2025 Fall Retreat and Annual Meeting

Speakers

• Ethan Hutt, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
• Ashley Smith-Purviance, The Ohio State University

Speakers

• Erika Bullock, University of Wisconsin, Madison
• Scott Seider, Boston College

U.S Black Vernacular Spanish(es): Toward Hemispheric Black Language Pedagogies in Spanish World Language Classrooms
Aris Clemons, University of Tennessee, Knoxville

Drawing on a rich tradition of linguistic activism that has resulted in the definition and introduction of Black U.S. English into classroom spaces, the current project argues for the existence and vitality of Black U.S. varieties of Spanish as integral to the linguistic development of Black students in world language programs. Using a variety of qualitative methods, the project traces Black Spanish development through transnational hemispheric Black language processes and sustained contact between Black Spanish speakers and African American English speakers. For Black students, who have consistently been marked as deficient language users (Sledd, 1969; Baker-Bell, 2020; Smitherman, 2017), the Spanish classroom often represents a space of ?unbelonging?. Recognizing U.S. Spanish classrooms as a place of Black unbelonging, the study aims to reduce and disrupt the raciolinguistic ideologies that mark Black U.S. Spanish(es) as broken or incomplete and its users as deficient, low-class or uneducated. Importantly, the project argues for Hemispheric Black Language Pedagogies, which provides Black students with knowledges and histories of Black language practices with the aim of destigmatizing the language practices of Black Spanish speakers so that they can fully participate in the benefits of bilingualism and are able to perform their identities without reproach.

Disrupting Anti-Black Logics: Black Students Interrogating and Reimagining Black Histories, Cultures, and Futures in Education
Tashal Brown, University of Rhode Island

The pervasive influence of anti-blackness in US education leads to the neglect of Black histories and cultures, often portraying Blackness solely through a lens of trauma. This exclusionary approach harms Black students by denying their humanity, promoting deficit narratives, and distorting or outright prohibiting the teaching of Black history. This study aims to challenge these patterns by examining how Black high school and college students navigate, interpret, and reimagine Black history education in both formal and community-based contexts. Grounded in BlackCrit (Dumas & Ross, 2016) and Black Historical Consciousness (King, 2019), the study explores how students perceive the presence or absence of Blackness in the curriculum and how these experiences influence their development of racial and cultural knowledge. Employing qualitative, arts-based, and collaborative methods, including interviews, focus groups, and creative inquiry, the study centers the voices of Black youth to illuminate how they engage with, critique, and envision Black history education. Their narratives reveal experiences of erasure, resistance, and belonging, and highlight liberatory possibilities. This study contributes to efforts to create educational spaces where Black histories, cultures, and literacies are affirmed and valued. Ultimately, it aims to advance educational equity by centering the knowledge, creativity, and lived experiences of Black youth, offering critical insights for designing curricula that deepen historical understanding and honor the diversity and richness of Black life.

Culturelessness as a Conceptual Framework: Cultural Capital and Racialization in Novice Language Teacher Pedagogies
Tasha Austin, State University of New York at Buffalo

All teaching is language teaching. As such, the uptick in culturally relevant and sustaining practices or approaches (CR/SP) to language instruction has implications particularly for Black and racially minoritized learners. The myriad and sometimes contradictory ways in which culture is understood, however, can stall the efforts of K-12 teachers despite their preparation to address cultural relevance in their pedagogies. The conceptual framework offered in my 2022 dissertation entitled, “Race, Language and Ideology in an Urban Teacher Preparation Program,” addresses this phenomenon of culturelessness– “a spectrum wherein cultural ‘capital’ cannot coexist with race (Black or white)” (Austin, 2023, p.4). It offers a lens through which to understand the varied and often race-centric considerations and applications of CR/SP as a valuable means to educate students which manifests in its uneven uptake in language education. Through semi-structured interviews and focus groups, this post-doctoral project aims to develop and apply culturelessness as a framework to extend the findings of the aforementioned dissertation work in mapping how novice teachers’ conceptions of culture, their own and that of their students’, emerge in their pedagogical decision-making. Findings can enhance and reframe calls for culturally relevant and sustaining pedagogies across policy, research and applied practice.

