2024 Fall Retreat and Annual Meeting

Speakers

• Khalil Anthony Johnson, Wesleyan University
• Luis Leyva, Vanderbilt University

Review our online document for panelist biographies.

Speakers

• Tisha Lewis Ellison, University of Georgia
• Emily Rauscher, Brown University

Review our online document for panelist biographies.

“Doing Work that Matters in Difficult Times” explores the challenges and opportunities faced by educators in an era of global and academic unrest. We’ll discuss strategies for:

• Maintaining focus on impactful teaching and research
• Addressing student concerns about world events
• Navigating institutional pressures and changes
• Finding meaning and purpose in academic work during turbulent times

Speakers

• Bryan Brayboy, Northwestern University
• Leigh Patel, University of Pittsburgh
• Carrie Sampson, Arizona State University

Review our online document for panelist biographies.

The world is complex! As researchers, we need to think broadly, outside of our usual silos. Although our work is collectively focused on research questions in math education, individual projects look at math ed issues through a number of lenses, including human development, language, race, gender, culture, etc.

This experiential session will serve as a jumping off for a larger conversation about the EMERG Conceptual Framework and a supportive context for thinking about and planning for project revisions.

SPEAKERS

María Cioè-Peña
B is for Bilingual, Black, or Broken: Erasure and pathologization through school-based ethnic, linguistic and disability classifications
This project examines the racializing and pathologizing experiences of Black Latinx students who receive English language and special education services. Due to the continued use and perception of ?Latinx? as a monolithic identity, Black Latinx students are missing from data even as they are heavily impacted by racism and ableism. As such, we cannot fully account for the depth of inequity across schooling. This study will document the experiences of Black Latinx students who received English language and/or special education services, with the goal of introducing the particularities of these students? experiences to equity discourses. Using interviews and descriptive inquiry, I will gather data that represent the experiences of Black Latinx students to showcase how current practices obscure issues related to their segregation across programs designed to support marginalized or at-risk learners. By centering these students? experiences, this study has the potential to surface information that is critical to developing and applying policies focused on equity and inclusion as they relate to racialized learners who receive language and special education services. This will be the first major study of how educational labels are used to maintain hierarchies that privilege non-Black, English-dominant/bilingual, enabled students over Black, emergent bilingual students with disabilities.

Natalia Rojas
The benefits of bilingual peers: examining educators? facilitation of supportive language strategies among emergent bilingual children and their peers
Providing Spanish-English emergent bilinguals with access to high-quality early childhood education (ECE) programs may reduce longstanding inequities in our educational systems. Yet, despite the importance of peer interactions, peers are rarely considered a solution for reducing inequality in the classroom and improving emergent bilingual learning and development. Although peer interactions may not be as constructive without educators? facilitation and support, prior research focuses on either peer interactions or educators? scaffolding of peer interactions without careful consideration of the dynamics between the two. As such, this mixed method proposes: (1) examining what supportive language strategies emergent bilingual peers use to scaffold learning (language and other) with one another; (2) exploring the social and linguistic strategies educators use to facilitate peer interactions and how these strategies facilitate peers? supportive language strategies; and (3) studying the process of co-developing with ECE educators a set of practice recommendations to facilitate peer interactions. Not only will results from this study expand our understanding of peer interactions, but by focusing on specific strategies at the emergent bilingual child and educator level, this study allows for immediate application to peer-mediated programs, ECE classroom practices, and potential educator professional learning programs.

Jessica Chandras
Challenging hegemonic narratives of academic success: Linguistic Justice in Rural India
India’s socially segregated society remains a barrier to educational equity for students of lower castes, low classes, and non-Hindu religions. My project focuses on the role of linguistic inclusivity for equity in education by examining impacts of caste, language, and identity in education for students from a socially marginalized, Denotified Tribal group in a rural region of the western Indian state of Maharashtra. Through qualitative ethnographic methods, I explore social stratification and the political economy of language evidenced in education among communities with two different home languages, or mother tongues: Marathi, the official state language of Maharashtra and Banjara, a language spoken by the formally nomadic community. The question framing this study asks how Banjara students, a group positioned at the margins of caste and socioeconomic status in India, understand and craft their identities in education through a distinct language within prevailing social hierarchies? Building on the need for more pedagogical scaffolding for Banjara students to learn Marathi identified through a pilot study in 2022, the project goals include creating research-practitioner partnerships to address equity in education through linguistic inclusivity and building interventions for greater access to educational advancement and inclusive pedagogies for linguistic minorities. Theoretical implications contribute to educational sociolinguistics and studies of language in education, identity, and belonging in learning sciences and the linguistic anthropology of education. This study builds a model to collaboratively shape educational structures, through language mediums of instruction, to broaden education equity by empowering further inclusivity of students from diverse linguistic and social backgrounds.

