2025 Spring Retreat

“Education Policy and Politics, Today” will engage fellows in a discussion about the shifting landscape of education policy under the current federal administration. The conversation will consider how scholars can navigate and contribute to these evolving dynamics—whether through research, advocacy, or policy engagement. By fostering an open dialogue, this session aims to equip participants with a deeper understanding of current challenges and opportunities while exploring pathways for meaningful impact in the education sector.

Speakers

• Lesley Bartlett, University of Wisconsin–Madison
• Kim Conway, ACLU
• Nichole Garcia, Rutgers University
• Na’ilah Suad Nasir, Spencer Foundation

Facilitator

• Ofelia García, The Graduate Center, City University of New York

Review our online document for panelist biographies.

“Meet the Funders” is an opportunity for fellows to connect with representatives from two leading funding organizations. Panelists will discuss available funding opportunities, emerging priorities in education research and practice, and strategies for securing grants in our current shifting landscape. Attendees will gain insights into what funders are looking for, how to position their work effectively, and ways to navigate challenges.

Speakers

• Erin Bogan, Gates Foundation
• Rhoda Freelon, Spencer Foundation

Facilitator

• Keon McGuire, North Carolina State University

Review our online document for panelist biographies.

SPEAKERS

Gloria Ashaolu
“An Outstanding Teacher, Civic Leader, and Author”: The Education-Activism of Jane Dabney Shackelford
Between the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the model of educational vision Black teachers fostered and were deeply committed to greatly mirrored what we today regard as anti-racist systems of knowledge and educational practices. This dissertation attends to the understudied educational activism, pedagogies, and praxes of local Black teachers during the Early Black History Movement through a biographical analysis of the life and times of Jane Dabney Shackelford, a Black female educator from Terre Haute, Indiana who was most active during the era of Jim Crow segregation. The educational trajectory and systems of teaching Shackelford and her peers embodied serve as a useful tool for conceptualizing the significant ways in which local schoolteachers cultivated an intentional educational and intellectual practice fueled by what Anna Julia Cooper referred to as the “moral forces of reason and justice and love.” The first contribution of this project entails the study of the life and times of an influential—yet understudied—historical actor as a window into the education-activism of Black teachers during the Early Black History Movement. Second, this project contributes to the growing scholarship on Jim Crow North, by challenging ahistorical, flattened, and selective narratives that loom in popular remembering of the era of Jim Crow segregation. Third, the use of the robust repository that makes up the Shackelford papers seeks to excavate the scholarly and intellectual work and the ethos that guided her educational activism and that of her community of educators.

La’Nora Jefferson
“The essence of Spelman College is Black womanhood”: The Spelman Campus Movement, 1924-2006
The mid- twentieth century Black Campus – Black Studies Movement was a Black Power precipitated and student-led movement that overturned the racist, eurocentric undergirding of American higher education. More recently, historians have acknowledged Black women?s participation in campus activism. However, their predominant focus on chauvinistic power dynamics within Black Power campus organizing inadvertently renders Black female students immobilized until the rise of Black Feminism during the mid-1970s periodized decline of the campus movement. By examining campus organizing at Spelman College, the premier Black women?s educational institution, from 1968 to 1976, my dissertation, ?The Essence of Spelman College is Black Womanhood,?: The Spelman Campus Movement, 1924-2006,? showcases how Black women employed Black Power and Black Feminist praxes to advance the movement while articulating and prioritizing concern for their dignity and socio-political needs as Black women students. Employing a long movement methodology, I examine the decisive antecedents that enabled students? mid- twentieth century activism. Additionally, I chart the establishment of Black Women?s Studies curriculum, and its conceptualization within and cultivation of Black Feminist thought and mobilization on Spelman?s campus between the 1980s and early 2000s. Ultimately, I assert that the establishment of Black Women?s Studies curriculum signaled a victory of the Black Campus-Black Studies Movement that effectuated lasting, progressive change in higher education and thereby enabled greater longevity and transformation in the overall movement. This study therefore prompts a reconsideration of the significance of Black Feminist organizing in the Black Campus-Black Studies Movement and subsequently the movement?s mid-1970s periodized decline.

Darion Wallace
Repudiating (Un)freedom: Assembling the Foundations of the Early Black Education & Abolition Movements in California, 1850-1910
In 1854, when the inaugural California Colored Convention, an anti-slavery organization, was called to order, the matter of quality Black education was a thematic agenda item of convention goers?many of whom were Black teachers. This august body was committed to educating ?the head, the hands, the heart? of Black students in preparation for the necessities and responsibilities of life in a hostile world. In dialogue with these efforts, this dissertation historicizes how abolitionist praxes, pedagogies, and epistemologies rooted in the Black radical and intellectual tradition informed Black education in the American West. Examining black periodicals, personal papers, administrative state documents, and Colored Convention minutes, this project illuminates the interiority of Black educational heritages in antebellum California and untangles competing visions for Black schooling in the Western frontier. This research bridges a critical rupture in the Black educational archive to document how Black teachers transformed the sociopolitical landscape of the American West and offers insights into how Black abolitionist teachers like Rev. Jeremiah Burke Sanderson articulated demands for social, political, and educational redress. Synthesizing life, intellectual, and social movement histories of education, this project illuminates how Black abolitionist educators breathed life into Black social movements as political subjects committed to undoing the symbolic and material order of antiblackness, as well as, how they transformed the political ambitions of the anti-slavery movement in California. These historical explorations expand the canon of Black educational history westward and add texture to our understanding of the limits and possibilities of educational abolitionism(s) in practice and theory.