CHAIR

Zeus Leonardo, University of California, Berkeley

Hardening Schools, Targeting Students? The Effects of School Security Equipment Grants on Schools and Minoritized Students
Samantha Viano, George Mason University

“Target hardening” is common parlance in law enforcement and the military to cover a variety of methods for increasing security of particular areas or for specific people to deter crime and violence. This term has gained popularity in reference to schools, as schools implement an increasingly broad set of school security measures (SSM). Previous research on SSM, like school resource officers, raises grievous concerns about the potential ways in which SSM bind minoritized students into the school-prison nexus, but we have little understanding of the effects of the broad-range of SSM. This proposed study leverages potentially exogenous variation in receipt of funding from the Virginia Department of Education School Security Equipment Grant program which has awarded grants for a wide-range of SSM annually to Virginia schools since 2014. This grant program has a competitive application process in which applications are given a numerical score, and funding is given to the top scoring schools until funding is exhausted. Using a regression discontinuity design, I will analyze education data as well as data from the Department of Juvenile Justice linked through the Virginia Longitudinal Data System to assess whether implementation of new SSM differentially affect minoritized students.

No Quick Fix: Experimental Evidence on Whether School Safety Information Mitigates Anti-Black Perceptions and Preferences for Schools
Chantal Hailey, University of Texas at Austin

Policymakers invoke school racial climate concerns to anchor both advocacy and dissent for equity educational policies (i.e., changing school names from racial figures, ethnic studies curricula, racial-solidarity symbols, racial-affinity groups); yet, we have little causal evidence on what these features signal to families. To examine whether school racialized cues and racial composition influence students? and parents? school climate perceptions and school preferences, I will conduct four original survey experiments with parent-adolescent dyads. Respondents evaluate school profiles with randomly varied quality ratings, socioeconomic and racial compositions, and one racialized cue (school names, ethnic studies requirements, racial-solidarity flags, racial-affinity clubs). By using an experimental design, my study isolates the role of racial composition and other racialized cues in shaping families? anticipated ?fit? and racial marginalization and their willingness to attend schools. It also reveals whether individuals from different backgrounds receive incongruent signals from the same racial cues (racial background, parents v. students, political orientation) and whether effect of schools? racial cues depends on schools? racial composition. Unearthing the hidden messages that families gather from school names, symbols, curricula, and extra-curricular spaces can inform districts about how shifting school features can exacerbate or mitigate racial disparities in belonging and educational attainment.

‘I’m a Mom. You’re a Mom.’: Emotion, Epistemic Practices, and Belonging on the Moms for Liberty Podcast
Tanner Vea, University of Washington, Seattle

“The Joyful Warriors Podcast” from the far-right movement organization Mom?s for Liberty (M4L) circulates harmful yet influential ideas driving book bans, fights against inclusive curricula, suppression of history, and attacks on educators. Turn by conversational turn, its participants build a view of the world in which innocent children and the United States itself are under urgent threat. Situated in the critical sociocultural learning sciences, and informed by studies of global fascism, this project investigates how M4L uses emotion in its construction of truth claims that fan the flames of dehumanization. It employs video-based interaction analysis of 80 episodes of “The Joyful Warriors Podcast” to understand how participants use epistemic practices (e.g., asking questions, using evidence, evaluating claims) interwoven with emotional and ideological dynamics, with consequences for the dehumanization of LGBTQ+ people and people of color. This study will offer a timely analysis of how a reactionary view of reality is constructed in the moment-to-moment scale of social interaction, with theoretical implications for emotion in politicized learning, methodological implications for studies of fascism, and practical implications for how educators can teach young people to recognize the irrational and power-laden moves that undermine the nuanced and reasoned debate democracy requires.

CHAIR

Tyrone Howard, University of California, Los Angeles

Constructing Campus Ecologies to Equitably Serve AA&NHPI Students: A Multiple Case Study of AANAPISIs
Mike Hoa Nguyen, University of California, Los Angeles

