UIC researcher among nation’s 200 most influential education policy scholars

Gholnescar “Gholdy” Muhammad, associate professor of curriculum and instruction in UIC’s College of Education, has been recognized by Education Week as one of the nation’s 200 most influential university-based researchers in education policy. 

Using a rubric created by Rick Hess of the American Enterprise Institute, each scholar was scored in nine categories, including their Google scholar score, book points, highest Amazon ranking, syllabus points, newspaper mentions, education press mentions, web mentions, congressional record mentions and Twitter score. 

“Simply being included in this list of 200 scholars is an accomplishment, given the 20,000 or more who might qualify,” Hess said.

Muhammad, a who received her doctorate in literacy, language and culture in 2013, returned to UIC last fall. Before joining UIC, she was a professor at Georgia State University, where she helped set up a program to train teachers in South Africa.

As a UIC student, Muhammad founded a summer writing institute called Black Girls W.R.I.T.E. to give young Black girls a space to “read, think and write about racial and other social injustices.” It was also a space to write about Black girl beauty and joy, she said. The idea came to her as she finished the first year of her doctoral program at UIC.

Muhammad also is a recent recipient of the 2021 Outstanding Educator in English Language Arts Award from the National Council of Teachers of English. Muhammad will discuss her book, “Cultivating Genius: An Equity Model for Culturally and Historically Responsive Literacy,” as part of the UIC Black Faculty Book Share event series Jan. 25.