BERKELEY HEIGHTS, NJ, August 16, 2019 /24-7PressRelease/ -- Marquis Who's Who, the world's premier publisher of biographical profiles, is proud to present Sarah Smith Ducksworth, EdD, with the Albert Nelson Marquis Lifetime Achievement Award. An accomplished listee, Dr. Ducksworth celebrates many years of experience in her professional network, and has been noted for achievements, leadership qualities, outstanding credentials and successes in her field. As in all Marquis Who's Who biographical volumes, individuals profiled are selected on the basis of current reference value. Factors such as position, noteworthy accomplishments, visibility, and prominence in a field are all taken into account during the selection process.
Dr. Ducksworth led a distinguished career in education for more than 40 years. Her preparation for a career in teaching started when she received a teaching assistantship at the State University of New York at Stony Brook, in 1965. After completing her duties as a teaching assistant and the coursework for a master's degree in literature, her husband's career took her to Queens, New York where, in 1968, she began her own career in earnest, working as a public school teacher in New York City. As she approached tenure as an English teacher at Franklin K. Lane High School in Brooklyn, New York, in 1977, her husband received another promotion that required his family, Dr. Ducksworth and two small children, to move to New Jersey. In New Jersey, Dr. Ducksworth applied for a teaching assistantship at Montclair State College and was accepted. As a graduate student working toward a master's degree in reading, she took a heavy academic load for two terms while teaching two reading courses. Consequently, she was able to complete the requirements for the advanced degree in two semesters. The chair of the reading department, Dr. Maria Schantz, then recommended to Kean College as a candidate to fill a part time reading instructor position there. Dr. Ducksworth taught reading at Kean for three semesters before she decided to pursue a doctorate degree in English Education at Rutgers. After completing doctoral course work as a full time student in two years, she took a break from her studies and began teaching reading full time at Middlesex County College while teaching concurrently freshman composition part time at Rutgers University. Upon hearing about a permanent job at a junior high school in Belleville, New Jersey, she decided to re-enter public school teaching for the security she thought the job would offer. However, her adviser at Rutgers, seeing the window closing on her chance to complete her doctorate, encouraged her to return to Rutgers to write a dissertation proposal. He helped her get a part-time visiting lectureship to fund her full-time dissertation research. Two years later, in the spring of 1988, she defended her dissertation and graduated from Rutgers with honors. At that point, she went back to Kean to apply for a job in the English Department and was hired as an assistant professor. She remained at Kean teaching a wide range of courses which included composition, Writing about Literature, American Literature, African American Literature, World Literature, and Senior Seminar until she retired in February 2016.
During her career, Dr. Ducksworth donated her skills as a speaker and presenter in her field. She also spent time as a session co-chair for an annual convention of the National Council of Teachers of English and a panel chair for the Mid-Atlantic Popular & American Culture Association in Boston. Dr. Ducksworth was also a respondent and moderator at the African Americans and Europe Conference held at the New Sorbonne University in Paris, France in 1991.
An accomplished writer, Dr. Ducksworth's scholarly efforts have included the contribution of articles to various professional journals, newsletters and newspapers. She published a poetry book Moments in the Chimes of Time in 2018, and her novel, Trouble in the Air, is slated for release this coming fall. She has done extensive research on black women writers, the Underground Railroad, and the journalistic writings of activist Ida B. Wells-Barnett. Her article on Stowe's characterization of blacks in Uncle Tom's Cabin, appears as a chapter in The Stowe Debate: Rhetorics in Uncle Tom's Cabin, (1994) and led to her becoming a founding member of the Harriet Beecher Stowe Society in Connecticut in the same year as the book was published. Her published research has been cited in papers written by other scholars and by students in term papers. During the late 1990s, Dr. Ducksworth received several history grants sponsored by the State of New Jersey to study the Underground Railroad in New Jersey. She made many presentations using that research and created a documentary which she showed in several academic and public venues in 2005, she was hired as Research Coordinator for the Center for Anti-Slavery Studies in Pennsylvania, and was responsible for uncovering hidden tracks of runaways throughout ten northeastern Pennsylvanian counties. Also, I n 2005, she wrote the foreword to the 5th edition of William Still's Underground Railroad. Based on her reputation as an Underground Railroad expert, Canadian producers at 90th Parallel Productions Ltd. asked her to be a commentator in a documentary entitled The Underground Railroad: The William Still Story, which aired on PBS in 2012. Dr. Ducksworth is a member of the Author's Guild, and she notably serves on the board of a local organization called Women Who Write."
Highly educated, Dr. Ducksworth was valedictorian of her Lanier High School, Jackson, Mississippi, senior class, where she wrote and delivered the commencement speech. She went on to study at Tougaloo College in Tougaloo, Mississippi, and at Oberlin College in Ohio. She received a Bachelor of Arts degree in English (summa cum laude) from Tougaloo College in 1965. She also completed postgraduate coursework in English Literature for a master's degree at The State University of New York at Stony Brook in 1967' and completed a masters' degree in reading at Montclair State College in 1979. In 1988, she received a Doctor of Education degree in English Education from Rutgers University in New Brunswick. The Alumni Chapter of the Graduate School of Education cited her dissertation which focused on adult illiteracy and ranges of proximal development for remediation as one of two successful dissertations written in 1988 deserving special commendation for excellence. In a special awards ceremony she received a certificate to commemorate this achievement. While completing her doctoral degree, she became certified as a teacher of language arts and supervisor. She was also inducted into Rutgers' Chapter of Kappa Delta Pi, (Delta Xi) an International Honor Society in Education (1987). A celebrated Marquis listee, she has been featured in the 25th edition of Who's Who in the East.
Dr. Ducksworth has been a member of various professional organizations, among which are the Modern Language Association and the National Council for Black Studies. She has been a member and former conference presenter for the National Council of Teachers of English. Additionally, she made many presentations and performed many services for organizations to which has belonged. She was a New Jersey chapter presenter of the Teachers of English to Students of Other Languages International Association. For more than a decade, she served as a reader for Advanced Placement essays for the Educational Testing Service and a College Board presenter. In 2011 she served as a summer intern scholar at the Educational Testing service on the Ewing, New Jersey campus.
Other honors Dr. Ducksworth has received are as follows: 1988, an Institute Fellow at the Summer Institute of Writing sponsored by the Center for the Study of Writing in New Jersey held at Ramapo College in New Jersey; 1989, a Visiting Scholar in the interdisciplinary seminar sponsored by the Laurie Chair in the women's studies in spring 1990; 1989, a fellow in the summer Woodrow Wilson National Foundation "Writers' Workshop;" 1990, a seminar fellow in Internationalizing the Curriculum Project sponsored by a special New Jersey Department of Education grant; 1994, a seminar fellow in the NEH Summer Seminar on Uncle Tom's Cabin and American Culture at the Newberry Library in Chicago; 1995, a resident fellow in the NEH sponsored Robeson Faculty Institute for two summers; a 2002 participant in a NEH sponsored Langston Hughes Celebration at the University of Kansas.
In recognition of outstanding contributions to her profession and the Marquis Who's Who community, Dr. Ducksworth has been featured on the Albert Nelson Marquis Lifetime Achievement website. Please visit www.ltachievers.com for more information about this honor.
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