FELLOW NOTABLES
Monisha Bajaj (Postdoctoral 2008) published an article entitled “Decolonial approaches to school curriculum for Black, Indigenous and other students of colour” in the London Review of Education. Vol. 20(1). DOI: 10.14324/LRE.20.1.05. She also was interviewed by the Rise for Racial Justice podcast about her 2021 co-authored book Educating for Peace and Human Rights: An Introduction (Bloomsbury).
Gert Biesta (Postdoctoral 1995) published a number of articles in 2022, including: Siegel, S. T. & Biesta, G. (2022). El problema de la Teoría de la Educación. Teoría de la Educación. Revista Interuniversitaria, 34(1), 33-48. https://doi.org/10.14201/teri.27157; Biesta, G. (2022). Why the form of teaching matters: Defending the integrity of education and of the work of teachers beyond agendas and good intentions. Revista de Educación 395, January-March, 13-33. DOI: https://10.4438/1988-592X-RE-2022-395-519; and Biesta, G. (2022). Have we been paying attention? Educational anaesthetics in a time of crises. Educational Philosophy and Theory 54(3), 221-223. DOI: 10.1080/00131857.2020.1792612. Also, a Dutch translation of his book Educational Research: An Unorthodox Introduction was published by Boom publishers; a Korean translation of his book Beyond Learning: Democratic Education for a Human Future was published by Kyoyookkwahaksa Publishing; an Italian translation of his book The Rediscovery of Teaching was published by Raffaello Cortina publishers; and a Spanish translation of the book was published by Morata publishers.
John Bell’s (Dissertation 2016) first book, Degrees of Equality: Abolitionist Colleges and the Politics of Race, was published by Louisiana State University Press in May. The book analyzes early experiments in interracial education at three nineteenth-century colleges and the implications of their endeavors for the progress of racial justice in the United States. The book shows how abolitionists and their successors put their principles into practice and also explains why these institutions succumbed to the very forms of racism they had once vowed to defeat. Together, the tragic arc of abolitionist colleges and the heroic efforts of Black students and graduates to redeem them offer a usable past for anyone working to make American higher education more equitable and inclusive today.
Michelle Bellino (Postdoctoral 2016) is the 2022 recipient of the Joyce Cain Award for Distinguished Research on African Descendants, awarded by the Comparative and International Education Society. Bellino is recognized for her article, “Education, Merit and Mobility: Opportunities and Aspirations of Refugee Youth in Kenya’s Kakuma Refugee Camp,” published in British Educational Research Journal.
Amy Binder (Postdoctoral 2002), Department of Sociology, UC San Diego, has several new publications on the subject of collegiate politics, including her new book The Channels of Student Activism: How the Left and Right Are Winning (and Losing) in Campus Politics Today (University of Chicago Press, 2022). Other work with co-author Jeffrey Kidder has appeared in Qualitative Sociology (“Trumpism on College Campuses”), Sociological Forum (“The Politics of Speech on Campus”), and Change magazine (“Higher Education for American Democracy and the Channels of Student Activism”). In 2021, Binder was elected to the Sociological Research Association, an honor society that recognizes the most successful researchers in the field.
Derek Briggs (Postdoctoral 2007) recently published a book entitled Historical and Conceptual Foundations of Measurement in the Human Science: Credos and Controversies (Routledge). The book explores the assessment and measurement of nonphysical attributes that define human beings: abilities, personalities, attitudes, dispositions, and values. The proposition that human attributes are measurable remains controversial, as do the ideas and innovations of the six historical figures—Gustav Fechner, Francis Galton, Alfred Binet, Charles Spearman, Louis Thurstone, and S. S. Stevens—at the heart of this book. Across 10 rich, elaborative chapters, readers are introduced to the origins of educational and psychological scaling, mental testing, classical test theory, factor analysis, and diagnostic classification and to controversies spanning the quantity objection, the role of measurement in promoting eugenics, theories of intelligence, the measurement of attitudes, and beyond. Graduate students, researchers, and professionals in educational measurement and psychometrics will emerge with a deeper appreciation for both the challenges and the affordances of measurement in quantitative research.