CHAIR

Maisha Winn

SPEAKERS

Kirsten Slungaard Mumma
Identifying the Effects of Schools on Civic Engagement
Despite record turnout, only half of all Americans aged 18-29 voted in the 2020 presidential election. Gaps in voter turnout are consequential for election outcomes, reflect (and may exacerbate) existing social inequalities, and diminish the ability of our democracy to fully represent the interests of its people. Although public schools have been called the “guardians of democracy,” it is not well understood whether and how K-12 schools contribute to civic engagement. The goal of this study is to identify the effects of K-12 high schools on adult voting behavior and to generate evidence on the mechanisms behind these effects. I will do this by pairing contemporary approaches to value-added modelling with unique data linking K-12, birth, and voting records for students in Indiana to estimate “civic value-added measures” that control for parental voting. I will then relate these civic value-added measures to value-added estimates for test- and non-test outcomes, peer group composition, and school-level measures of civic education opportunities to identify potential mechanisms for these effects. Specifically, this study will address the following two primary research questions: 1. Do high schools affect the civic engagement of their students? and 2. Are high school effects on civic engagement related to effects on test and non-test outcomes, peer group composition, and other measures of civics-related coursework and extracurricular opportunities?

Josh Coleman
Banned Childhoods: Storying Book Banning practices and LGBTQ+ Educational Activism in the Conservative Midwest
Book bans are on the rise across the United States, and LGBTQ+ children’s books are now the most banned of the 21st century. Targeted by social media campaigns and conservative educational policy (e.g., Florida’s “Don’t Say Gay Bill?), these texts spotlight an ideological battleground around banned childhoods, or the ideological belief that LGBTQ+ children are inappropriate for inclusion in U.S. schools and libraries. While educational scholarship has focused on nation-level change, research has yet to account for region-specific book banning practices and educational activism, despite book bans clustering in politically conservative regions (e.g., the Midwest and Deep South). Addressing this gap, this narrative inquiry study chronicles educational stakeholders’ experiences of the implementation of Senate File 496, an educational policy that bans books across the state of Iowa. This study’s findings seek to advance educational knowledge on regional distinctions in book banning practices and resulting educational activism. This project’s implications will increase access to LGBTQ+ children’s literature by 1) informing policy that challenges book banning practices specific to local context and 2) detailing practitioner approaches to challenging book bans in libraries and schools.

Derron Wallace
Policing for Safety in Schools? Exploring Black Youth?s Experiences of New School-Based Policing in Britain
School-based policing is now a key feature of British educational policy and practice for the first time in the history of British schooling. The introduction of in-school policing follows a sharp increase in knife crime in major British cities since 2017. And though knife crime has occurred largely in out-of-school spaces, Britain’s Children’s Affairs Commissioner called for “neighborhood police officers attached to every school,” mirroring practices in the United States for dealing with safety in schools. The proposed study is the first ethnographic study of how Black youth experience new developments in policing in London public schools. Drawing on archival analysis, in depth interviews, and participant observations at one of the first schools in London to host police officers as members of staff, and to install metal detectors at the entrance of schools, this project advances two key objectives. First, it assesses the discursive development of narratives on policing students from 1970-2020. Second, it explores Black youth’s sense-making of routine in-school policing commonly proposed as a solution to school safety concerns. This project contributes to international educational research by documenting the voices and views of Black youth on policing and schooling in the global city they call home.

CHAIR

Lois Weis

SPEAKERS

Suneal Kolluri
Defending Utopia: Ideology and Inequality in the Great Suburban High School
Many suburban schools, though increasing in racial diversity, are seriously under-serving Black and Latinx youth. Playa Linda High School, the diverse, Southern California suburban high school that is the focus of this ethnography, is no such school. However, despite genuine achievements in promoting equality, I argue that the school ultimately reinforces inequality, particularly as it manifests in their own suburban utopia. The process by which I argue this occurs is as follows: (1) The school’s success with racial diversity results in large part from curated inclusion, a strategy in which racially minoritized students are welcomed at the school, but their presence is contingent on them having attributes rendering them worthy of being included. (2) Playa Linda students’ understandings of social inequality, by virtue of racially integrated classrooms and the instruction they receive, are detached from historical and present-day oppressions in the local community. (3) A genuine (but insular) kindness culture that met all students’ needs obscures the more invisible injustices that impact the school and neighborhood. By leveraging meritocratic ideologies to curate a racially inclusive school and then ignoring local manifestations of racism within that school’s community, Playa Linda led students to assume that even if the world around them is unfair, their own world is not. This ideological production between a school and its suburb has important implications for equality and justice nationwide.

Brian Van Wyck
Education, Islam, and the Making of Turkish Difference: Turkish Teachers and Imams in Postwar Germany
The project offers a history of the racialization of Turkish Muslims in the Federal Republic of Germany from the 1960s through the 2000s, focusing on the role of teachers and imams from Turkey who worked with what was the country?s largest migrant group by 1973. Teachers offered language courses to the children of so-called ?guest workers? in German schools, whereas imams taught religious lessons and led prayers in mosques and Qur?an courses. In these capacities both provided information for audiences in two countries about Turks in the Federal Republic on culture, Islam, and racialized difference. They did not just produce knowledge, but were called to act upon this knowledge, providing interventions based on what German or Turkish officials deemed to be the needs of the Turkish German population. This position at the intersection of producing and applying knowledge and of the interests of two states makes teachers and imams uniquely valuable subjects in a history of the transnational politics of knowledge about race and Islam. Tracing this history offers insights into the contested and contingent racialization of Islam in Western Europe, the entangling of Turkish and German secular regimes, and transnational attachments encouraged and fostered by sending and receiving states in concert.