Charlesa Redmond
Roots to Routes: Black Intellectual Labor and the Politics of Higher Education in North Carolina, 1790-1891
For a brief moment, it seemed that the routes to higher education would diversify infinitely as hundreds of thousands of freedpeople enrolled in colleges at the close of the Civil War. Free and enslaved African Americans melded traditional education – the pursuit of a classical curriculum and theological training – with manual and vocational training in a tradition dating back to the colonial era. What would come to be known as Head, Hand, and Heart work in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries was fundamentally shaped by, and rooted in, antebellum pedagogies. Yet, conversations about the direction of Black education narrowed as the nineteenth century came to a close and industrial training took preference over all other approaches. Scholars have often mis-attributed this postbellum rise of industrial education to Booker T. Washington’s peculiar politics of education. By historicizing this transition as it played out in North Carolina, a pioneering state for the establishment of HBCUs, I argue that Washington’s politics of education was in fact a complex set of maneuvers between state and federal forces attempting to control Black education on the one hand, and a burgeoning class of Black intellectuals attempting to raise a generation “up from slavery” on the other. To offer insight into how African American higher education developed in the direction of industrial education, I adopt the methods of intellectual historians. I ask how Black intellectuals articulated justifications for their education, what they hoped to learn as they traversed various routes to attain higher education, and how they interpreted government-backed industrialization of that education.

CHAIR

Khalil Johnson

SPEAKERS

CoCo Massengale
Liberation Literacies: An Archival and Ethnographic Study of Black Literate Lives Across Time
For the past 400 years, Black people have been cast as criminal readers, nonreaders, reluctant readers, struggling readers, and similar labels of deficit. ??While many studies have documented and disputed the hegemonic narrative of Black deficiency, little research challenges the assumption that slavery is anything more than distal history in the literate lives of Black people today. Drawing on theories of temporal nonlinearity that interpret contemporary Black experiences through the lens of slavery and its afterlives, this multi-method dissertation explores the ways Black people both historically and presently are positioned and (re)position themselves in relation to literacy. Beginning with the Federal Writers? Project Slave Narratives, I conduct a three-phase analysis to uncover the literacy experiences and longings of formerly enslaved people. I then put this analysis in conversation with data from a year-long ethnographic study in which I serve as a participant-observer of 13 Black children?s literate lives in and out of school. This synthesis of archival and ethnographic data offers a unique perspective into the throughlines between the barriers to literacy faced by both enslaved people and Black children today, as well their shared literacy practices and aspirations for the future.

Karla Thomas
Smuggling Black Truths: Blackcrit Sensemaking Amidst the Disruption and Expansion of Black Liberatory Educational Possibilities
Black education has been a fugitive project since its inception. New pernicious barriers to a just Black education are willfully set in motion every time a modicum of progress is made. Black parents and Black teachers have been educators, political organizers, and architects of Black spaces for learning even as resources are intentionally withheld. Following a 2020 executive order to eliminate “divisive concepts in schools,” 44 states passed anti-Black education policies, limiting discourse on race, in particular, African American history. This study focuses on Florida, the state implementing the most restrictive educational policies. Through three interrelated studies, my research traces the process by which Black parents and Black educators make sense of anti-Black education laws and conceptualize their role in response to the restrictions. This work is timely and pertinent to the state of Black education as these intentionally vague laws, along with the criminal, employment, and violent consequences of resisting, aim to curtail progress made toward a more equitable public education in the US. Three research questions guide this work. First, How do Black caregivers interpret and respond to Florida’s anti-Black educational policies? Secondly, How do Black Florida teachers make sense of Florida’s new anti-Black education policies? Finally, have Black Florida teachers modified their educational and pedagogical practices due to Florida’s new anti-Black education policies, and if so, how? This interdisciplinary research introduces Blackcrit Sensemaking as a theoretical contribution to the literature on racialized sensemaking and liberatory education, particularly within the context of Black fugitive pedological practice.

Rubén González
I’ve always had the abolitionist spirit in me?: Novice Teachers of Color, A Community of Abolitionist Praxis, & Pedagogies of Abolitionist Praxis
K-12 schools have long served as carceral sites of suffering for students of color and other marginalized youth. While there has been increased dialogue about police and prison abolition within the general public and in educational contexts in recent years, much of the scholarship exploring abolition in educational settings remains conceptual. Specifically, there is a need for more empirical scholarship exploring how abolitionist approaches to teaching and learning are enacted within and beyond K-12 classrooms and schools. As such, this two-year ethnographic and qualitative study investigates the experiences of four novice English Language Arts (ELA) teachers of color (i.e., two elementary teachers and two high school teachers) and how they develop and enact an abolitionist praxis during their pre-service and first-year teaching experiences. In particular, this study explores: 1) how involvement in what I conceptualize as a ?community of abolitionist praxis? mediates how participants develop an abolitionist praxis, and 2) how participants enact an abolitionist praxis in their work via what I term ?pedagogies of abolitionist praxis.? By exploring the intersection of abolition, teacher education, and novice teachers of color, this study advances the conceptual and empirical understanding of abolition in teacher education and in K-12 classrooms. The implications of this research have the potential to transform K-12 schooling and society away from carceral policies, practices, and ideologies and toward liberation for all.

CHAIR

Nelson Flores

SPEAKERS

Jasmine Jones
From Photovoltaic Circuits to Digital Conversational Networks: A Participatory Community-Based STEM Education Project
Dominant equity discourses in STEM education continue to prioritize increasing access to disciplinary knowledge without critically interrogating the ways in which traditional science and technology learning bounds its participants. This multiphase dissertation project contests the boundaries of STEM education by centering the discursive relationship emergent between participatory learning and community self-determination. In the contexts of both my science classroom and summer technology program, I propose a teacher research study to explore how teachers and students engage the structure-agency dialectic present within a participatory STEM project to address community issues at the intersections of canonical STEM knowledge, environmental justice, and digital technologies. The holistic set of data include curriculum documents, program recordings, and interviews with teachers, students, and community leaders. Drawing uniquely from the data throughout each phase of the project and its respective nuanced investigations, I explore how physics and technology education can be repurposed as community-responsive, liberatory praxes. By focusing on teacher, student, and community perspectives in school science and during out-of-school programming, I hope to articulate new possibilities for equity in physics and technology education by informing the development of future participatory and community-responsive STEM projects that position students as transformative intellectuals, who enact their agentic power to transform oppressive structures and help their communities to self-determine.