Travis J. Bristol (Dissertation 2013; Postdoctoral 2020) earned tenure at the University of California, Berkeley. He also co-edited with Conra Gist (Postdoctoral 2016) the Handbook of Research on Teachers of Color and Indigenous Teachers, which was published by the American Educational Research Association.
Tolani Britton (Dissertation 2016; Postdoctoral 2021) published an article entitled “College or Bust… or Both: The Effects of the Great Recession on College Enrollment for Black and Latinx Young Adults” in the Journal of Research on Educational Effectiveness (https://doi.org/10.1080/19345747.2022.2054885). This article looks at whether the Great Recession led to changes in two-year and four-year college enrollment patterns for Black and Latinx students. She also co-authored with Arlyn Moreno Luna “The Impact of State Drug Laws on High School Completion and College Enrollment for Latino Young Men” in American Behavioral Scientist (https://doi.org/10.1177/00027642211054825).
Angela Calabrese Barton (Postdoctoral 1996), Professor and Chair of Educational Studies at the University of Michigan, won the American Education Research Association’s Division K 2022 Innovations in Research on Equity and Social Justice in Teacher Education award (with Edna Tan). She also has a new paper (also with Edna Tan) published in the Peabody Journal of Education focused on “Supporting teacher visioning of Justice-oriented Engineering in middle school.” This paper explores how teachers vision for teaching engineering in ways that attend to the sociopolitical dimensions of STEM teaching and learning, and in particular, how teachers make sense of and work to disrupt nested (in)justices that operate through mundane STEM education and school practices. She also has a handbook chapter in J. Luft & M. G. Jone’s Handbook of Research on Science Teacher Education focused on “Towards justice: Designing for rightful presence as a lens for science teacher education research”.
Toni Cela (Dissertation 2014) is a National Institutes of Health/National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIH/NIDA) Post-Doctoral fellow at the University of Miami in Coral Gables, Florida, and recently co-published as the lead author, Haitian and Haitian American Experiences of Socioethnic Discrimination in Miami-Dade County: At-Risk and Court-Involved Youth,” in the journal Family Relations: Interdisciplinary Journal of Family Science. Her co-authored article on prior research conducted on the impact of Hurricane Matthew titled, “Emergency Health in the Aftermath of Disaster: A Post Hurricane Matthew Outbreak in Rural Haiti,” was recently published in the Disaster Prevention and Management journal.
Maia Cucchaira (Postdoctoral 2012) published an op-ed, “Too Many Americans Don’t Understand What Happens in Their Schools”, in the New York Times in March. You may read it at: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/03/08/opinion/covid-schools-disruption.html
Cati de los Ríos (Postdoctoral 2020) received two 2022 Early Career Awards from American Educational Research Association’s Special Interest Groups: 1) Grassroots Community and Youth Organizing for Educational Reform; and 2) Language and Social Processes.
Fabienne Doucet (Postdoctoral 2002) became Executive Director of the NYU Metropolitan Center for Research on Equity and the Transformation of Schools in January. She is the first woman director of the Center, and the first Black woman to lead a research center at the Steinhardt School.
Jason Ellis (Postdoctoral 2017) received a 2021-22 Killam Research Fellowship to support research during a one-year study leave.
Rachel Fish (Postdoctoral 2020) has two forthcoming papers from her NAEd/Spencer Postdoctoral Fellowship project. In “Stratified Medicalization of Schooling Difficulties,” accepted at Social Science & Medicine, she shows how students’ academic and behavioral difficulties become differentially medicalized as disability, and how these processes relate to large-scale racial and gender inequality in special education. Also forthcoming in Research in Social Sciences and Disability with co-authors David Rangel, Nellie De Arcos, and Olivia Friend, is “Inequality in the Schooling Experiences of Disabled Children and their Families during COVID-19.” Finally, along with Catherine Voulgarides and María Cioè-Peña, she was awarded a Spencer Foundation Conference Grant. The conference, “Envisioning an Interdisciplinary Future for Special Education and Gifted Racial Equity Research,” will bring together early-career scholars to develop a new trajectory of interdisciplinary, intersectional research on equity in special and gifted education.