Sara Doolittle
If There is But One”: The Intersection of Law, Education, and Black Citizenship Rights in Oklahoma
This legal history explores previously unstudied and undiscovered court challenges for educational access brought by Black settlers during Oklahoma?s territorial period (1889-1907). Through examining these local cases, my work addresses broader questions we have about educational rights and access. In Oklahoma Territory, Black pioneers had equal rights to land under the Homestead Act and the territory?s Organic Act. They had historic access to integrated education in other states, in neighboring Indian Territory, and on military posts. Yet racist forces were determined to deny access to Black children. Their families fought against a narrowing of their rights. These families found sympathetic judges in the territory?s courts. As a result, Oklahoma courts heard more challenges than in any other state. This history has a broader significance. This was a pivotal time for the law and for public education, and a defining period for Black citizenship. As such my research sheds new light on the question: is there a federal right to education? It further considers: What is the role of the federal government in protecting the rights of all its citizens to educational access? How is racial hierarchy upheld by negating this history of rights claims as it pertains to education?

CHAIR

Jon Hale

Postdoctoral Fellows who presented in a Fellows Forum today will meet their discussant in East Court.

Gather at specific tables at the West Court to discuss a specific topic.

Not participating in one of the other sessions? You are welcome to take a break during this time.

EMERG Scholars will meet individually with their primary mentor. This is an opportunity to catch up on where they stand with their project and talk through their longer-term personal and professional mentoring goals. (If the primary mentor is not available in person or remotely, they will meet with another member of their mentor triad and/or a member of the Executive Board.)

“Navigating and Securing an Academic Position” will guide grantees through the intricacies of obtaining and succeeding in tenure-track academic positions today. We’ll discuss strategies for:

• Understanding the academic job market landscape
• Preparing for and excelling in interviews and job talks
• Negotiating offers effectively, including salary, startup packages, and teaching load
• Navigating the tenure process and meeting institutional expectations
• Balancing research, teaching, and service commitments

Speakers

• Michael Feuer, George Washington University
• Okhee Lee, New York University
• Zeena Zakharia, University of Maryland

Review our online document for panelist biographies.

“Beyond the Academy” explores career paths for academics outside traditional tenure-track academic positions. We’ll explore:

• Alternative career options leveraging your academic preparation
• Pros and cons of leaving academia
• Transferable knowledge valued in non-academic sectors
• Strategies for transitioning to industry, non-profits, government roles, or establishing new organizations
• Maintaining research interests outside university settings

Speakers

• Rhonda Broussard, Beloved Community
• Jasmine Haywood, Lumina Foundation
• Liza Pappas, Grow Your Own Teachers, Illinois

Review our online document for panelist biographies.

“Finding Joy (and Balance)” addresses the crucial challenge of maintaining personal well-being and professional satisfaction in demanding academic environments. We’ll explore:

• Strategies for work-life balance in academia
• Identifying and prioritizing sources of joy in your work
• Techniques for managing stress and preventing burnout
• Creating boundaries and learning to say ‘no’
• Cultivating meaningful personal and professional relationships
• How to transform academia’s culture to value joy

Speakers

• James Earl Davis, Temple University
• Amanda Tachine, University of Oregon

Review our online document for panelist biographies.

This year marks the 70th anniversary of the landmark Brown v. Board of Education decision. In 2004, AERA inaugurated the Annual Brown Lecture in Education Research to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the Supreme Court taking sustained and significant research into account in its ruling. Each year, AERA elevates a scholar notable for undertaking such work. For 20 years, distinguished scholars have delivered the Brown Lecture, examining educational equality and equity and the complicated legacy of Brown.

Speaker

Elise Boddie, University of Michigan

SPEAKERS

Meseret Hailu
Gendered Engineering Laboratories: Microcosms of Universities in Kenya, Rwanda, and Uganda
The underrepresentation of women in STEM is a perennial issue in the study of higher education. Studying women in engineering programs at private higher education institutions is necessary as these settings are uniquely positioned to lessen inequalities for women in STEM due to growing enrollment and institutional resources. This project focuses on the gendered dimension of university laboratories of three private universities in Kenya, Rwanda, and Uganda. Using an institutional ethnography design, I explore engineering laboratory spaces, curricular materials, and the perspectives of engineering faculty to unpack the contextual factors that influence how women in East African countries navigate engineering programs in higher education. The research question driving this work is: what can be learned about equitable teaching experiences for women through a comparative study of engineering laboratory classrooms in private African institutions? Employing an African feminist worldview, my study illuminates how African faculty members design pedagogical approaches to create equitable learning environment; what messages are communicated based on artwork, signs, and other physical attributes of laboratory environments; how materials such as course syllabi, flyers, and physical laboratory materials are used; and how women engage in placemaking in engineering laboratories. This work allows me to extend the scope of my current scholarship on public universities in Africa to the rapidly proliferating sector of private higher education. Additionally, it will provide scholars and institutional policy makers with a better understanding of how to lessen the structural and interpersonal challenges that often encumber laboratory learning for women in East African postsecondary institutions.

