Baylor’s 2025 Centennial Professors Awarded Funding for Summer Research

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Baylor University faculty members Elesha J. Coffman, Ph.D., professor of history, and T. Philip Nichols, Ph.D., associate professor of English education, have been selected to receive the 2025 Centennial Professor Awards for summer research projects. The awards will provide funding for Coffman’s research that examines the history of Religion News Service and Nichols’ development of a free database of new technologies for K-16 educators.

The Centennial Professor Award, created by the Baylor Class of 1945, honors two tenured faculty members annually with a $5,000 Centennial Faculty Development award for research projects that facilitate their development and contribute to the academic life of the University. These projects may include travel for study or research, the development of innovative teaching materials or other professional development activities.

History of Religion News Service  

Coffman said it was a “wonderful surprise to get a burst of good news with the Centennial Professor Award” in support of her research on the history of Religion News Service (RNS).

A former journalist, Coffman specializes in American religious history and the transmission of ideas. Her project, “Making Religion News,” will examine the background and history of RNS and its role in reducing religious prejudice in the United States. With a current gap in information about RNS and its historical struggles in reporting on religion, Coffman’s hands-on research seeks to understand the goals of RNS journalists.

Religion News Service was founded in the 1930s, a tense time in American history with an economic depression, rising fascism and growing hostility between different religious groups, Coffman said.

"The journalists at RNS believed that truthfully reporting news about these religious groups would ease social tensions and strengthen American democracy,” she said. “RNS has been doing this work for more than 90 years now, producing thousands and thousands of reports for use in print and broadcast media, but no one has ever written a formal history of the organization.” 

The RNS archive is located in the Presbyterian Historical Society in Philadelphia, and only a small amount of the documents are digitized, requiring Coffman to travel and analyze the records herself. The Centennial Award’s funding will sponsor her research trip to the RNS archive, as well as one to the National Conference of Christians and Jews (NCCJ) in Minneapolis, where she will research the business side of RNS.  

Coffman said the RNS archive does not contain information about budgets, subscribers to the news service or even lists of staff members, but she hopes to find that information in the NCCJ archives. With the information she gathers over the summer, Coffman plans on drafting the proposal for a book on RNS.

Database of educational technologies

As a professor in the School of Education, Nichols is widely recognized for his research on the intersection between literacy, education and technology. His project, “Connecting Research and Practice in Ethical Educational Technology Use,” aims to create a free, continuously updated, searchable database of new technologies for K-16 educators. Nichols said the main goal of this project is to create an accessible way for educators and administrators to find relevant research to help guide their decision-making by improving research related to educational technologies. As new technologies continue to emerge, he said that many schools feel a desire to keep up with the pace of the latest digital tools. 

“In my own research in K-12 school systems, I’ve found that decision-making related to the procurement, implementation and use of new technologies isn’t always based on research evidence about their effectiveness,” Nichols said. “No one wants to be seen as the school or district that isn’t ‘innovative,’ and embracing new technologies is an easy way to project the image that you’re offering a cutting-edge education. One consequence of this is that schools often expend considerable time and money on untested technologies that never live up to their promises.”

The creation of this database will combat this issue by providing cross-discipline research on educational technologies, as well as the most effective ways to manage the new digital age. In addition, Nichols hopes the database can serve scholars by providing a source for different disciplines to find one another’s research and promote collaborations to improve the evidence base about how educational technologies should designed, used and regulated.

“This project is something I’ve been thinking about for years, and I’ve been waiting for the right circumstances to set it in motion. I’m so grateful that the award committee recognized the same potential in the project that I’ve seen, and I can’t wait to get started on it,” he said.     

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