Ryan Gildersleeve published: S. S. Bengtsen & R. E. Gildersleeve (Eds). (2022). Transformation of the University: Hopeful Futures for Higher Education. London: Routledge. He will also begin as Dean of the College of Education at Eastern Michigan University this summer. See the announcement here: https://today.emich.edu/story/story/12070
Roger Goddard (Postdoctoral 2002) has formed the Collaborative for Ohio School Research with an initial $200,000 award from the Educational Service Center of Central Ohio to help local school districts make better use of data to identify and ameliorate COVID-19 achievement gaps. In addition, Goddard is Co-PI with his former post-doctoral researcher, Dr. Minjung Kim (PI) (Assistant Professor at Ohio State) on a $100,000 grant to study the impact of newly funded school-based counselors on students and teachers during the COVID-19 pandemic in the Columbus City Schools. Goddard was also just appointed by the Executive Committee of the Ohio State University Faculty Senate to a three-year term on the University Research Committee to shape university research policy. Goddard also extended his research on efficacy beliefs with a validation study linking an original measure of principal efficacy beliefs for instructional leadership to student learning in an article published in Leadership and Policy in Schools (Goddard et al., 2021).
Peter Francis Harvey (Dissertation 2020) has published an article in the American Journal of Sociology entitled “’Make Sure You Look Someone in the Eye’: Socialization and Classed Comportment in Two Elementary Schools.” The paper, based on his dissertation research funded by NAEd/Spencer, shows how children’s bodies become classed in schools from a young age.
Laura E. Hernández (Dissertation 2016) recently published three articles based on the research conducted with the support of her NAEd/Spencer Fellowship. The first, “Code Switching and Political Strategy: The Role of Racial Discourse in the Coalition-Building Efforts of Charter Management Organizations,” was published in the American Educational Research Journal. This piece examines how charter management organizations (CMOs) variably and strategically deploy racial appeals in the pursuit of resources and the equity implications that these political tactics carry. Her second piece, “Navigating Politically Muddy Waters: Charter Management Organizations and their Localized and Discursive Efforts to Craft a Counternarrative”, was published in Urban Education. This article investigates how CMO discourse is strategically used to buffer sociopolitical criticisms and to align with local values and orientations. Her most recent article, “The Importance of Being “Woke”: Charter Management Organizations and the Growth of Social Consciousness as a School Quality Marker,” was published as part of a special issue in Educational Policy that explored racialized conceptions of school quality.
Erika Kitzmiller (Postdoctoral 2014), Term Assistant Professor of Education, Barnard College, just published her first book, The Roots of Educational Inequality: Philadelphia’s Germantown High School, 1907 – 2014, Penn Press, 2022. The book chronicles the transformation of one American high school over the course of the twentieth century to explore the larger political, economic, and social factors that have contributed to the escalation of educational inequality in modern America. She completed the book revisions as a Spencer Foundation postdoctoral fellow at Harvard University’s Hutchins Center.
Matthew Kraft (Dissertation 2012) received the 2022 Outstanding Public Communication of Education Research Award from the American Educational Research Association. He was also selected to become a Research Associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research in the Economics of Education program. His recent article, “Can teacher evaluation systems produce high-quality feedback? An administrator training field experiment”, was published in the American Educational Research Journal.
Adam Laats (Postdoctoral 2009) completed his book manuscript about the earliest history of urban public education in the USA, and the career of delusional school reformer Joseph Lancaster. He also published commentary about schools and history in Nature, Washington Post, and Slate.
