann is a Fellow of the American Educational Research Association (AERA) and an elected member of the National Academy of Education. She has also received the Research Achievement Award from ASHE and the Exemplary Research Award from AERA Division J, some of the highest research honors in her field.