Tess Bernhard
Reasoning Together or Clicking Through? Analyzing How Individualized Computers Shape Group Science Talk
Science educators have long strived to more authentically and collaboratively engage students in the disciplinary practices of science, and the expansion of school computing has been thought of as a key ingredient to achieve this aim. However, existing research has done little to focus on the nature of students’ social talk as they collaborate on science tasks through computers that may individualize or isolate their efforts. In this study, I attend to the framing students bring to the social situation of a group science task. If students are meaningfully engaging in science in groups, they frame their talk in a manner that demonstrates they are taking responsibility for building knowledge together. Unfortunately, students are often positioned as more passive receivers of preordained knowledge, framing their contributions in way that scholars have called “doing school” or “doing the lesson” (e.g. Hutchison & Hammer, 2010; Jiménez-Aleixandre et al., 2000). I collected data in three teachers’ classrooms who regularly used computers in their instruction, yet also at times strategically sidelined computers to change the way their students engaged in group work. I compared how students framed their contributions to science discussions across conversations, noting how the presence (or absence) of school-issued, individualized computers appeared to mediate the depth with which students “did school” versus “did science” throughout their conversations. I combined methods of framing analysis (Goffman, 1974; Tannen, 1993) and interaction analysis (Jordan & Henderson, 1995) to illustrate differences in how students talked and related to one another. I found that in most episodes where students’ small group activity was mediated by individualized computers, talk existed within a frame of “doing school.” This contrasted with episodes where computers were shared or put away, in which more frequent and sophisticated scientific talk emerged. I reveal through close interaction analysis ways students embodied certain anti-social habits as they worked on their own computers—namely, going at their own pace, and keeping their screens private—which appeared to stymie the construction of science knowledge as a social group. My findings complicate the popular view that expanded school computing has deepened children’s engagement in science—illustrating examples of teachers strategically limiting the presence of computers to encourage collective reasoning with their peers.

Lino Guajardo
Proof comprehension through the student’s perspective: investigating proof comprehension strategies, beliefs of understanding, and features of difficulty
Proof comprehension is one of many important tasks mathematicians believe their students should practice (c.f., Weber & Mejia-Ramos, 2011). This importance of the task has focused some proof researchers on student proof comprehension. Yet, the current state of the field uses the researcher or mathematician perspective. These perspectives have been used to assess student proof comprehension or develop ways to improve student proof comprehension. Little research has been conducted in investigating the student perspective of proof comprehension (e.g., Weber, 2015). In my dissertation, I interviewed 8 participants, focusing on student perspective in three ways. Firstly, extend the work conducted by Weber (2015) by not just considering “successful” students but investigating the proof comprehension strategies general sets of students use and why they are used when attempting to understand a given proof. Secondly, explored how students define what it means to understand proof. Lastly, investigated how students judge the difficulty in understanding a given proof. My dissertation supports the narrative and belief that student perspectives in education is important. To truly support students in their learning and to teach students productively, researchers and instructors must take into consideration students’ perspectives on the content and ideas being brought to them.

CHAIR

Deborah Loewenberg Ball

SPEAKERS

Elizabeth Maher
Building Mechanical Boys: A Raced and Gendered History of Autism in the United States from 1930-1980
This project brings together analytical frameworks from critical disability studies, disability justice, neurodiversity studies, and critical race theory to examine how discourse around autism served as a means of expressing anxiety about changing views on race, gender, class, disability, intelligence, productivity, potential, educability and ultimately the definition of humanity in the mid to late 20th century United States. Beginning in the 1940s with the earliest writing on autism as a discrete diagnosis and continuing to the eve of the purported ?autism epidemic? in the 1990s this project traces how autism became known as a white male middle-class disorder associated with technocratic intelligence in both the clinical and popular imagination. The history of autism provides insight into the critical role that psy-disciplines (psychiatry, psychology etc.) played in the (re)construction of notions of racial and gender difference in the mid-20th century United States. Psy professionals, educators, middle-class white parents and autistic advocates used discussions about autism to develop new, and seemingly scientific and objective, ways of discussing white masculinity and proper gender roles for white middle-class men and women. Autism became associated with new raced and gendered ideals which I refer to as white technocratic masculinity and white technocratic domesticity. These ideals framed the privileges of whiteness as the results of a supposed cultural or biological affinity for/ability to adapt to the technocratic, scientific, world of the ?machine age.? In building this argument I draw on variety of sources including academic articles, archival materials from parent advocates/educators, and life-writing by autistic self-advocates.

Anna Almore
Care in Containment: The Geography of Black and Indigenous Encounters within Schooling
In this study, I work alongside Black and Indigenous educators within the space of the reservation in order to investigate the (im)possibilities of Black and Indigenous relationalities within the site of school. This interdisciplinary dissertation charts the geography created when the technologies of antiBlackness and antiIndianness collide. Or, put differently, I?m curious about the space generated when liberatory aspirations collide with decolonial dreams. In this research study, I explore how the school building becomes a place where we can trouble the seemingly dichotomous, opposing, and separateness of the capacious dreams of liberation/decolonization and violent technologies of anti-Blackness and settler colonialism. Through this research project, I seek to map the contradictions, collisions, and complexities that emerge when we sit in the space created by Black and Indigenous encounters. I employ critical ethnography to notice the ways these tensions emerge in and outside of the school place. I use interviews to listen to and be a witness to the experiences of Black and Lakota teachers who navigate freedom dreams for Black and Indigenous people. I use close reading, historiography, and cultural critique to contextualize these schooling moments into broader discourses around identity, coalition, colonialism, and futurity.

