2011 Marion Langer Award Recipient

Dr. Judith Torney-Purta

Judith Torney-Purta, PhD, is Professor of Human Development at the University of Maryland.   Dr. Torney-Purta was honored for her leadership in the generation and diffusion of knowledge about the prevalence and antecedents of democratic concepts, values, and attitudes among early adolescents in numerous societies around the world. 

In landmark cross-national studies at times of enormous global change, Dr. Torney-Purta has been preeminent in her contributions to cross-cultural understanding of the factors involved in young people's readiness to promote human rights and social justice.  She also has led coincident global assessments of civic education. In so doing, Dr. Torney-Purta and her colleagues have documented the common shortcomings of young people's preparation for meaningful exercise of citizenship and for their tolerance of such self-expression by others. 

Taken together, these studies provide important lessons for education of children and adolescents in both advanced and emerging democracies — lessons that Dr. Torney-Purta herself has applied in curriculum development for international audiences.

 

2010 Marion Langer Award Recipient

Dr. Robert Michael Franklin, Jr.

Dr. Robert Michael Franklin is the tenth president of Morehouse College, the nation’s largest private, four-year liberal arts college for men. Prior to Morehouse, Franklin was a Presidential Distinguished Professor of Social Ethics at Emory University, where he provided leadership for a university-wide initiative titled “Confronting the Human Condition and the Human Experience” and was a senior fellow at the Center for the Study of Law and Religion at the law school. He also has served as program officer in Human Rights and Social Justice at the Ford Foundation, and as an adviser to the foundation’s president on future funding for religion and public life initiatives. Additionally, Dr. Franklin has served as president of the Interdenominational Theological Center (ITC), the graduate theological seminary of the Atlanta University Center consortium, and as the Chautauqua Institution's Theologian in Residence. Dr. Franklin is an insightful educator and accomplished author.

Dr. Franklin was honored for his promotion of prophetic engagement of primary community institutions, especially religious congregations, in thought, conversation, and action in pursuit of social justice in the United States and abroad. A leading public intellectual, Dr. Franklin has been an influential foundation program officer, university professor, seminary president, college president, and social commentator. In all of those contexts, he has persuasively advocated and, more importantly, thoughtfully demonstrated both courage and civility and both rationality and spirituality in honest discourse on some of the most sensitive issues affecting American families in general and African American families in particular. A leading scholar on the papers and speeches of Martin Luther King Jr., Dr. Franklin, like Dr. King, is guided by a vision of a “socially conscious democracy” strong enough to tolerate and indeed learn from expressions of uncomfortable truths. Dr. Franklin recognizes the transformative power of respectful relationships — reconciliation, tolerance, and love — in the creation of a just social order. Accordingly, he has insightfully identified the points of common experience and belief among all people who hope for community, whatever their politics and theology may be.

2009 Marion Langer Award Recipient

Anne B. Smith

Anne B. Smith, PhD, is Professor Emerita, Children’s Issue Center, University of Otago in Dunedin, New Zealand.  She is the founder of the Children’s Issue Center which provide a national interdisciplinary forum for research into and discussion of children's issues, as well as resources and information for those involved with children. The centre has an educational, research and policy role and its main mission is to "monitor, co-ordinate, produce and disseminate information about children's well being and healthy development". Dr. Smith was honored for her research and advocacy to ensure that the voices of children are heard.  Working both in New Zealand and in international contexts, Dr. Smith has striven to increase knowledge about children’s experience in both exceptional and everyday contexts.  As a center director and an international scholar, she has worked both to transform studies of childhood and to diffuse the resulting knowledge within the academy itself and in teachers’ lounges, television studios, and the halls of government.  Showing due respect for the dignity of both children themselves and the adults who care for them, Dr. Smith has devoted much of her career to making schools and child care centers more humane.  Exploring children’s own values, attitudes, and experience, she has made groundbreaking contributions to understanding of the nature and implications of such a child-centered perspective.  Her scholarship has extended beyond educational settings and child care to the home, the playground, the health clinic, the social service agency, the lawyer’s office, the courtroom, and the policy arena.

2006 Marion Langer Award Recipient

Felton Earls, MD

Felton Earls, MD, is professor of Social Medicine in the Department of Global Health and Social Medicine at Harvard Medical School.  He joined the Harvard Medical School faculty in 1974, became the Blanche F. Ittleson Professor of Child Psychiatry and Director of the division of Child Psychiatry at Washington University in St. Louis in 1981, and returned to Harvard in 1989.  Dr. Earls is on the Board of Directors of Physicians for Human Rights and is a member of the Committee for Human Rights at the National Academy of Sciences.  Dr. Earls was honored for his pioneering work in the generation and application of knowledge about the critical significance of collective efficacy in the safety, health, and dignity of children, families, and communities and for his leadership in galvanizing health professionals’ attention to the obstacles for fulfillment of the right to health of children in need around the world.  One of the most eminent behavior epidemiologists of childhood, Dr. Earls directed the Harvard Project on Human Development in Chicago Neighborhoods, perhaps the largest social science project ever conducted. He has applied his findings about the importance of community participation in projects in Brazil, Romania, South Africa, and Tanzania as well as the United States. He has conducted action research to examine the key ingredients in young people’s engagement in deliberative democracy, and he has extended this work in relation to the effects on children of the HIV/AIDS pandemic in southern Africa.

2005 Marion Langer Award Recipient

Michael Wessells, PhD

Michael Wessells, PhD is Professor of Clinical Population and Family Helath in the Program on Forced Migration and Health at Columbia University.  Dr. Wessells was honored for his tireless efforts to preserve family and community relationships for children in zones of armed conflict or natural disaster.  Working for the Christian Children’s Fund and consulting to numerous other international organizations, Dr. Wessells has helped to mobilize psychosocial relief for children in many countries torn asunder by armed conflict or natural disaster.  Assisting local helpers in facilitating the recovery of children in exceptionally difficult circumstances, Dr. Wessells has given particular attention to the vexing problem of re-integration of child soldiers.  As a result of Dr. Wessells’ work, many children who have faced tragedies of sometimes barely imaginable scale are recovering, and the world is a safer and more humane place.