Joel Mittleman
Gender Inequality Beyond the Gender Binary: A ‘Gender Predictive’ Approach
America?s rapidly expanding college gender gap has refocused public attention on the underachievement of boys. Although scholars have long argued that boys? academic engagement is undercut by dominant masculinity norms, these norms have been largely invisible in quantitative research. Instead, researchers have been restricted to documenting disparities by binary sex, collapsing the entire gender spectrum into a 0 or 1. This binary approach erases the experiences of students who do not adhere to gender norms and is increasingly out-of-step with how gender is understood today. This project provides a way to move beyond this binary framework. Analyzing four decades of high school cohort studies, I will use machine learning to quantify the extent to which students? survey responses conform with the gender norms reported by their peers. By directly measuring gender norms, it becomes possible to analyze students throughout the gender spectrum: both those who adhere strongly to gender norms and those who depart radically from them. Across six separate cohorts, I will use this ?gender predictive? approach to analyze students? social, academic and economic outcomes. Reanalyzing these old data in an entirely new way, I will advance a timely new account of masculinity and the rising gender gap in education.

Jennifer Blaney
Without a Safety Net: Community College Transfer Student Success, Precarity, and the Responsibility of Universities
Community college pathways are critical to advancing equity in STEM. However, despite the wealth of literature exploring equity and student success in undergraduate STEM programs, most of this research centers the experiences of students who follow direct pathways from high school to four-year universities. My research addresses this gap in the literature by focusing on one of the least diverse and most lucrative STEM fields: computer science. This study specifically explores the experiences of students who transfer from community colleges to four-year universities in pursuit of a computer science bachelor’s degree. Using a mixed-methods design, I consider how student pathways intersect with larger structural barriers, relying on surveys and interviews with transfer students, alongside data from faculty, staff, and administrators across five research universities. Findings document the diverse trajectories that community college transfer students follow through their programs, highlighting how students are continually subjected to precarity as they navigate university structures that were not created with them in mind.

CHAIR

Anna Neumann

SPEAKERS

Karishma Desai
Shaping Youth Potential: Development, Gendered Aspirations and Contested Visions of Indigenous Futures in Western India
As ecological devastation intensifies and economic development results in extraction of natural resources, Indigenous communities around the world bear the brunt of consequences. Two key forces are at play on Indigenous youth lives in such contexts. On one hand, state interventions claim to empower Indigenous youth by cultivating their human capital to ?develop? Indigenous regions even while they confiscate community land. On the other hand, Indigenous social movements center youth as political actors in struggles towards sovereignty. Both draw on education as a means to shape youth potential towards distinct visions of Indigenous futures. Importantly, the gendered impacts of political economic shifts, distinct roles women play in social movements, and different kinds of skills training illustrate that visions for youth and community futures are gendered. Through a multi-sited comparative ethnography in the Narmada district of Gujarat, this study will bring into relief two key positions about Indigenous youth potential, examine how educational projects produce related gendered aspirations, and show how youth interpret and make sense of their own and their communities? futures. Examining the state?s educational efforts in relation to that of an Indigenous social movement provides ethnographic insight into the possibilities and limits of educational sovereignty in postcolonial societies.

Meixi
Redesigning Schools with Family Story Walks in Three Indigenous Contexts
Indigenous-led public schools are critical sites for experimenting and enacting educational sovereignty. This study engages global Indigenous collaborations of families and educators to design land-based school systems that both shape and are shaped by socioecological shifts of our times. My research study asks: What forms of public schooling support Indigenous families? collective continuance across generations in the face of competing demands and rapidly changing socioecological systems? I explore this question through participatory design research and trans-Indigenous methodologies to design for distinct relational forms of learning where Indigenous family and land-based intellectual systems are the first ontological grounds of teaching and learning at school. Together with four Indigenous communities (e.g. Lahu, Akha, Mayan, Dakota) across three Indigenous-led schools in Chiang Rai, Thailand, Chiapas, Mexico, and Minneapolis, Minnesota, I study how transformed land-educator-family relationships on Family Storywalks expand possibilities for transforming the everyday practices of educators. I use a mix of qualitative inquiry, video interaction analysis, and epistemic network analysis to highlight families? complex theories of collective continuance while extrapolating generalizable patterns across them. As Indigenous communities navigate increased pressures and renewed ways to self-determine their futures, this study contributes sociocultural theories of intergenerational learning and thriving across place. In increasingly uninhabitable worlds, I offer pragmatic strategies to regenerate new forms of schooling within global Indigenous relations toward collective thriving and contribute foundational understandings to human learning that reaffirm Indigenous peoples as permanent generators of knowledge.