Jo R. King
Evaluating the Consequences of Suspension Reform for Special Education Placement and Services
Suspension bans have become a common policy response to counter high rates and disproportionalities in exclusionary discipline in K-12 public schools. However, little is known about the methods school personnel employ when suspension is no longer permitted, and even less is understood about the ensuing impacts of these alternative strategies. My dissertation evaluates the 2012 suspension ban in New York City (NYC), focusing on the impact of the ban on subjective special education classifications and, additionally, the impact of ban-induced classifications on student attendance, achievement, and graduation rates. I frame my results using Disability Critical Race Theory (Annamma et al., 2013), conceptualizing high stigma disability labels—as defined by Fish (2019)—as a partial substitute for suspension, while also recognizing that students who may have been excluded via suspension may now be receiving needed services when suspension is no longer permitted. I use longitudinal, student-level data from NYC Public Schools (NYCPS) to estimate these impacts. First, I leverage an event study difference-in-differences framework to estimate the increase in subjective special education classifications on average and for specific subgroups. Next, I estimate a student fixed effects model to compare the impact of special education for students classified post-ban relative to the pre-ban impact of classification. Taken together, my dissertation provides key evidence for policymakers interested in using suspension bans to reduce reliance on suspension, and provides a strong connection between suspension and special education that, until now, has been relatively theoretical or associative.

CHAIR

Katelyn Heath

SPEAKERS

Edom Tesfa
Contexts of Care: Supporting Immigrant-Origin Youth in a New Destination
Now that the majority of school-age children in the United States are non-white and over a quarter of school-age children are immigrant-origin (Migration Policy Institute, 2021), school districts across the country must adapt to meet their needs. This dissertation is an ethnographic study of immigrant- and refugee-origin adolescents? experiences of care and belonging within nested contexts of immigrant reception (Golash-Boza & Valdez, 2018; Rodriguez et al., 2022). I aim to answer the following questions: How do African and Latin American immigrant-origin high school students experience care and belonging (or a lack thereof) at school and in their communities? How have a series of protracted crises? such as the COVID-19 pandemic, the cost of living crisis, the housing crisis, anti-Black racism, and xenophobic laws, policies, and discourses? shaped these young people?s experiences of care? How do they organize for more caring communities within and outside of school? To answer these questions, I engaged in a year of participant observation, supplemented by interviews, focus groups, and critical document analysis, in Portland, Maine, where over one-third of the public schools? students are immigrant-origin. Findings from this study will provide much-needed insights into how schools can become sites of care and possibility in resistance to local, regional, and national anti-Blackness and xenophobia. Findings from this project can inform educational practices and policies in emerging contexts of immigrant reception.

Alysha Banerji
Reading, Writing, and Refuge: Exploring Universities’ Global Civic Responsibilities
My dissertation explores the normative commitments that motivate institutions of higher education to welcome and support globally displaced refugees. In 2020, only 5% of refugees were enrolled in tertiary education globally, compared to 40% of non-refugee students (UNHCR, 2023). I focus on a few extraordinary initiatives in the UK, the US, and Canada, each of embodies a distinct approach to supporting refugees, and vary in their conceptions of the purpose and civic responsibility of universities. Taken together, they provide a multidimensional view of how higher education, especially in the Global North, may respond to forcible displacement, illuminate nascent conceptions of university?s cosmopolitan civic responsibility, and illustrate ethical dilemmas at the intersection of a traditional commitment to knowledge production and emerging responsibilities as social actors in a globalised society. This research falls at the intersection of two fields in higher education literature: civic purposes of universities and the internationalization of higher education. Even as universities become increasingly international in their internal demographics and external reach, there is a dearth of literature exploring the intersection of these two pieces?i.e. social responsibilities of universities to a global society. Grounded in explorations of novel pathways through which higher education can respond to forced migration, I ask more broadly: How do refugee support initiatives shed light on the global civic responsibilities of universities; hypothesising that these cases demonstrate new possibilities for universities as global civic actors, while also illuminating the complexities inherent in this positioning.

Alexandra Pasqualone
“MidAmerica Meets Mideast”: Arab American Identity Formation in Dearborn Schools, 1980 – 2001
Schools of the mid-to-late 20th century served as pivotal spaces where Dearborn youth of Arab descent navigated the tumultuous environment of adolescence amid social, personal, and geopolitical debates. My project explores the relationship between public school policy shifts and identity formation among communities of Arab descent in Dearborn, Michigan between 1948 and 2001. The period I examine stretches from heightened immigration of Southwest Asian and North African (SWANA) populations to the Midwest after the establishment of Israel to the rise in Islamophobia in the decades following 9/11. Centering Arab American identity development, I argue Dearborn Michigan’s growing Arab American population transformed public schools from primarily assimilating institutions inculcating youth with middle-class American values during the post-war period, to institutions, in many instances, accepting of cultural pluralism by the 1980s and 1990s. This shift developed from a reciprocal process in which students and communities of Arab descent demanded respect for their identities while the experiences they faced in schools altered their self-perceptions as Arab Americans. In many ways, students shaped their schools just as schools shaped them. The postwar experiences of Arab-descendant youths in Dearborn illuminates Arab American identity formation not only in this region, but also in other parts of the United States. Additionally, emphasis on youth of Arab descent and their influence on shifting school policies challenges notions of schools as mass institutions replacing the cultural and social beliefs of immigrant families with American values. Grounded in archival sources and oral interviews, this project explores the nuances surrounding the identities of Arab populations in the U.S. and complicates current historical understandings of education and its relationship to race, ethnicity, and what it means to be American.

