Congratulations to Dr. Donna Riley the GLBTA Educator of the Year

The National Board of Directors & Staff of More Light Presbyterians wish to congratulate Dr. Donna Riley, longtime MLP supporter and one of our distinguished former Co-Moderators, for being selected to receive the GLBTA Educator of the Year Award from the National Organization of Gay and Lesbian Scientists and Technical Professionals.  Donna serves as an Associate Professor of Engineering at Smith College, Northampton, Mass. Congratulations Donna!

National Organization of Gay and Lesbian Scientists and Technical Professionals
2010 Recognition Awards

The NOGLSTP Recognition Awards were established as a means of identifying, honoring, and documenting the contributions of outstanding GLBT science, engineering and technology professionals, as well as corporations, academic institutions, and businesses that support GLBT professionals in the fields of science and technology.

NOGLSTP is pleased to announce the recipients of the 2010 Recognition Award for Outstanding GLBT Engineer, Scientist, and Educator of the Year: Jay Keasling, Jesse Michel Bering, and Donna Riley. These awards will be presented at our Annual Recognition Awards Reception on Sunday February 21, 2010 at the San Diego Marriot Hotel, during the AAAS Annual Meeting. All interested people are welcome to attend.

The GLBTA Educator of the Year award, reserved for the GLBTA Educator who has enabled significant growth for GLBT students in science or technology - through teaching, counseling, advocacy, role modeling, or other educational roles, goes to Dr. Donna Riley, Associate Professor of Engineering at Smith College.  Dr. Riley is a founding faculty member in the Picker Engineering Program at Smith College and an out bisexual woman who has been active in LGBT political movements for 19 years. Smith College has a history of being a lesbian and bi-friendly campus, often recognized in the Advocate magazine’s list of LGBT-friendly colleges. More recently, transgender students at Smith and queer students of color at Smith have organized to expand the tradition of inclusivity and affirmation. Smith is the first women’s college in the country to offer a degree in engineering.

In addition to serving as a role model for queer engineers on campus, Dr. Riley also works to include a focus on LGBT issues in her scholarship. She wrote an article in a special diversity issue of the journal Leadership and Management in Engineering introducing LGBT issues for practitioners and identifying ways to make workplaces more LGBT-friendly. In behind-the-scenes ways in her editorial work and professional service, Dr. Riley works to promote scholarship in engineering education that includes a focus on LGBT students and cultures of heterosexism and homo-, bi-, and trans-phobia. Often such work has difficulty finding a home because the field of engineering education has yet to recognize and respond to what gender studies scholars call “intersectionality” – the reality that people hold multiple identities at once as people with gender identities, races and ethnicities, abilities, sexual orientations, and social class, among others. Thus LGBT articles can be lost in a shuffle that seeks to categorize articles as either about “women in engineering” or about “minorities in engineering.” In her book Engineering and Social Justice (Morgan and Claypool, 2008), Riley includes a section on Homophobia and Heterosexism in engineering, and refers throughout the book to LGBT issues including same-sex marriage, heteronormativity in engineering textbooks, and LGBT activism in a number of contexts.

Dr. Riley is out in articles on her experiences as a woman in engineering as well as in work on engineering education. In her teaching, Dr. Riley employs liberative pedagogies – that is, feminist, critical, and queer pedagogies that seek to empower students as scholars and as whole people by turning a focus to power relations in the classroom, as well as in the larger world.

Source of information:  http://www.noglstp.org/?page_id=10