Tiffany Nyachae
Remembering and (Re)reading Black Girl-Oriented Programs for Multiple Girlhoods and Futures
Guided by endarkened feminist epistemology, Black feminist pedagogy, Black girlhood theories/pedagogies, and various explanations for success, this project examines the impact of Black girl-oriented programs from the perspectives of approximately 70 young adults who participated as youth over a decade ago to understand the impact and possible areas for growth in programs for Black girls, towards their futures, and in approaches to addressing Black girls in education. The current knowledge of longitudinal impact for youth programs overall is weak, and almost non-existent for Black girl-oriented programs. Drawing on phenomenological research, Black Girl Cartography, and memory work methodologies, the following research questions guide this qualitative study: (1) How do former participants remember the program?; (2) What are their (re)readings of program curriculum?; (3) How do they articulate Black girlhood and success?; (4) How, if at all, was/is the program responsive and relevant to who they were, became, and hope to become? This research provides unique contributions to theories about, and methodologies for including, the range of Black young adult perspectives and experiences in educational research as they interact with the pedagogies and epistemologies of Black women researcher-educators. Additionally, this research brings together scholarship on Black girlhood and memory work to consider how education contributes to Black girl thriving and socialization processes across time and contexts. A major implication of this project is holding education policy and practice accountable for supporting Black girl-oriented programs beyond the 1?2-year (or less) lifespan that many suffer due to lack of support and funding.

CHAIR

Megan Franke

SPEAKERS

Kelly Slay
Institutional Stewards? The Role of General Counsels in College Admissions and Institutional Policy-making
General counsels have historically been an important part of college administration, but in recent years, their roles have grown in scope and influence. With more regulation of higher education at the state and federal levels, an increasingly political landscape, and legal challenges to college admissions policies, higher education institutions face more legal vulnerabilities today than perhaps at any time throughout their history (Guard and Jacobsen, 2024). While a small body of research has illuminated the recent legal and regulatory developments affecting higher education, very few studies empirically examine the role and perspectives of general counsels in shaping institutional policy, including how colleges adapt and implement admissions policies in the current socio-political climate. Drawing on interviews with general counsels at a diverse group of institutions, this exploratory study highlights the various tensions campus lawyers navigate, the power they wield, and the implications for access and equity.

Elise Castillo
Asian American Students, School Choice, and Integration
Research at the intersection of competitive school choice and segregation under-examines the experiences of Asian American students and families, mirroring the longstanding invisibility of Asian Americans in research and policy. Yet as the fastest-growing immigrant group in the nation, and one of the most politically, ethnically, and socioeconomically diverse, Asian American students stand to substantially shape the racial politics of school choice and desegregation. Thus, I ask: How do Asian American public high school students and recent alumni make sense of segregation and screened admissions in New York City public high schools? What frames do they employ in their sensemaking? What do their frames reveal about their understandings of Asian American racial identity and the American racial hierarchy? To address these questions, this qualitative case study employs frame analysis, specifically, frames for making sense of race, class, and educational opportunity (Poon et al., 2019; Warikoo, 2016). By documenting how students? diverse and intersectional identities may shape their views, findings will contribute to theory-building on Asian American racialization. Additionally, in demonstrating how Asian American students experience competitive school choice and segregation, findings will hold implications for how choice and integration policies can more equitably serve diverse Asian American communities.

CHAIR

Amy Stuart Wells

Yesterday’s conversations provided an experience of the complexity and complicated the process of framing research. As a continuation of that conversation, the group will use the EMERG Scholars’ research as examples to answer the following questions centered on revising a project design:

• How do we consider different lenses for our research in reasonable ways? Combine them in ways that are reasonable? How do we best do that in a way that comes together meaningfully?
• How do we decide what lenses to use in our research?
• What criteria do we use to differentiate which contextually relevant considerations are absolutely necessary to include, what would be nice to include, and what we are going to leave to other researchers to explore?
• How could these different dimensions impact how project findings are perceived (i.e validity, generalizability, etc.)?
• Can we resolve or reduce these tensions?

SPEAKERS

Michael Singh
Toxic Masculinity Masking as Cultural Relevancy: Latino Men Navigating Heteropatriarchal Expectations of Manhood in the Teaching Profession
In recent years, there has been a tremendous effort to recruit and retain more men of color in the teaching profession. While these efforts remain widely popular, emerging critiques challenge deficit logics that frequently posit men of color as the patriarchal saviors and fixers of problematic boys of color. Furthermore, critical race scholars have critiqued the ways the catch-all category ?men of color? lacks specificity and forfeits a more robust analysis of race and racism. This research project is designed as a qualitative study exploring the life histories and professional experiences of Latino men teachers from non-dominant backgrounds. It is designed as a life-history narrative inquiry and will utilize a three-phase interview regimen. Using an instrumental and targeted qualitative approach, the study?s purposeful sampling brings Indigenous, queer, critical, and Black Latino men voices to the fore. Furthermore, the conceptual framing of this project offers an intersectional and relational approach to the study of race, gender, and sexuality. The objectives of this research are to a) explore the lives and experiences of Latino men teachers?a teacher population rarely studied in isolation, and b) deconstruct the heterogeneity of the grouping ?Latino men teachers,? with specific attention to interlocking systems of oppression. Overall, this study centers new voices and conceptual frameworks in the conversation surrounding men of color teachers with the hope of paving new, justice-oriented avenues of research.

