Kim Stephenson, 2022 Dissertation Mini-Grant winner

Kim Stephenson is an Assistant Professor of Elementary Education and an Accreditation Support Specialist for Huntingdon College, where she teaches pre-service educators. She previously served for many years as a K-12 grade academic director and gifted program director, during which she initiated and developed elementary and middle school gifted programs for the institution. She is in her final semester as a doctoral student at the University of Alabama in the Special Education Multiple Abilities Ph.D. program for gifted education and has successfully defended her dissertation, “Comparing Pre-service and In-service Teachers’ Perceptions of Fostering Creativity in the Classroom.”

Kim is a wife and the mother of four children. She serves as the President-Elect of the Alabama Association for Gifted Children, Chair-Elect of the NAGC Professional Learning Network, Awards Committee member for CEC-TAG, and on the Development Committee for NAGC. She has been honored by the 2019 NAGC Professional Learning Network award for creating a professional learning program for all stakeholders with the new gifted program, third place in the 2021 NAGC Research and Evaluation Network Research Gala for research “Work in Progress” on her dissertation topic, and the 2022 University of Alabama’s Outstanding Service by a Graduate Student award.

Contrasting measured pre-service and in-service teachers’ self-reported perceptions of factors related to fostering creativity would balance comparative data and increase empirical research that would fill multiple needs in the literature that few researchers have considered. How K-12 teachers think about creativity is critical to examine since it drives what happens in the classroom (Kaufman & Beghetto, 2013; Zwirn & Vande Zande, 2015). Just as researchers’ conceptions and definitions of creativity make it difficult to develop a consensus, practitioners’ perceptions of fostering creativity also differ.

Her research will examine different ways of practitioner thinking and how pre- service and in-service teachers perceive creativity, including (a) their perception of self-efficacy to foster creativity, (b) their perception of society’s value of creativity for students, (c) their perception of how engaging their teaching environment is, and (d) their perception of the amount of potential they believe their students hold in being creative. Examining these areas through a theoretical framework of layers surrounding and influencing the students of the 21st century will provide a path for the field to identify how to better support teachers in fostering creativity in students.

The Foundation’s Dissertation Mini-Grant was created to assist doctoral students for dissertation research related to intelligence or gifted education.