Minority-Serving Institutions (MSI) play a pivotal role in advancing the educational opportunities for students of Color. Asian American and Native American Pacific Islander-Serving Institutions (AANAPISI), one of the most recent MSI designations to be established by Congress, were born out of the necessity to build the capacity of colleges and universities to support the unique and complex educational needs of Asian American, Native Hawaiian, and Pacific Islander (AA&NHPI) students, especially Southeast Asian American (SEAA) and Native Hawaiian and Pacific Islanders (NHPI). This study delves into the transformative processes that AANAPISIs undertake to construct comprehensive campus-wide ecologies to equitably serve AA&NHPI students, amid the challenges posed by the model minority myth, particularly for SEAA and NHPI students. This study employs a qualitative, multiple-site case study design, encompassing 12 differing AANAPISIs across the United States and Pacific Islands. The investigation aims to uncover how AANAPISIs shape a holistic campus ecology beyond programmatic initiatives. Findings contribute to the modest and emergent literature base on AANAPISIs and AA&NHPIs, as well as new theoretical understandings of racialized organizations. Implications will directly inform the work of policymakers and institutional leaders/practitioners, as they seek to develop and implement effective, equity-centered, and transformative strategies.

Men’s Claims of Discrimination under Title IX, 1994-2014
Celene Reynolds, Indiana University Bloomington

Gender plays a critical role in US higher education, contributing to both different and unequal experiences as well as outcomes. Women are advantaged in some respects but continue to trail men in others. The mechanisms driving these disparities have long been a focus of social scientific research. Yet the question of how discrimination contributes to gender inequality in colleges and universities remains relatively unexplored. This is due to a lack of data. What little there is often only captures the most egregious incidents. I am constructing an original dataset that I will use to analyze individual experiences of and institutional responses to sex/gender discrimination across American higher education. I draw on information contained in letters resolving federal Title IX complaints against four-year nonprofit schools from 1994 to 2014. The US Department of Education (DoE) closes every complaint with a letter. These letters include extensive detail about incidents of sex/gender discrimination on campus and attempts to remediate them. Combining qualitative and quantitative methods, specific articles will assess (1) how discrimination experienced by men compares to discrimination experienced by women, (2) historical shifts in what the DoE recognizes as sex/gender discrimination, and (3) accounts of sexual misconduct on campus.

Faculty Cluster Hiring as a Catalyst for Racial Equity in the Professoriate
Roman Liera, Montclair State University

This study focuses on how faculty cluster hiring could catalyze comprehensive changes across campus. Many interventions that promote racial equity in faculty hiring focus on redressing individual mindsets or changing practices in one unit, which leave intact organizational routines that make it possible to use race-evasive frames that value whiteness as a credential and distribute resources to faculty applicants who perform whiteness. In this comparative case study, I examine the following research questions: (1) How do administrators, faculty, and staff initiating cluster hiring persuade their colleagues to use cluster hiring to promote racial equity? In what ways, if any, does the engagement with race and racism of administrators, faculty, and staff initiating cluster hiring vary across the different universities? (2) How do administrators, faculty, and staff position faculty cluster hiring initiatives as valuable or necessary for the university? How do administrators, faculty, and staff allocate resources for faculty hiring initiatives to promote racial equity in their university? and (3) How do administrators, faculty, and staff use cluster hiring to decentralize preferences for White candidates and White credentials? And what changes to promote racial equity do administrators, faculty, and staff make or do not make with cluster hiring?

CHAIR

Sylvia Hurtado, University of California, Los Angeles

The Evolving Role of High School Equivalency Credentials as a Post-Secondary Pathway
Blake Heller, University of Houston

For the over 24 million American adults who do not hold a traditional high school diploma, high school equivalency (HSE) credentials represent the primary “second-chance” pathway to meet minimum requirements for many jobs or educational opportunities. This project will update and extend knowledge about HSE credentialing in the United States in several ways, filling important gaps in the extant evidence. The five research questions that drive this project characterize the modern landscape of high school equivalency in the United States, estimate the causal educational impacts of earning an HSE credential, measure heterogeneity in the impacts of earning an HSE credential, assess the returns to different types or levels of HSE credentials, explore the role of HSE exam retaking in educational attainment, and assess how HSE credentials are judged by hiring managers. I will bring current, representative data to bear on pressing questions about HSE credentialing and adult education at the national and state levels and probe the mechanisms that explain whether, how, and for whom HSE credentials help adults without high school diplomas meet their educational and career goals.