Luis Rodriguez
Extending Teacher Talent: A Mixed-Methods Study of the Paraprofessional Pool in New York City
The challenge of constructing and maintaining a diverse and high-quality pool of teaching candidates is a significant concern for education policymakers and practitioners. Prior research indicates that many school districts struggle to find qualified candidates for vacant teacher positions, particularly in schools that predominantly serve students from low-income families, students of color, or those who do not speak English as their first language. Moreover, the COVID-19 pandemic has exacerbated these shortages in recent years. Such trends place critical importance on investing in policies and programs to cultivate what many education policymakers and practitioners consider to be a plausible candidate pool for future teachers, prompting persistent calls advocating for the preparation of paraprofessionals as future full-time classroom teachers. The goal of the current project is to shed additional light on paraprofessional demographics and career trajectories and their ambitions to enter the teaching profession, specifically within the New York City context. Using an explanatory sequential mixed methods study designed, the study will provide a descriptive portrait of the paraprofessional pool and identify the organizational conditions that support and impede paraprofessionals from transitioning into full-time teaching roles. The ultimate objective of the project is to inform the work of education policymakers, practitioners, and researchers who seek to improve teacher preparation pipelines and support the professional advancement of paraprofessionals into the teaching profession.

Chanelle Wilson
Does Anti-racist Teacher Preparation Endure?: Revisiting the Development of Racial Literacy in Undergraduate Teacher Preparation Five Years Out
The transition from undergraduate teacher preparation to in-service teaching practice is an important area of focus in the overall research on teacher development. Many formal public schooling institutions in the United States replicate oppressive social structures, hierarchies, and inequities, including racism. Specifically, the field needs more insight into the process of developing and solidifying an identity as a teacher for racial justice?an identity that must endure through challenging and even hostile contexts. This study prioritizes learning from (1) the perspectives of in-service teachers who participated in race inquiry groups during their student teaching and (2) their professional trajectories in implementing race-conscious practices during their first years of teaching. Critical Race Praxis and Racial Literacy, offer a powerful theoretical guide for the praxis work of in-service teachers that is the focus of this study, bringing together an argument for an understanding of racism with a focus on practices that can counter and begin to dismantle racist systems in education. Using qualitative methods, former teacher candidates, now in-service teachers, will be guided to reflect on their journey in education to be racially-literate educators through storytelling narratives. The approach to research includes a co-constructive, participatory process that engages teacher participants as co-researchers. Insights gained from this study will provide a window into what former pre-service teachers navigate after they graduate and how they undertake the journey of implementing racial literacy skills and teaching for racial justice.

CHAIR

Susan Moore Johnson

SPEAKERS

Eunjin Seo
A Causal Examination of How Peer Mindset Climate Shapes STEM Major Belongingness and Persistence
The racial and ethnic inequality in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) education impairs the quality of the U.S. workforce and makes our economic system unjust. Interventions targeting STEM students’ mindsets, such as utility value and growth mindsets, have shown some promising effects in reducing disparities, but they are unlikely to fully mitigate inequality due to the importance of the classroom climate, such as peers. The way peers think and talk about who is smart and who can succeed in large gateway STEM courses can be a powerful resource or risk factor for minoritized students’ persistence in STEM majors. To date, research on the classroom’s mindset climate has been correlational, with insufficient causal evidence to make concrete policy recommendations for using peer climate to narrow group disparities in STEM. In this postdoctoral fellowship, Eunjin Seo will create and use two novel datasets to generate causal evidence about the effects of peers’ fixed mindset on Black, Latinx, or Indigenous students’ belongingness and persistence in STEM majors. This research will reveal the causal role of the peer climate in reproducing inequality and provide the basis for concrete solutions that target modifiable climate factors such as peers’ mindsets.

Anthony Johnson
Engineering Advantage: How Inequality Persists in an Era of Collaborative Learning
Collaboration has become widely endorsed on college campuses?especially in academically rigorous programs like science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM)?given its potential to yield not only deeper but also more equitable learning for students from all backgrounds. But what are students? collaborative experiences actually like in these programs, and are they, in fact, equitable? Using a qualitative case study of an elite engineering school in which I conducted interviews with 88 students and six administrators as well as observations over the course of two and a half years, this project shows how the culture and structure of STEM programs actually undermine the equitable promises of collaborative learning by creating more positive collaborative experiences for privileged students than for their less-privileged counterparts and by positioning privileged students to receive more academic help, support, and learning opportunities. The extreme academic rigor of the engineering school facilitated collaboration among students, albeit a competitive form of it. However, little guidance was provided about how and with whom to collaborate, placing the burden on students to rely on their own backgrounds to navigate the peer collaborative scene. Compared to their less-privileged counterparts, privileged students?those from class-advantaged high school contexts as well as who were affluent, male, and White and Asian?were more comfortable and better able to get involved on campus (which yielded more collaborative opportunities), collaborate, and participate within collaborative groups.