CHAIR

Jullie Posselt

SPEAKERS

Ariel Borns
Instructional Coaching in Bilingual Schools in Guatemala: A Comparative Case Study
Coaching is heralded as solving a host of issues, including weak leadership and ineffective literacy instruction. Despite the popularity of coaching reforms for improving teachers? classroom practices and student reading achievement in the U.S. and in low- and middle-income countries, resources and systems to support such organizational improvements are often lacking, even after successful pilot programs. Through a 14-month ethnographic comparative case study (Bartlett & Vavrus, 2017), my dissertation examines Guatemala?s national coaching reform, which aims to achieve educational and ethnolinguistic equity through decentralized efforts to support high-quality instruction as well as linguistically and culturally relevant education for Indigenous populations, who comprise over 50% of the national population. I draw on over 600 hours of observations at public primary schools in Indigenous communities and staff professional development, document analysis, and over 50 interviews with educators and key-informants involved in Guatemala?s coaching system to examine how Indigenous peoples embedded within the state as educational leaders understand, negotiate, and challenge international- and state-driven narratives around language, literacy, quality, and equity. Findings from my research reveal the ways the coaching model sought to improve instruction across three interrelated components of the education system ? systemic change, pedagogical improvement, and ethnolinguistic inequality. The findings of this study have the potential to inform efforts to leverage coaching to achieve ethnolinguistic and educational equity in diverse contexts around the globe.

Elizabeth Castro
Latina bilingual paraeducators as sociocultural mediators of language and literacies: in accompaniment with bi/multilingual youth in secondary schools
Bilingual paraeducators provide classroom instructional support to linguistically diverse young people including immigrant, refugee, migrant, and newcomer students in the United States. Although the role of paraeducators is outlined in policy, in practice, teachers may receive limited training on leveraging the roles of bilingual paraeducators. Situated in rural/suburban secondary schools in California, my ethnographic research centers four Latina bilingual paraeducators who work in accompaniment with emergent bi/multilingual students, documenting crucial transitions across different secondary classrooms and disciplines. Grounded in sociocultural perspectives on language, literacy and learning, my research engages with scholarship on translanguaging, language ideologies, and raciolinguistic ideologies. As part of analyzing everyday language and literacy practices and shifts in student learning and participation, this study employs discourse analysis of language and paralinguistic cues, maps out movement across learning contexts, and follows the co-creation of print and digital texts. Through classroom observations and interviews, this study inquires how bilingual paraeducators navigate social and linguistic tensions they encounter in their roles as they currently exist. This study positions Latina bilingual paraeducators as consequential sociocultural mediators and contributors to young people?s well-being, school participation, and belonging in school. Paraeducator-youth relationships emerge as sites of potential, validation, resistance, and joy.

Lillie Ko-Wong
The Need for Strong Equity: Investigating How Institutional Dynamics Drive Equity Efforts in Teacher Education Programs at Minority Serving Institutions
Continued concern persists that teacher education programs as a whole might not operate in an equitable manner, such as an inadequate preparation for diverse classrooms, lack of diversity in candidates and faculty, and resource disparities. Minority-serving institutions (MSIs) offer a promising intervention as they enroll and graduate more teachers of color than majority White institutions. However, there is still much we do not understand about the institutional context of MSIs and how they might contribute to greater diversity and equity in teacher education programs. In response, this multiple site case study investigates the institutional dynamics that drive programmatic equity efforts at teacher education programs at MSIs. By critically examining these dynamics, this study aims to shed light on strategies and practices that hold the potential to create more inclusive and effective teacher education programs. Utilizing interviews, observations, document analysis and physical trace evidence, this multiple case study of teacher education programs at MSIs examines the ways that institutional elements impact programmatic equity efforts in teacher education. This project focuses on enrollment-based MSIs, such as AANAPISI and HSIs, in the context of California. This study is guided by a conceptual framework that integrates institutional theory, racialized organization theory, and strong equity. Teacher education programs play a crucial role in educating the next generation of teachers and MSIs are poised to support larger numbers of students of color. I hope that a deeper understanding of these dynamics will inform research and interventions for institutional contexts and teacher education programs to enact strong equity that ultimately supports minoritized students.

CHAIR

Brittany Murray

SPEAKERS

Forrest Bruce
River as Relative: Co-design Towards Educational Self-Determination & Kinship Relations
One of the most vital challenges facing humanity is learning to live in just, sustainable relations with water. Doing so will require systems of education that cultivate an ethic of care for and complex thinking about water and the rest of the natural world. Through three interrelated studies this dissertation will 1) examine the ways that humans make relations with and engage in complex reasoning about water and 2) explore how core principles of outdoor water-based education manifest in learning environments to support ethical relations, deliberation and complex socioecological reasoning. This presentation will focus specifically on the first study which examines co-design processes for water-based learning in an Indigenous STEAM summer program. By analyzing 3 years of co-design data across multiple spatial arrangements, I demonstrate the maturation (Deloria, 1979) of co-design through a deepening of subject-subject relations (Bang & Vossoughi, 2016) and expansion of the political and ethical landscape. Further, I demonstrate the role of place in co-design maturation. Engaging in co-design across multiple places — especially outdoors, with lands and waters — creates conditions for a deepening of subject-subject relations and an expanded political-ethical landscape. This study contributes to the field of educational and design research by explicating the “why,” “how,” and “where” of co-design towards systems of education that cultivate thriving futures for human and more-than-human communities.

