Green Wins Presidential Fellowship
Peri Green, a learning sciences graduate student at the School of Education and Social Policy, received the prestigious Presidential Fellowship at Northwestern University for her work exploring how a child’s environment can create or reduce opportunities for learning.
Her research argues that infrastructure begets opportunity: transportation, time, safety, and social connection all play a major role in learning outside the classroom. “The more people have access to, the more they're able to achieve and become,” Green says.
Green is the sixth SESP student to win the highly competitive fellowship since 2016. Previous winners include Jacob Kelter (2022), Sheridan Fuller (2021), Heather McCambly (2019), Mollie McQuillan (2017), and the late Cynthia (C.C.) DuBois (2016).
The Fellowship is funded by the President of the University and awarded by The Graduate School. Recipients become members of the Northwestern Society of Fellows. Fewer than 12 percent of nominated students are appointed to the Fellowship, and they are chosen for their outstanding academic efforts and leadership skills.
“Peri combines rigorous research with a deep understanding of the young people and communities she works with,” said her advisor, Nichole Pinkard, the Alice Hamilton Professor of Learning Sciences.
“She's remarkably creative in adapting learning science methods to highlight geospatial knowledge, and she does it thoughtfully. Her collaborators know their ideas matter and feel supported in their work.”
Green developed “Freeze Framing,” a system built around an app that lets kids document what they do when they’re not in school and reflect on their experiences. By mapping where children go and analyzing their experiences, Green was able to identify barriers that affect participation, such as transportation issues and peer influence. She detailed these in a paper that received the Most Outstanding Design Paper Award at the 2025 International Conference of the Learning Sciences.
Green also co-designed Mappenings, a mobile geocapture app that helps young people document and interpret their experiences.
In 2024, funded by the Alice Kaplan Public Humanities Graduate Practicum, she launched #Community Crawls, a public humanities initiative designed to connect young people with their local community spaces—museums, parks, and libraries.
The project, inspired by Gwendolyn Brooks’ poem We So Cool and the notion of bar crawls—visiting several establishments in one day— took five teenagers living on Chicago’s South Side to public places over several weekends; they documented their experiences on TikTok. The group went everywhere from the Chicago Hip Hop Heritage Museum and South Shore Cultural Center to the Whitney M. Young Jr. Library.
“Every time we went somewhere, they’d say, ‘Oh, I’ve never been here’ and I’d be shocked because they literally live right next to it,” Green said.
Neighborhood opportunities
Green, who grew up in Decatur, Georgia and frequently visited family in Detroit, was raised by a single mom, Pyper Bunch, who stressed the importance of education. She said her neighborhood lacked out of school opportunities, but in seventh grade Green attended the Atlanta Dream Enrichment summer program; she later went to a Georgia Tech academic weekend program.
“Anything I did, I had to apply on my own and it had to be free,” she said. “After the Georgia Tech program, I kept asking, ‘can we go back? Can I do another one?’ But we didn’t know how to find them.”
Green played tennis at her all-Black high school and selected the trombone because it didn’t have keys, like the other instruments. “I always wanted to do the thing no one else was doing,” she said.
She won a Gates Millennium Scholarship and studied business technology and education at the University of Miami. She later earned a master’s degree in technology, innovation, and education at the Harvard Graduate School of Education.
In 2020, Green worked as an instructional design and technology specialist at Clark Atlanta University, an experience that reinforced her desire to work in academia but in a way that contributes to communities.
She found Pinkard, who was elected to the National Academy of Education for her work on education ecosystems, and knew her next step was to pursue a doctorate in learning sciences under Pinkard’s guidance. “My ultimate goal is to open informal learning places throughout my community and put them in existing community spaces,” she said.