Stephen Santa-Ramirez
So, What Happens Now? The Post-Graduation Transitional Experiences of Recently Graduated Collegians who are Undocu/DACAmented
Nearly 100,000 students who identify as undocu/DACAmented graduate from U.S. high schools each year, with 2.1 million college-aged. For the last decade, there has been an increasingly growing body of scholarship centering these collegians, including their advocacy efforts and revealing the barriers they often encounter with access to and persistence in higher education. Little empirical research in this area highlights post-college outcomes associated with legal uncertainty. Guided by UndocuCrit and transition theoretical connections, this phenomenological study investigates the post-college career preparatory and post-graduation experiences of recently graduated undergraduate collegians who are undocu/DACAmented in the Southwest and Northeast regions of the United States. The results will contribute to existing literature centering undocu/DACAmented collegians lived experiences, offering exigent implications for institutional agents and policymakers interested in retention, student success, and post-graduation preparedness to more effectively engage with and holistically support these collegians as they transition in, through, and out of college.

CHAIR

Gale Sinatra

SPEAKERS

Harper Keenan
Unmanageable Subjects: Trans Childhood and Struggle for Self Determination in School
Gender self-determination has been the unifying demand of transgender social movements in the United States since they began to coalesce more than 50 years ago. The challenges still facing trans youth expose the persistent role of schooling in regulating gender, and in managing childhood more broadly. I argue that trans people are positioned as unmanageable subjects within the context of K-12 schools. This phrase has an intentional double meaning, referencing 1) the treatment of transgender existence as a taboo topic, and 2) the challenges trans children pose to the administrative and social regulation of gender. How might educators embrace unmanageability? What might it look like to practice education that resists rigidly scripting the world, including who children can be and become within it? Drawing on two years of multi-site qualitative data drawn from five elementary school classrooms and one after school program in a large urban school district in Northern California, this study examines the struggle for gender self-determination in primary education through more than 50 interviews and 5 focus groups with teachers, 20 play-based focus groups with children, and over 500 hours of participant observation.

Stephanie Toliver
Come to Find Out: Black Rememory against an AntiBlack Spatial Imaginary
In this presentation, I highlight how Black social memory creates a time-space compression that challenges antiblackness. To illustrate this concept, I interrogate the dissonance between the subjective realities of Black people in New Castle, PA and the broader sociopolitical and geographical narratives perpetuated by predominately white narrators within the city. By foregrounding these divergent perspectives, I engage in theoretical reflections on the role of (re)memory in reshaping spatial dynamics, positing that Black communities utilize memory as a means of subverting dominant narratives and asserting agency over their environments.

Davena Jackson
A Black Ethos: Toward Centering Blackness, Cultivating Antiracist Pedagogy, and the Pursuit of Justice-Oriented Solidarity
The urgency of embracing a Black ethos comes from an enduring impact of anti-Blackness and deficit-based practices in English language arts (ELA) classrooms. These practices have harmed Black students, including a growing population of African diasporic (e.g., Haitian, Cape Verdean, Afro-Latinx) students whose families have immigrated to the United States, particularly in the Northeast. In addition, ELA teachers face significant challenges due to national, state, and district-wide policies affecting pedagogy and students’ learning experiences. Thus, this session will emphasize the importance of Justice-Oriented Solidarity (Jackson, 2020), which provides a foundation for relationship-building and prioritizes antiracist, humanizing teaching practices that support and affirm Black students’ diverse, complex identities and experiences.

CHAIR

Tisha Lewis Ellison

SPEAKERS

Karlyn Adams-Wiggins
Marginality Trajectories in Middle School Inquiry Science
When teachers transfer power to learners in collaboration intensive reform-oriented science classrooms, are the benefits equitably distributed among peers? Recent reforms emphasize learners’ engagement in scientific practices as a way to help learners think like scientists do about natural phenomena; focusing on scientific practices also is intended to leverage knowledge and abilities that learners from diverse backgrounds bring to the science classroom. Yet, despite the benefits of authentic inquiry for learning to think scientifically, peer interactions can skew opportunities to learn such that equity is undermined. Grounded in Wenger’s concept of marginal non-participation, this project uses microgenetic methods to examine how trajectories of marginality are constructed over the course of a semester for middle schoolers when inquiry science units are implemented. The proposed research produces a qualitative classification scheme for describing severity of marginality as it develops in real time and uses a multiple case study to describe marginality’s development over a semester for members of 4 collaborative groups. The proposed research extends situative perspectives on motivation and research on status problems by describing how moment-to-moment social interactions inform marginal non-participation and construct marginal identities for students in inquiry classrooms.