Labor and Learning: Analyzing Teacher Strikes and Their Impacts on Students and Communities, 2007-Present
Melissa Lyon, University at Albany

Over the past five years, educators have increasingly taken to the streets to rally for greater funding, higher salaries, and improved working conditions within the public education system. Indeed, incidents of teacher strikes between 2018-2022 increased roughly six-fold relative to the decade prior. Strikes are dramatic events that require substantial organizational and material resources and lead to school closures that may disrupt student learning. Yet, we do not know how strikes affect educational outcomes, let alone politics more broadly. In this proposed project, I will use a first-of-its kind, hand-collected database of over 700 strikes over the past 15 years to describe the landscape of teacher strikes, explore their causes, and estimate their impacts on student academic achievement and inequality, school conditions, and political engagement within local communities. In addition to these empirical contributions, I also will contribute to our theoretical understanding of teachers? unions. I move beyond the common ?are unions good or bad? frame to consider the possibility of nuanced implications of strikes for educational and societal inequalities as a result of union political advocacy, alliances with other labor unions, and other activities that represent teachers? interests while simultaneously supporting (or conflicting with) the broader public good.

School Funding Mechanisms and Property Tax (In)Equity
Julien Lafortune, Public Policy Institute of California

Inequities in local school revenues have motivated a long history of research, advocacy, and litigation. Past research indicates reform efforts have reduced or eliminated spending inequities, lifting short- and long-run outcomes for the less advantaged communities they targeted. However, we have limited data on the tax burdens facing local communities under varying school finance regimes. In many states, property tax rates may be regressive, even where overall school funding is not. I propose to overcome this research gap and provide new time series evidence on tax rate progressivity across and within states. Novel empirical methods will combine property tax assessment records, local municipal boundaries, and school district revenue files to estimate effective tax rates as a share of assessed property values?and implied tax rates as a share of market-rate valuations. Descriptive methods will decompose tax rates across time and place and identify correlations with specific school finance mechanisms. Differences-in-differences and synthetic control methods will be used to estimate causal impacts of school finance reforms on tax revenue progressivity, on average and heterogeneously by the state-level school finance mechanism used. Results will advance the school finance literature and inform policy debates over equity in state-level school finance policies.

CHAIR

Christopher Lubienski, Indiana University

Stolen Innocence: How the United States Robbed Migrant Minors of Their Childhood
Ivón Padilla-Rodríguez, University of Illinois at Chicago

Migrant youth in recent years have faced educational deprivation, labor exploitation, dangerous human smuggling, detention, and family separation. Stolen Innocence draws from neglected archival records across the U.S. and Mexico and oral histories to show how, throughout the twentieth-century, U.S. officials used law, policy, and the concept of ?alienage? to deprive migrant minors of the rights of childhood through multiple forms of educational deprivation. It contends that legal systems that monitored migrant youth were built around the ideal of childhood innocence. But even as minors and their advocates resisted rights deprivations and benefitted from the discourse of youthful innocence, it was weaponized against them and their parents to criminalize them both. Law enforcement did this by blaming migrant parents for the harms and educational losses endured by their ?innocent? children when subjected to migration and exploitation. But Stolen Innocence also traces how advocates? reliance on the politics of childhood innocence harmed some young migrants. When children?s advocates got the 1965 Migrant Education Program institutionalized in federal law, its data collection tools made migrant students and parents detectable by law enforcement. Stolen Innocence, therefore, warns of the unintended consequences of marshaling the ideal of childhood innocence to design ?pro-migrant? policies, including educational ones.

“There are more of us out there?”: The Narratives and Knowledges of Latinx Public School Teachers Across the U.S. South
Timothy Monreal, The University at Buffalo, SUNY

This research project uses semi-structured interviews, ecomaps, and group pl·ticas to examine and center the knowledges and narratives of Latinx K-12 public school teachers across the United States South. The project aims to both identify the strengths and assets Latinx teachers may bring to the classroom as well as identify barriers to increasing Latinx teacher representation, retainment, and professional success across the region. Such research is crucial because the Latinx student population continues to rise across the U.S. South, but most states in the region have an Latinx teaching force of between 1-4% (Lindsay et al., 2017). This project is significant to education, and educational research, because even as scholars, community activists, and practitioners (see Guerra & Rodriguez, 2022; Maxwell, 2016; Monreal, 2022a; Roth & Grace, 2015) attest to the need for increasing Latinx teachers in this quickly diversifying region, there is a dearth of research the centers the collective experiences of Latinx teachers throughout the U.S. South (Colomer, 2019; Salas & Portes, 2017).

