The National Academy of Education (NAEd) recently selected Amber Chevaughn Johnson, a University of Maryland Ph.D. candidate in teaching and learning, policy and leadership, with an urban education specialization, as one of the recipients of its 2025 NAEd/Spencer Dissertation Fellowship.
The fellowship, which begins in Fall 2025, will provide a total of $27,500 in funding, along with professional development, to 35 dissertation fellows selected from a pool of more than 400 applicants. In addition, the NAEd/Spencer Postdoctoral Fellowship will award $70,000 to 25 postdoctoral fellows selected from a pool of more than 270 applicants. The fellowships support early-career scholars whose projects address critical issues in the history, theory or practice of formal or informal education, at the national and international levels.
In her dissertation, “Waterbearers Against the Dark: Black Women of the South Carolina Sea Islands and the (Re)Construction of Black Education,” Johnson examines archives and oral histories to study how Black Sea Island women have cultivated Black knowledge with children and how this knowledge interplays with public education. She wrote, “This study positions Black women, especially of the South Carolina Sea Islands, as progenitors of Black knowledge in the U.S., everyday educators and custodians of Black life.”
“I am so grateful to receive this fellowship. Personally, it will allow me to dedicate the time, energy and resources to this project that it deserves so that I can honor the fullness of the people, histories and futures at the heart of my study,” said Johnson. “But I’m also excited by what this award means beyond me. I’m excited by the possibility of seeing more scholarship that amplifies the everyday efforts of Black communities to hold on to themselves and their ways of knowing that have sustained them but that have been devalued in our collective imagining of education. This award gives me hope that we can continue to expand our collective ideas about what education was, is and can be to make space for the histories, ideas, practices and learning traditions that help people live full, free and liberated lives.”
“The NAEd/Spencer Dissertation and Postdoctoral Fellowships offer life-changing opportunities,” said Okhee Lee, chair of the NAEd Professional Development Committee. As a past recipient herself, Lee emphasized “the significant impacts these fellowships have on the recipients’ professional careers and how these fellowships enable the recipients to further their ideas and contribute to shaping education research.”
Learn more about Johnson’s dissertation and research interests.