Julissa Ventura
Moving Towards Transformative Student Voice in Community Schools
As the community school model is adopted by more school districts, particularly urban school districts, questions arise about how community schools are enacting their mission to be a more democratic and community-centered education reform. One of the key community school strategies is shared leadership, which researchers have found is an important structure that contributes to improved academic outcomes seen so far in community schools (Oakes, et al., 2017). Through an ethnographic case study approach with 3 focal schools in Wisconsin, this study explores shared leadership in relation to student voice and leadership. Specifically, the project examines how community schools can support youth in meaningfully contributing to the decision-making and transformational change in their schools. While collaboration with community partners and families has been part of the community schools research, less attention has been given to the role that students can play in advancing the goals of community schools. Thus, this study aims to fill this gap by looking at how community schools can create spaces for transformative student voice through youth councils that are part of shared leadership at the K-5, K-8, and high school levels. Moreover, the findings from this project will make important contributions to the understanding of community school structures and practices that work against inequalities in our schools.

Karina Salazar
Computational Redlining in Access to College? Exploring the Geodemographic Classification of Student List Products
Colleges recruit prospective students by purchasing student lists from the College Board, ACT, and other vendors. Student lists contain the contact information of prospective students who satisfy “search filter” criteria (e.g., test score range, high school GPA, zip code) specified by the college making the purchase, who can then be recruited via mail, email, or targeted social media. Some proprietary search filters use geodemographic classification to categorize the college-going characteristics of high schools and neighborhoods in efforts to help colleges “more efficiently” target prospective students. Grounded in critical data studies that suggest algorithmic products reproduce biases through lack of transparency in inputs and the presumed objectivity of outcomes, this project aims to open the proprietary “black box” of College Board’s segment filters to explore how they structure educational opportunity. I develop a classification for US high schools using a nationally representative student sample from the High School Longitudinal Study of 2009. Factor and cluster analysis are used to create high school clusters comparable to the College Board’s segment filter. I then apply this school classification to metropolitan areas across the country to explore whether and to what extent such filter products structure college access opportunities along dimensions of race, class, and geography by way of inclusion (versus exclusion) in simulated student list purchases.

CHAIR

Okhee Lee

Postdoctoral Fellows who presented in a Fellows Forum today will meet their discussant in East Court.

Gather at specific tables at the West Court to discuss a specific topic.

Not participating in one of the other sessions? You are welcome to take a break during this time.

EMERG Scholars will meet individually with their primary mentor. This is an opportunity to catch up on where they stand with their project and talk through their longer-term personal and professional mentoring goals. (If the primary mentor is not available in person or remotely, they will meet with another member of their mentor triad and/or a member of the Executive Board.)

This plenary will examine the current mental health crisis in K-12 education, highlighting the challenges faced by both students and educators. We will explore the causes of wellness issues in schools, the potential impact of recent legal and funding shifts on school-based services and programs, and how research can inform effective programs and policies. The discussion will encompass the critical need for policy initiatives that enhance mental health resources, strategies for fostering a supportive school culture, and the importance of addressing the unique experiences of marginalized populations.

Panelists

• Dorothy Espelage (Chair), University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
• Ron Avi Astor, University of California, Los Angeles
• Sheldon Berman, Former Superintendent of Schools (Hudson, MA; Jefferson County [Louisville], KY; Eugene, OR; and Andover, MA) and American Association of School Administrators (Lead Superintendent for Social-Emotional Learning)
• Rhonda Boyd, Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, University of Pennsylvania
• Emma Elliott, University of Washington
• Paul Poteat, Boston College

Review our online document for panelist biographies.

This plenary explores how, in the era of partisanship and ubiquitous digital technology, we might augment the extensive research on use of research evidence (URE) to inform an equitable, next generation research-policy-practice information infrastructure in education that can efficiently mobilize resources and organize key actors (including knowledge producers, intermediary organizations, and users) to address current challenges and future crises. The discussion is grounded in the comparative analysis of two case studies – the Science of Reading (SoR) and Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS) – to examine best practices and lessons learned concerning the conditions that warrant successful translation of research insight, innovation, invention, and implementation in education. Through these case studies, we will explore how to accelerate the slow and plodding research-policy-practice infrastructure that facilitates research use and creation by public policy actors at the local, state, and federal levels.

Panelists

• Louis Gomez (Chair), University of California, Los Angeles
• Elena Aydarova, University of Wisconsin-Madison
• Lisa Coons, Virginia Superintendent of Public Instruction
• Nell Duke, Stand for Children and University of Michigan
• Emily Hanford, APM Reports (Senior Correspondent, Producer, and Host of the podcast Sold a Story)
• Mike Kirst, Center for Education Policy Analysis, Stanford University
• Marina Stenos, FINN Partners

Review our online document for panelist biographies.