Crafting Dominicanidad: Citizenship and Education during the U.S. occupation of the Dominican Republic (1916-1924)
Alexa Rodriguez, University of Virginia

Crafting Dominicanidad is an intellectual history that traces various notions of citizenship in the Dominican Republic that were articulated and shaped during the U.S. occupation (1916-1924). In the book, I examine how education became central to discussions about dominicanidad, as schools were perceived to be necessary for the formation of future citizens. Using U.S. Military Government and Department of Education documents, letters written by concerned parents and community members, and photographs of students during the period, I assess how these accounts shed light on the ways Dominicans grappled with the relationship between education and Dominican citizenship during the 1916 U.S. occupation. I argue this example helps to demonstrate that it was not just intellectual and political elite who determined membership to the nation, or the rights and responsibilities of citizens. Rather, ordinary people used schools to shape what dominicanidad, or Dominican cultural and national identity, would look like and expressed their own ideas about Dominican citizenship. Schools were vital in this rearticulation and dissemination of dominicanidad since the expansion of the education system during the occupation caused them to become a key social hub and a space for all Dominicans to engage with the state.

If We Aren’t Grieving, We Aren’t Healing: Grief as a Trauma-Informed Praxis
Sharim Hannegan-Martinez

The rates of child trauma nationally continue to catapult exponentially year after year. In response to this health crisis, over the last decade there has been burgeoning research on trauma-informed pedagogies and practices in schools, and more recently, grief. While this scholarship has made important contributions to the field of education and to educational practice at large, it often addresses these phenomena separately and does little to interrogate the relationship between grief and trauma or to situate grief as a trauma-informed and healing practice. The purpose of this study is to add to the growing body of trauma-informed and healing-centered scholarship by centering a component of healing from trauma that is often looked over in educational scholarship and practice: grief. Through engaging in different iterations of Chicana Feminist Pl·ticas with Teachers of Color from across different geographic regions, I seek to understand the landscape of grief and trauma for both Teachers and Students of Color while utilizing communal pl·ticas as a methodological and pedagogical opportunity to model grief-centered healing practices. This study makes a timely contribution to educational research as centering grief as a trauma-informed praxis is imperative in supporting the healing and well-being of children and teachers alike.

Learning to Learn: Empowering Children to Guide Their Learning
Janina Eberhart

Metacognition, the ability to monitor and control cognitive processes, is crucial for children to become agents of their own learning and is a predictor of their success in school. This skill does not develop naturally and must be taught. Studies indicate that teachers seldom promote metacognition in the classroom. One potential explanation might be that existing interventions and programs are multicomponent approaches that are difficult to implement. To address this issue, the research project will employ a common elements approach to identify evidence-based metacognition kernels that offer low cost, straightforward, and adaptable methods for enhancing metacognition development in classroom settings. That is, activities and instructional elements commonly found in interventions that effectively promote metacognition in elementary school classrooms will be isolated. Next, materials for teachers explaining why metacognition kernels are effective and how they can be implemented in everyday classroom activities will be developed. The feasibility of these materials and their use in the classroom will be assessed in collaboration with elementary school teachers. Given the significance of autonomous learning, this project is both timely and needed. In particular, teachers who work in low socioeconomic backgrounds where resources are scarce will benefit from this initiative.

CHAIR

Mary Helen Immordino-Yang, University of Southern California

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

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

Onto-epistemic Hacking: Educators Co-designing Contexts for Worldmaking in Video Gameplay
Arturo Cortez, University of California, Davis

Historically marginalized communities, especially young people, frequently use everyday technologies to design new social futures, imagining beyond society’s most pressing inequities. Thus, it is necessary for educators to be prepared to design and leverage future-oriented?speculative?pedagogies with youth?s everyday use of digital technologies. As attention to justice-oriented pedagogies increases, the importance of designing for equitable relationships between educators and learners should become central in how we prepare educators across formal and informal learning environments. This design-based research project explores how after-school educators learn to develop and iterate upon pedagogical blueprints that implement robust relational practices necessary for future-oriented work with youth. Within this orientation, this study examines how designed gaming environments organized around socio-cultural notions of learning have particular affordances for teacher learning where educators, alongside youth, creatively prototype agentic identities, equitable forms of participation, and embed new values and social relations into just virtual worlds, within the context of video game play. My claim is that the tools and participation frameworks of designed gaming environments will support educators in developing robust frameworks for equitable relationship-building as part of their larger conceptualization of speculative pedagogies.