Kathryn Lanouette (Dissertation 2017) published an article in Science Education titled “Emotion, place, and practice: Exploring the interplay in children’s engagement in ecologists’ sampling practices” (https://doi.org/10.1002/sce.21702). Additionally, she recently co-authored an article with Victor Lee (Postdoctoral 2014) and Michelle Wilkerson in Educational Researcher, titled: “A call for a humanistic stance toward K-12 data science education” (https://doi.org/10.3102/0013189X211048810)
Timothy J. Lensmire (Postdoctoral 1994) was appointed Editor of the journal Whiteness and Education, co-edited (with Ezekiel Joubert III) a special issue on Black Lives Matter and rural education for the Journal of Research in Rural Education, and had his essay, “How white supremacy is reproduced in the relations of white people to other white people, with some notes on what this means for antiracist education,” published in the International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education.
Tisha Lewis Ellison (Postdoctoral 2015) was interviewed in the UGA-Grady Newsource Regarding the Literacy “Read ‘N Roll” program in April, 2022. On April 13, 2022, she was invited to participate in a virtual panel, Inclusive digital pedagogies at the Adobe Creative Campus Collaboration Conference 2022. Dr. Lewis Ellison has also published the following books: Compton-Lilly, C. (Postdoctoral 2002), Rogers, R., & Lewis Ellison, T. (2021). Making sense of literacy scholarship: Approaches to synthesizing literacy research. Routledge, and Compton-Lilly, C., Lewis Ellison, T., Perry, K. (Postdoctoral 2002), & Smagorinsky, P. (Editors) (2021). Whitewashed critical perspectives: Restoring the edge to edgy ideas in literacy education. Routledge. [Foreword: Rich Milner (Member); Afterword: Valerie Kinloch]
Margaret G. McKeown (Postdoctoral 1988) co-authored two new articles and appeared on a podcast. Her articles are: Crosson, A. C., McKeown, M. G., Lei, P., Zhao, H., Li, X., Patrick, K., … & Shen, Y. (2021). Morphological analysis skill and academic vocabulary knowledge are malleable through intervention and may contribute to reading comprehension for multilingual adolescents. Journal of Research in Reading, 44(1), 154-174, and Crosson, A. C., Tapu, C., & McKeown, M. G. (2022). Think Like a Linguist: Leveraging Multilingual Students’ Expertise about Language. Journal of Adolescent & Adult Literacy. She was interviewed on the podcast Education Reading Room with Oliver Lovell. (Episode 062: Margaret McKeown on Robust Vocabulary Instruction) https://www.ollielovell.com/errr/margaretmckeown-vocab/
Mollie McQuillan (Dissertation 2017), Assistant Professor in Educational Leadership and Policy Analysis at the University of Wisconsin Madison, has two papers in the forthcoming special issue of Educational Researcher. “A Starting Point: Gender, Hot Cognition, and Trans-Informed Administrative Guidance” describes how local districts attempt to address the who, what, how, and why of supporting transgender students. McQuillan uses a mixed-methods approach to review evidence of trans-informed guidance that can introduce complex gender “definitions” and legitimize students’ identity. The paper also highlights how few texts interpret existing state and local policies so leaders can understand how these policies could translate into administrative actions. The paper includes several suggestions as policymakers initiate gender-diversity reforms.
The second Educational Researcher article, which is co-authored with several members of the Spencer-funded Trans Studies Learning Community, uses data from the largest survey of PK12 trans educators to date. McQuillan and colleagues find trans school workers reported greater policy protections but less sources of social support when compared to their students.
McQuillan also published part of their dissertation sponsored by the NAEd/Spencer Dissertation Fellowship in Educational Policy, Scaling gender and sexuality-related policies in K-12 schools. This mixed-methods paper outlines top-down (e.g., legislative nondiscrimination mandates) and bottom-up (e.g., community characteristics of the district) pathways involved in expanding educational reforms concerning LGBTQ+ students.
McQuillan and Eckes have a forthcoming publication in West Education Law Reporter, “Legal Update: When Social Media Posts Cause Students Emotional Harm,” detailing the implications of a recent First Circuit Court of Appeals ruling addressing Massachusetts’ anti-bullying law and students’ free speech rights.
