Christopher Thomas, assistant professor of educational leadership and policy in the College of Education, has been named a recipient of the NAEd/Spencer Postdoctoral Fellowship for 2025.
“I am so humbled to receive this fellowship,” Thomas said. “It’s both a recognition of the work I’ve done and a testament to the importance of the research I’m doing.”
Thomas joins three other University of Florida faculty members who have previously received this fellowship. They include Damon Clark, assistant professor in the Department of Economics from 2005 to 2011; Pengefi Zhao, associate professor of qualitative research and methodology from 2019 to 2023; and F. Chris Curran, associate professor of educational leadership and policy and director of the Education Policy Research Center.
Thomas’s research focuses on elementary students’ First Amendment rights in public schools. He draws on his passion for democracy and education.
He focused on this topic because “most of the existing scholarship and even judicial opinions focus primarily on older students, but a few court cases have taken views of young students’ speech rights that are incomplete and problematic.”
Chris Thomas, Ph.D
He is also the author of Reclaiming Democratic Education: Student and Teacher Activism and the Future of Education Policy, which examines student and teacher activism and its impact on the understanding and implementation of students’ First Amendment rights.
“It seemed like the perfect topic to explore in order to inform how courts and educators realize the democratic aims of education in the elementary school context,” he said.
As a recipient of the NAEd/Spencer Postdoctoral Fellowship, Thomas was awarded $70,000 to support his research.