Unsettling Raciolinguistic Hierarchies in U.S. Science Education
Kathryn Kirchgasler, University of Wisconsin-Madison

Science education scholars have spotlighted two concerns: (1) the exclusion of minoritized students via curricular tracking, and (2) assimilationist norms faced by those who do gain access to advanced coursework and careers. My project shows how both problems stem from unexamined histories of segregated and colonial instruction. I explore a paradox of conditional inclusion: in ascribing minoritized students the potential to become agentic citizens, research has tended to prescribe distinct interventions to bring them closer to cultural and linguistic norms universalized as scientific. The project uses archival research to: (a) analyze science pedagogies designed for segregated Mexican schools in the United States between 1912?1947; (b) trace the colonial networks of expertise authorizing these classificatory practices; and (c) uncover tactics of refuting segregationist policies and countering assimilationist demands. The project will contribute to science education, the historiography of Mexican American education, and raciolinguistic perspectives by mapping the techniques professionalizing teachers to see and hear students as either potential scientists or not-yet-prepared citizens. By spotlighting century-old premises driving these sorting practices, prevailing strategies to recognize and respond to linguistic diversity no longer appear simply just, but rather constitutive of the racialization and coloniality with which educational scholarship must begin to reckon.

Ua lawa mākou i ka pōhaku: On answerability, ʻāina, and anagrammatical learning designs for Hawaiʻi
Ethan Chang, University of Hawaii

Ua lawa mākou i ka pōhaku (We are satisfied with stones) expresses a popular refusal of the 1893 US-backed overthrow and ongoing military occupation of Hawaiʻi. But more than a slogan, these words insist that America is not the only social force through which Kanaka ʻŌiwi (Hawaiian) and aspiring settler allies, like myself, might come to know one another. This project examines how one Kanaka-led Research Practice Partnership (2022–ongoing) sought to weave relations and coproduce knowledge animated by a belief that the stones of this ʻāina (“that which feeds,” land) are enough. I examine how our efforts to enact answerable research contributed to (a) the material restoration of ancestral classrooms, such as loko iʻa (fishponds) and (b) the development of a material-based theory of anagrammatical designs: contexts of learning that depart from the prevailing “grammar of schooling” and that nourish ways of knowing, living, and being that extend respect to all living beings.

CHAIR

Megan Franke, University of California, Los Angeles

Civics as Survivance: Unsettling Curriculum to Transform Democracy
Rachel Talbert, Teachers College, Columbia University

Through work with Native American youth, the Lenape Center, social studies teachers, and students in New York City, this humanizing research project investigates what curricular knowledge is most important to the Lenape, whose Land New York City is on, and urban Native diaspora communities in NYC. This project will focus on what knowledge the Lenape and urban Native communities in New York City feel is most important for all teachers and students to know to support Lenape futurity and understanding of urban Native Americans in New York City. This study will then investigate the implementation (including its feasibility and acceptability) of social studies curriculum with a sample of non-Native youth and teachers in NYC. Through the continued development of trusting research relationships, social studies curriculum will be developed that values the political, social, cultural, and educational futures of Indigenous Peoples and presented to educators with support for their own process of unlearning settler curriculum using Cornel Pewewardy?s Transformational Indigenous Praxis Model (2022) and a community assessment to encourage further action research in NYC classrooms.

Growing Democracy: Examining Children’s Civic and Rhetorical Practices in Election Years
Cassie Brownell, OISE, University of Toronto

One purpose of U.S. schooling is to prepare children to participate as adults in society democratically. Typically, democracy is defined as civic participation in governmental processes. By contrast, recent research offers reconsiderations of civics to account for children?s evolving individual and group identities and the sociopolitical rhetoric they employ. Amidst this renewed interest in civics within education, much of the research focuses on youth close to the voting age because many still dismiss younger children’s voices. Instead, they position children as naÔve and apolitical. However, children enact politically relevant social identities beginning in early childhood. Framed by critical sociocultural theories, this qualitative study is among the first of the new millennium to trace how U.S. children?s civic and rhetorical practices evolve across time, age, and political landscapes. Punctuated by three presidential election cycles, this comparative case study addresses how children engage with broader discourses and how they (re)produce political rhetoric. Findings will render the complexity of contemporary U.S. children’s political lives visible, illuminate how schools support or constrain children’s civic and rhetorical practices, and outline critical, child-centered research methods for longitudinal investigations into political socialization. This work is vital in politically polarized U.S. society.

