Nominations for Jasmine Ma Award

Posted by Amy Voss Farris on Monday, December 8, 2014 in News.

The Dr. Jasmine Ma Award

For contribution to the doctoral student community

Presented by the Doctoral Students’ Association, Department of Teaching, Learning & Diversity, Peabody College of Education and Human Development

Previous Ma Award Recipients

In honor of Dr. Jasmine Ma, whose tenure as a doctoral student in the Department of Teaching, Learning, and Diversity has continued to shape the lives of students and faculty long after her graduation in 2012. Among her many accomplishments, Dr. Ma helped found the doctoral students association, and while she may not have been the only founder of the DSA, she hung around long enough that she was the elder statesman of the Wyatt atrium to many of us who came after. She was a gifted political activist in Frierian as well as Faircloughian terms. She loved to create spaces for public discourse, and the bigger the space the better (cf. Ma 2012; Hall & Ma, 2011). Perhaps most importantly, she was really consistent in her office hours, occupying a table at the Yazoo Tap Room after 4 o’clock every Thursday, often with her beautiful wife and daughter, a refuge for doc students trying to relearn how to talk to normal people. In this, and in other ways, Dr. Ma was a role model for how to do a PhD and still come out cool at the other end.

The 6^th anniversary of the DTLD Doctoral Students Association has just passed. Governed as we are by the tides of academic trajectory, there will soon be no active doctoral students who would be able to tell you that just by scrolling back through their google calendars. Investing this award is an opportunity to write down our origin story (see Appendix X), and to remember that there was once a time when we didn’t have representation in the department, or money to throw lavish parties, or even a listserv.

By Laws:

1) SELECTION
Sometime between AERA and the end of spring semester the co-chairs will send an email to the listserv to solicit nominations. Nominations must include a written justification for why the nominee deserves a community service award, preferably written as a trickster hero narrative. The co-chairs will also strong arm a couple of other doc students into joining a selection committee. The committee will be responsible for reading the nominations, establishing trustworthiness criteria, creating a coding system, picking the winner, and archiving a dossier of theoretical and methodological notes about the experience. Alternatively, everyone can just get together over some cheap happy hour nachos, have a laugh reading each other’s attempts at non-academic prose, and vote on a winner.

2) AWARD
A toast in your honor, and a $50 gift certificate to a local brewery/distillery of your choice, not necessarily in that order. Or if you don’t drink, you may ask that the money to be spent on something else, perhaps a Carbonite subscription. You are also authorized by the DSA to write “Community Service Award,” or words to that effect, on your CV, forever.

References
Hall, R., & Ma, J. Y. (2011, June). Learning a part together: Participant trajectories with ensemble spatial forms in a high school marching band. In R. Hall (Chair), Difference, culture, and distribution I mathematics and science learning. Symposium conducted at the 41^st Annual Meeting of the Jean Piaget Society: Berkeley, CA.

Ma, J. Y. (2012). Changing Local Practice for Good: Walking Scale Geometry as Designed Disruptions for Productive Hybridity. (Unpublished doctoral dissertation). Vanderbilt University, Nashville, TN.

Photo Credit: Jasmine Ma

Tags: Jasmine Ma, Katie Headrick Taylor