Finally, a Madison Education Project report authored by McQuillan describes the school climate and health of LGBTQ+ students in Madison and evaluated several of Madison Metropolitan School District’s programs to support LGBTQ+ students. One of their findings in this research-practice partnership suggests that a scaled, intensive version of LGBTQ+-inclusivity professional development in Madison elementary schools contributed to fewer school disciplinary actions in schools receiving the professional development program.
Francine Menashy (Postdoctoral 2013) published the article “Economic imperialism in education: A conceptual review” in Educational Researcher, co-authored with Huriya Jabbar (2013 Dissertation Fellow; 2016 Postdoctoral Fellow). She completed the Dubai Cares-funded project Promising Partnership Models for Education in Emergencies: A Global-Local Analysis with co-PI Zeena Zakharia (2007 Dissertation Fellow) and published a report and policy brief based on the research.
Nicole Panorkou (Postdoctoral 2017) published the article “Exploring Students’ Dynamic Measurement Reasoning About Right Prisms and Cylinders” in the journal Cognition and Instruction. The work presented in this article focused on research that Panorkou conducted during her NAEd/Spencer Postdoctoral Fellowship. This study presents the results of a series of design experiments that aimed to engage twelve fourth-grade students in mathematical activity exploring the volume of right prisms and cylinders as a dynamic sweep of a surface through a height, an approach that is referred to as Dynamic Measurement for Volume.
Rob Reich (Postdoctoral 2002) published his first book for a general audience, System Error: Where Big Tech Went Wrong and How We Can Reboot (with Mehran Sahami and Jeremy M. Weinstein). He also wrote his first paper with colleagues from the Computer Science department, “On the Opportunities and Risks of Foundation Models.”
Frank Reichert (Postdoctoral 2016) has been selected for the Faculty Outstanding Young Researcher Award 2021/22 of the Faculty of Education at The University of Hong Kong. He was also a Visiting Fellow at the Institute for the Didactics of Democracy at the Leibniz University Hannover, Germany, in May 2022, and joined the Centre for Inclusive Citizenship at the Leibniz University Hannover as an Associate Member. In addition, Reichert is co-organizing a joint international conference of the Standing Group “Citizenship” of the European Consortium for Political Research and the Centre for Inclusive Citizenship, entitled “Inclusive Citizenship as Belongings, Practices and Acts” (https://ecpr.eu/Events/205). He has also published two new articles as the corresponding author, one on the measurement of digital literacy during the Covid-19 pandemic (Pan et al., 2022) and the other examining how digital literacy is associated with gaming addiction (Tso et al., 2022).
Pan, Q., Reichert, F., de la Torre, J., & Law, N. (2022). Measuring digital literacy during the Covid-19 pandemic: Experiences with remote assessment in Hong Kong. Educational Measurement: Issues and Practice 41(1), 46–50. DOI: 10.1016/j.lanwpc.2022.100382
Tso, W. W. Y., Reichert, F., Law, N., Fu, K.-W., de la Torre, J., Rao, N., Leung, L. K., Wang, Y., Wong, W. H. S., & Ip, P. (2022). Digital literacy as a protective factor against gaming addiction in children and adolescents: A cross-sectional study. The Lancet Regional Health 20, 100382. DOI: 10.1111/emip.12498
Diego X Roman (Postdoctoral 2020) co-authored a paper in the Review of Research in Education titled “Exploring Conceptions of Creativity and Latinidad in Environmental Education Through the Lens of Culturally Sustaining Pedagogy“. In this paper, the authors employed a culturally sustaining pedagogy lens to conduct a systematic review of literature analyzing whether and how environmental education programs have recognized the creative potential inherent in the heterogeneity and richness of Latinx communities in the United States.
John L. Rudolph (Postdoctoral 2004) was recently named Vilas Distinguished Achievement Professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. His new book, Why We Teach Science (and Why We Should), examines the arguments frequently made for teaching science in schools and asks whether they hold up to what is actually known about how and what students learn. It is scheduled to be published by Oxford University Press in 2023.