“Things We’ve Known Even Before Having the Words to Explain”: Languaging Embodied Knowledge and Practices for Racially Just and Thriving Educational Futures

Josephine Pham, University of California, Santa Cruz

Though intersubjectivity is inseparable and integral to teacher learning and development, the role of the body in everyday social activities embedded within broader systems of power and discourse is often undertheorized in matters of transformational teaching and learning. As knowledge holders who can help us envision possible educational futures shaped by the social issues that afflict us in the present, in this multi-method study, I partnered with ethnic studies teachers of color with embodied understandings of race, power, and life systems to examine how their embodied practices affected student learning, development, and expressions for social change. Employing critical embodied design-based research, we centered the body’s sensibilities and physical presence as a tool for mutual inquiry. We used multimodal data sources and the arts to define, re-interpret, and re-articulate language for bringing racially just and thriving educational possibilities into action: by attending to the body as a tool (i.e., facial expressions, gestures, movement) and as a practice for mediating learning in advance and in the moment (i.e., attuning to emotions, feelings, bodily energy). In turn, this study offers expansive empirical framings and methodological designs that capture the non-tangible, visceral dynamics of learning and teaching for social transformation, and alternative designs for justice-centered teacher education when teachers’ lived, felt, and embodied knowledges are made central to their pedagogical sensemaking.

CHAIR

Sarah Freedman, University of California, Berkeley

Reversing the Research Lens: Analyzing Turns Toward Racial Equity at IES and NSF
Heather McCambly, University of Pittsburgh

Recent studies have spotlighted the persistently racialized funding decisions of agencies like the National Institutes of Health and the National Science Foundation (NSF). These inequities have critical implications for the study of racialization in higher education as grant funds are used as key indicators of institutional prestige; to legitimize particular methodological, epistemic, and political traditions in research; and to shape participation in the academy via influence over tenure outcomes and graduate student training. Prior work also demonstrates that government policies that favor research infrastructures and methodologies concentrated at elite, white-serving institutions provide a race-evasive mechanism for the racialized distribution of resources in educational research.

This project takes up grantmaking as a hidden yet pervasive mechanism of racialization at two agencies that play critical roles in educational research and reform: the Institute for Education Sciences (IES) and the NSF?s Education and Human Resources Directorate (NSF-EHDR). Using a longitudinal (2010-2024), mixed-methods study, I ask: 1) How have equity commitments and policy designs at IES and NSF-EHRD changed over time?, 2) How do IES and NSF-EHDR grantee characteristics differ from the universe of eligible institutions and researchers, and have these differences varied across policy conditions?, 3) What epistemological and axiological values are reflected by funded projects, and how has this varied over time, by organizational and individual characteristics, and funding programs? In doing so, this project seeks to offer critiques of education-focused grantmaking generative to catalyzing shifts toward racial equity and epistemic expansion in the academy and educational policy more broadly.

What is fair? Disentangling public conceptions of merit and equity in the age of inequality
Marissa Thompson, Columbia University

How do Americans decide what is (or isn’t) fair in the distribution of educational resources? The proposed study uses an original conjoint survey experiment to determine how individuals make normative judgments about fairness in educational contexts. Survey respondents will be randomly assigned to read two student profiles with varying characteristics and asked to decide who should receive more resources in order to maximize fairness. Further, to examine how beliefs about fairness differ from beliefs about equity and merit, respondents will also be asked to distribute resources equitably and in order to reward merit. I will then collect free responses to be examined using computational text-as-data methods to shed light on the mechanisms that underly decision-making. In doing so, this study will answer the following research questions: (1) how do individuals balance academic performance, perceived effort, race, gender, SES, and disability status in making judgments about fairness, equity, and merit in the distribution of educational resources? and (2) how do narratives around fairness shift under different conditions of inequality? This study contributes to theoretical and empirical projects in the sociology of education that seek to understand how individuals make sense of questions of fairness in the context of persistently unequal schooling.

