International honors
Two Boston College faculty members in the Lynch School of Education and Human Development will soon be honored for their scholarly achievements at ceremonies in Europe.
Eric Dearing (Caitlin Cunningham)
Eric C. Dearing, executive director of the Mary E. Walsh Center for Thriving Children and a professor in the Counseling, Developmental & Educational Psychology department of the Lynch School, will receive an honorary degree from the University of Oslo at commencement ceremonies in September.
From 2013-2018, Dearing served as a senior researcher at the UO’s Norwegian Center for Child Behavioral Development; since 2018, he has been a visiting professor at the university’s Faculty of Educational Sciences. He has contributed to numerous research studies on child development with UO colleagues.
Dearing joined the BC faculty in 2006, and succeeded Walsh Center founder and Professor Emerita Mary E. Walsh in 2022. An expert in the links between students’ lives outside of school and their classroom performance, Dearing’s recent work focuses on promoting high-quality parent and early educator engagement to improve math learning for children from low-income families.
Marina Bers (Caitlin Cunningham)
Marina Bers, the Augustus Long Professor of Education at the Lynch School, has been selected to receive a Dame of the Imperial Hispanic Order of Charles V at the Solemn Ceremony of Knights in Granada, Spain. The damehood ceremony, equivalent to knighthood, recognizes individuals in the arts and sciences whose work has contributed to the country of Spain.
A native of Argentina, Bers is a widely recognized innovator in computer science education for early childhood, particularly for her Coding as Another Language curriculum—for both the free ScratchJr app she co-created and the KIBO robotics kit she developed—which has been translated into Spanish and is widely used across Spain and Latin America. There are more than 52 million users world-wide.
The damehood ceremony for Bers will take place on May 11.