Keith Sawyer (Postdoctoral 2000) (University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill) was a co-editor of a special issue of the Journal of the Learning Sciences titled “Learning in and through the arts” (2022, Volume 31, Issue 1; co-edited with Erica Halverson, University of Wisconsin-Madison).
Sarah Surrain (Dissertation 2020) recently published two articles on teacher-child language interactions in preschool classrooms serving Spanish-speaking bilingual learners with co-authors Stephanie Curenton and Cecilia Jarquín Tapia. “Fostering dual language learners’ participation in Head Start classroom conversations through code-switching in whole group and small group settings” appears in Early Education and Development https://doi.org/10.1080/10409289.2022.2073749). “The importance of dyadic classroom conversations for dual language learners” appears in The Reading Teacher (https://doi.org/10.1002/trtr.2089). She will present findings from her NAEd/Spencer-supported dissertation longitudinal study on bilingual parent-child interactions spanning the transition to English-language schooling at two conferences this summer: the International Conference on Heritage/Community Languages at UCLA and the International Symposium on Bilingual and L2 Processing in Adults and Children in Tromsø, Norway.
Samantha Viano (Dissertation 2017) led a webinar with Dr. Dominique J. Baker (Postdoctoral 2022) for the Society of Research on Educational Effectiveness (SREE) in their Critical Perspectives in Quantitative Methods Webinar Series co-sponsored by Association for Education Finance and Policy (AEFP), the American Educational Research Association – Division L, and the Council on Public Policy in Higher Education (CPPHE), a Council of the Association for the Study of Higher Education (ASHE). A recording of the webinar, titled “Racial and Ethnic Identities and Administrative Data,” is available at https://www.sree.org/critical-perspectives.
Shirin Vossoughi (Postdoctoral 2016) was awarded the Charles Deering McCormick Teaching Excellence award at Northwestern University. She also published a journal article on Race, Parenting and Identity in the Iranian Diaspora in the Journal of Family Diversity in Education.
Jon M. Wargo (Postdoctoral 2020) recently published two articles: Gendered Genius Hour: Tracing Young Children’s Uptake of ‘Expert’ Across the Nexus of Personal Digital Inquiry in the journal Research in the Teaching of English and Leveraging Digital Media to Document Social Class Injustice in English Journal. In addition, he received an Honorable Mention for the 2022 Jan Hawkins Award for Early Career Contributions to Humanistic Research and Scholarship in Learning Technologies.
Chenyi Zhang (Postdoctoral 2016) published an article about Chinese parents’ stress during COVID quarantine time. He is also currently designing and implementing a trauma-informed literacy program in preschool classrooms, in which teachers used reflective practices to integrate literacy and social emotional instruction together in classroom routine activities. He was selected to be a Horowitz Early Career Mentor by Society for Research in Child Development (SRCD) and began serving as a member of SRCD Rapid Assessment and Response Strategy Team.
Jonathan Zimmerman’s (Postdoctoral 1999) book Free Speech and Why You Should Give a Damn (illustrated by cartoonist Signe Wilkinson) won the Ben Franklin Gold award from the Independent Book Publishers Association, for the best book in the category of “political and current events.” In September, University of Chicago Press will publish a revised 20th-anniversary edition of his 2002 book, Whose America? Culture Wars in the Public Schools.
Kate Zinsser (Postdoctoral 2015), Associate Professor of Psychology at the University of Illinois at Chicago, launched a new program of research into early childhood expulsion practices during her 2015 postdoctoral fellowship. This line of inquiry has only continued to grow. It now includes a long-term partnership with Illinois policymakers to evaluate the implementation of a state-wide ban on exclusionary discipline in childcare and preschool programs and a mixed-method study of the impacts of preschool expulsion of families. Early in 2022, her team published the first systematic review of early childhood exclusionary discipline in the Review of Educational Research. In August of 2022, her first sole-authored book, No Longer Welcome: The epidemic of expulsion from early childhood education, will be published by Oxford University Press.