Innovating (In)equality: Philanthropy, Federal Policy, and the Racial Politics of K-12 Education, 1954 to 1994
Erica Sterling, University of Virginia

Using extensive archival research, I interrogate how ?innovation? became a proxy for equitable education policy from 1954 to 1994. The book reveals how the combined forces of the civil rights movement and the Cold War facilitated how federal bureaucrats, philanthropists, and education researchers theorized and developed non-judicial alternatives for large city school systems that remained untouched by desegregation. But what began as a thought experiment in the 1960s to achieve choice-driven, voluntary desegregation and to protect the vitality of American cities began to crumble by the early 1970s. The prerogatives of Black communities, presidential administrations, and the Ford Foundation shifted to no longer view innovation and the choices it could produce as a mechanism for desegregation. For the remainder of the 1980s and 1990s, the national backlash to public education captivated the country, allowing school choice to reemerge as a centerpiece of federal education reform efforts. By starting in the 1960s, the manuscript illuminates the long history of school choice rhetoric and policies, explaining how they both challenged and maintained inequity, and how an eclectic mix of stakeholders came to dominate the contemporary education reform landscape.

CHAIR

Sigal Ben-Porath, University of Pennsylvania

• Niral Shah, University of Washington, Seattle
• Elizabeth Todd-Breland, University of Illinois Chicago

This panel will explore the current challenges facing education researchers, including IES and NSF cuts impacting data collection, maintenance, and availability; and academic freedom and how it impacts research, particularly in the wake of attacks on DEI. It will also highlight recent actions of institutions and individuals as a means of providing hope for the future and pathways forward.

Chair: Pam Grossman, University of Pennsylvania

Panelists:

• Andrew Ho (Chair), Harvard University
• Peggy Carr, National Center for Education Statistics, U.S. Department of Education (former)
• Adam Gamoran, William T. Grant Foundation
• Diana Hess, University of Wisconsin-Madison
• James L. Moore III, National Science Foundation

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

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

Small groups will pick up where the previous plenary left off, looking at pathways forward for education researchers. Groups will discuss strategies for building collective courage in higher education, maintaining data integrity/infrastructure, and supporting early-career researchers. These conversations will be led by a pairing of NAEd fellows and members and/or external speakers from organizations who are at the forefront of these issues.

Chair: Pam Grossman, University of Pennsylvania

Discussion Leaders

What NAEd is and could be doing to support education research moving forward

• Alfredo J. Artiles, Stanford University
• Amy Berman, National Academy of Education
• Cassie Brownell, OISE, University of Toronto

Continuing equity-focused research moving forward 

• Megan Bang, Northwestern University
• Maya Revell, University of Oregon

The federal role vs. state and districts roles in data collection

• Peggy Carr, National Center for Education Statistics, U.S. Department of Education (former)
• Andrew Frangos, University of Chicago

Building collective courage in higher education to support education research

• Vivian Gadsden, University of Pennsylvania
• Greses Pérez, Tufts University

Strategies and resources for research funding moving forward

• Adam Gamoran, William T. Grant Foundation
• Ethan Chang, University of Hawaii

What college/schools of education can do to support educational researchers

• Diana Hess, University of Wisconsin-Madison
• Rachel Talbert, Teachers College, Columbia University

Continuing longitudinal and large-scale research and assessment programs moving forward

• Andrew Ho, Harvard University
• Qingqing Yang, State University of New York at Albany

What universities and colleges can do to support education researchers and strategies and resources for research funding moving forward

• Michael McPherson, Spencer Foundation (emeritus)
• Samantha Viano, George Mason University

Mobilizing research for legal cases

• Amy Stuart Wells, Bank Street Graduate School of Education
• Talia Leibovitz, University of California, Berkeley
• Xinyu Pan, Bank Street Graduate School of Education
• Jose Vilson, Bank Street Graduate School of Education

Using education research to support policymaking

• Kevin Welner, University of Colorado Boulder
• Danielle Graves Williamson, Boston University

• James Bridgeforth, University of Delaware
• Avery Davis, New York University

• María Cioè-Peña, University of Pennsylvania
• Stephen Santa-Ramirez, University at Buffalo

• Lok-sze Wong, University of North Texas
• Chantal Hailey, The University of Texas at Austin
• Marissa Thompson, Columbia University