Yaa Oparebea Ampofo
“Arise Ghana Youth for your Country”: A Study of Young People?s Learning and Life-making Pathways amid Socio-Ecological Crisis in Ghana
As youth across Sub-Saharan Africa grapple with intensifying crises marked by climate change, socio-ecological degradation, pandemics, and economic and geopolitical disruptions, there is urgent need to reimagine knowledge and learning about socio-ecological conditions, guided by the experiences of youth navigating these rapid changes. This ethnography explores how Ghanaian youth experience and learn about crisis, socio-ecological change, and human-planetary wellbeing as they move across the institutions and learning spaces that make up daily life; and how they situate their needs, responsibilities, and future livelihoods within these understandings. Through six months of community mappings and institutional ethnography and twelve months of extensive interviews, participant-observations, and focus group discussions with focal youth participants, this study examines (1) how core institutions associated with youth education (family, schools, religious institutions, and workplaces) socialize young people about crisis, socio-ecological change, and human-planetary wellbeing; (2) how youth make sense of and respond to these efforts in relation to their daily experiences; and (3) how youth generate knowledges and actions that may offer new hope to their survival and thriving. A study of how youth learn across diverse institutionalized spaces offers a critical, interdisciplinary analysis of knowledge production, teaching, and learning, and new ways of understanding sense-making, experience, and action. The project challenges pervasive colonialist approaches that overdetermine the importance of formal schooling and overlook youth’s agency in knowledge generation. It informs how we might imagine radically different and decolonizing educational pathways to support youth in generating alternative, hopeful livelihoods and futures, for themselves and the planet.

Briana Rodriguez
Maya Mathematics: A Practice of Relation
Dominant mathematics – the mathematics learned in schooling – has long been a mechanism to reify social hierarchies. Although much work has been done to help young, minoritized people advance their mathematics learning and develop agency, mathematics education continues to be a site of struggle. As we explore the ways mathematics can be taught towards non-reformist goals in education, I explore the ways mathematics might be defined differently by Indigenous communities in Central America. My dissertation employs an Indigenous Storywork as methodology (ISM) to center the intergenerational impact stories have for Indigenous people in Guatemala and El Salvador (Archibald, 2008). The purpose of ISM is to facilitate ?learning from and working with the traditional and life experiences of Indigenous Elders, cultural knowledge holders, storytellers, and educators? (Smith, 2019, p. 315). In this project in collaboration with Maya community educators in Guatemala and Nawa-Pipil community educators in El Salvador, we explore the ways mathematical knowledge has been constructed and practiced in past, present, and future through popular education programs. Through a framework of refusal relationality (Vaught et al., 2022), the community explores the ways Maya and Nawa mathematics challenges the colonial conditions of space and time through our relationship with Maya/Nawa knowledge and futurity. As a community, we ask, In what ways is mathematical knowledge constructed and practiced by Indigenous community educators in Guatemala and El Salvador?

CHAIR

Shirin Vossoughi

SPEAKERS

Caroline Bartlett
Unlocking Educational Opportunities: State Policies Supporting English Learner Success
Our nation’s nearly five million English learner-classified (EL) students face significant educational disparities resulting from inadequate attention to their needs within current policies and practices. Previous research highlights inequities ELs face in their schools and classrooms. Less has focused on ways broader education policies exacerbate or ameliorate such inequities. My dissertation focuses on ways states and school districts can use policy inputs to expand educational opportunities for ELs as we emerge from the COVID-19 Pandemic. In the first paper, I explore the effect of the COVID-19 Pandemic on subgroups of ELs? academic and linguistic outcomes in Michigan. Findings can inform state and district leaders as they develop policies for serving ELs in coming years. The second paper uses a difference-in-regression discontinuities design to investigate the impact of shifting default reclassification policy from district to state responsibility on eligible ELs? reclassification outcomes. I discuss heterogeneity in effects by students? home languages, immigration status, and district characteristics to assess the viability of default policy to reduce disparities in reclassification outcomes based on race, ethnicity, language, or other factors unrelated to English proficiency. The third paper leverages interview and document analysis to understand how district leaders interpret state school finance policy and develop local policy to allocate resources and serve ELs in financially constrained environments. As the EL population continues to grow nationwide, my dissertation will contribute evidence on policies that affect EL students’ short- and long-term outcomes, identifying areas states and school districts can expand educational opportunities for their EL students.

Betsy Beckert
Exploring the Communicative Repertoire of a Signing Deaf Adolescent
In the US, 95% of deaf children have hearing parents, most of whom do not sign proficiently. Lack of language access has become the overriding narrative of signing deaf children from hearing families. In this narrative, deaf adolescents’ semiotic ecologies are often depicted as anemic and lacking complexity. To disrupt this narrative, I conducted a multi-sited ethnographic case study that explored the complex interactions of a signing deaf adolescent (Brady) and non-/limited-signing others in situations that involve texts of various kinds (e.g., graphic novels, maps, drawings, text messages). I investigated (1) how Brady and his hearing parents characterized the varieties of communicative practices they engaged in together and (2) how Brady and non-/limited-signing others co-composed meaning in interaction when engaging with texts in varied settings of daily activity. I took a semiotic ecological approach, framed by ethnographies of home and community literacies, studies of deaf individuals’ semiotic repertoires, and co-operative action theory. I centered how meaning was co-constructed and negotiated both in moment-to-moment interactions and over time. This study contributes an evidence-based account of a deaf child’s dynamic, complex communicative practices. Such sociocultural explorations are imperative to dismantle deficit frames and support teachers in engaging with deaf children’s practices to foster their language and literacy development.

Maegan Shanks
From Disability To Embodied Biodiversity: analyzing international inclusive education policy processes in Kenya
Disability inclusive education has become a growing sector within international development that pushes for the rights of children with disabilities to access education along with their non-disabled peers. Many countries including Kenya have committed to achieving equitable education for children with disabilities with its ratification of the United Nations Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (CRPD). In my dissertation, I strive to explain disability inclusive education policy processes. How do policy makers develop national disability inclusive policies and laws while reconciling with competing social norms regarding people with disabilities reflected in global policies? What explains the lack of effective implementation of disability-inclusive education policies in countries such as Kenya that have ratified the CRPD? Is the lack of effective implementation due to the different conceptualizations of disability? Conceptualizations of disability refers to how stakeholders view the roles of people with disabilities in society. There are norms that reflect deficit orientation on Deaf, DeafBlind, and Hard-of-Hearing (DDBHH) people and people with disabilities (PWD) while some global policies reflect a holistic orientation on DDBHHPWD. Kenya is a leader in the African continent regarding creating and implementing inclusive policies and yet experiences a lack of fully realized implementation of its disability inclusive education policies. I anticipate that the differing conceptualizations of disabilities between Kenya?s societal norms and CRPD may be a factor. My research design consists of interpretivist qualitative mixed methods using inductive causal processing/coding from discourse analysis and content analysis along with archival research and ethnographic fieldwork.

CHAIR

Eva Lam

SPEAKERS

Kourtney Kawano
It Runs in the Family: Examining Internalized Oppression and Resistance among Native Hawaiian Students and their Families
Inspired by recent inquiries into the impact of historical trauma on Indigenous Peoples around the world, including the U.S. Department of the Interior?s investigation into the Federal Indian boarding school system from 1819 to 1969, this dissertation unpacks the colonial legacies of assimilation in Hawai?i and the ongoing efforts that Native Hawaiian students and families are taking to challenge oppressive ideologies in their homes and schools through culture-based education. In light of increased reports of racialized and gendered conflicts involving Indigenous Peoples on local and national scales, this study critically examines internalized oppression, the conscious and unconscious acceptance of intersecting social hierarchies that reinforce and reproduce discrimination, stereotypes, stigmas, and prejudice, as a major consequence of white supremacy and settler colonialism. Given the interdependent nature of Native Hawaiian families and communities, this dissertation questions the extent to which internalized oppression and resistance against its manifestations (e.g., internalized racism, sexism, nativism) ?run? in Native Hawaiian families with culture-based schooling backgrounds. Using a qualitative phenomenological research design grounded in Native Hawaiian ways of knowing and being, this study interweaves family stories, artifacts, and genealogy to understand how these phenomena are transmitted within and across generations and how these lessons of the home are treated in classrooms. Through discourse and narrative analysis of individual and group interviews with students and observations of family interactions, this study offers insights into how students internalize notions of identity and culture through kinship networks and verbal and non-verbal discourse.

Anshu Jain
Schooling, Bureaucratic Encounters, and Transgender Men’s Livelihood Pathways in Northern-India
The current moment, marked by calls for trans equality and inclusion globally, has resulted on the one hand in legislative measures aimed at mainstreaming gender minorities, and on the other hand in a transphobic backlash and a rollback of rights in many countries. In India, while transgender people were recognized as citizens with equal protections in 2014, state violence on their bodies continues, and trans people’s access to civil rights and social protections, as well as their ability to earn a livelihood, remains restricted by a labyrinthine bureaucratic system and contradictory public logics of rights, inclusion, and gender norms. This dissertation explores the intersections of bureaucratic encounters, state policies, and the educational and livelihood experiences of transgender men in Hindi-speaking northern India. In this comparative ethnography of diverse transgender men’s experiences in a metropolitan and a non-metropolitan city in northern India, I draw on the fields of transgender studies and anthropology of education and policy to study transgender men’s encounters with educational and state bureaucracies; their experiences as students, citizens, and activists; the situated impacts of these experiences and encounters on transmen’s livelihood pathways; and transmen?s efforts to transform social, educational, and bureaucratic logics and practices to support more stable livelihoods. This study provides valuable methodological and theoretical contributions to the literature on making education relevant and equitable for trans people, and directions for trans policy and trans politics in India.

Ruchi Saini
How Universities Shape Students? Experiences with Gender-Based Violence in India: An Intersectional Feminist Narrative Inquiry
Gender-based violence (GBV) in universities is a widely recognized detriment to students? physical and mental well-being. However, contemporary research on the topic overwhelmingly conflates GBV with sexual violence, and centers the voices of students from universities in the global north. The lived experiences of female students from countries such as India are often relegated to the margins of international educational policy discourse, forestalling the promise of global gender equity and sustainable development. My dissertation is a narrative inquiry that employs an intersectional feminist framework to address this research gap. Using a broad definition of violence that includes physical, sexual, psychological, and economic manifestations, I investigate how female students? experiences with GBV at a large public university in India are shaped by the structural and cultural characteristics of the institution. The notions of ?structure? and ?culture? are used as heuristic tools to separate the formal limitations (=structure) on institutional stakeholders from the largely unspoken collective assumptions and values (=culture) that guide their actions. The research design involves three interdependent levels of investigation undertaken over fifteen months: 1) focus group discussions with bystanders (n=60) of GBV, 2) art-based narrative interviews with self-identified victim-survivors (n=20) of GBV, and 3) key informant interviews with student leaders (n=10) of college societies advocating for victim-survivors. By providing female students with a platform to own and control their narratives, the study has the potential to disrupt the essentializing image of Indian women as passive victims and will be helpful in building more inclusive universities.

CHAIR

Ema Elliott

SPEAKERS

Aya Jibet
The CEP Affirmative Action program: Mismatch, Spillovers and Peer-effects.
In this project, we study the effect of an Equal Opportunity Program (CEP) launched by Sciences Po. The objective of this initiative was to diversify the student body at Sciences Po and bring new possibilities in higher education (and beyond) for students from underprivileged social backgrounds. We first focus on evaluating the spillover on students from the partnering high schools using a difference-in-difference strategy. In this part, we focus on disadvantaged students? college application and enrollment patterns and the effects of the CEP policy in increasing low-income and disadvantaged students? enrollment at selective colleges. Then, to test the mismatch hypothesis- according to which affirmative action policies could have negative effects on the targeted minority students by over-matching them to schools that are above their academic ability- we evaluate the benefit of enrolling at Sciences Po for students who were on the margin of getting admitted. We use admission data on students who were first deemed admissible in the first admission stage and exploit the random assignment of oral examiners by implementing a judge fixed effect design. Finally, we study the peer effects resulting from the introduction of social and racial diversity in an elite institution. We will run online experiments to investigate how interactions with CEP students changed individuals? behaviors and implicit biases.

Ramy Abbady
New York’s March Toward Free College: The Effects of Financial Aid on Enrollment and Student Loan Debt in Public Higher Education
In this dissertation, I quantitatively examine the racialized impacts of New York?s financial aid programs on public postsecondary enrollment and student loan debt. New York?s Tuition Assistance Program (TAP) has, since the 1970s, provided low-income students with grants covering tuition costs in the State University of New York (SUNY) and City University of New York (CUNY) systems. Since 2017, the Excelsior Scholarship has provided free tuition at SUNY and CUNY for students with family incomes up to $125,000. In the first paper, I use data from the National Postsecondary Student Aid Study to estimate the impacts of TAP on student loan debt through propensity-score matching. In the second paper, I use data from New York City Public Schools to analyze the impacts of the Excelsior Scholarship on CUNY and SUNY enrollment through interrupted time series analysis. In the third paper, I compare New York?s decline in community college attendance following the implementation of the Excelsior Scholarship to national trends using synthetic controls. Together, these studies enable the analysis of how financial aid programs can contribute to the closure of racial enrollment and student loan debt gaps through the study of New York, a state with significant racial and socioeconomic diversity. In doing so, I employ critical quantitative approaches through disaggregation beyond traditional racial categories and a focus on equity. These studies provide insights from a large, racially diverse state, in order to inform public policy across the country as various iterations of ?free college? programs are proposed and implemented.

Shirley Xu
Elitism or Erasure? How Asian Americans Frame and Mobilize Around Selective Admissions Reforms in K-12 Schools
Redistributive admissions policies such as affirmative action and the elimination of standardized admissions exams have been effective tools for increasing educational opportunity for historically marginalized students across both public K-12 and higher education. However, these policies face continual attack from conservative opposition groups, whose latest strategy centers claims of anti-Asian discrimination. These claims have been successful in mobilizing some Asian Americans into political action, granting the opposition movement legal and electoral victories. Yet, considerable gaps remain in our understanding of how Asian Americans themselves interpret these policies, and how they are being induced to act, either for or against equity-oriented initiatives?particularly against facially race-neutral policies in a post-SFFAlegal landscape. In this mixed-methods dissertation, I explore how Asian Americans perceive redistributive admissions policies, how they are being mobilized in support or opposition to these policies, and how issue framing and policy design can impact their level of support. In Phase 1, I conduct in-depth interviews with Asian-identifying community members and activists across two sites of K-12 admissions controversy: Lowell High School in San Francisco, and Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology in Northern Virginia. From these interview data, I derive distinct issue frames and design components to develop the treatment arms of an original survey experiment in Phase 2 that targets a national sample. This study?s results will provide policymakers with greater understanding of how to account for public opinion in the creation and framing of equity-oriented policies and help identify opportunities for intervention and coalition building.

CHAIR

Stella Flores

SPEAKERS

Annaliese Paulson
General Education and Student Success
Although general education requirements comprise approximately one-third of a four-year student?s degree requirements in the United States, there is little empirical evidence as to their efficacy. While general education requirements are intended to ensure all students develop general skills and experience a liberal arts education, there has been limited credible research on the topic. Drawing on an original dataset of more than 900,000 syllabi from thirty four-year postsecondary institutions in Texas linked with administrative student transcript and wage records, I provide one of the first quantitative analyses of the role of postsecondary general education requirements in the United States. Across three studies, I examine where core general skills like writing and the ability to work in groups are taught in postsecondary curriculum, estimate the labor market returns to general skills learned in coursework, and provide the first causal estimates of the effect of general education requirements on student success in college and the labor market.

Jordy Berne
The Long-Run Impacts of Universal Pre-K with Equilibrium Considerations
Since 1995, publicly funded pre-K with universal eligibility has proliferated across the U.S. Universal pre-K (UPK) operates at great scale and serves children with a wide range of alternative childcare options. Because these programs are relatively young, very little is known about their long-run impacts on children. In this paper, I use a difference-in-differences (DiD) design to estimate the long-run impacts of Georgia UPK, the first statewide program. Children exposed to UPK were 1.7% more likely to graduate high school, 11.1% less likely to receive SNAP benefits as adults, and girls were 10.6% less likely to have children as teenagers. To help interpret those results, I use a potential outcomes framework that highlights how public pre-K expansions can affect the entire childcare market. For instance, greater competition could force private centers to adjust prices and quality, or to close entirely, creating spillover impacts on children not enrolled in public pre-K. Empirically, I find evidence consistent with large spillovers in Georgia, suggesting that a focus on UPK enrollees would miss a key part of the program’s overall impact. Further, I show that conventional DiD estimates of treatment effects on the treated (TOT effects) may be substantially biased in the presence of spillovers—in the Georgia context and in others.

Jonathan Marino
Decoding Development: Constructing Early Grade Reading Reform in Uganda, 2009-2023
In recent years, international education development actors have coalesced around a focus on early grade reading, seen as the gateway skill for future schooling success. My dissertation centers Uganda?s experience with this global early grade reading agenda. Over the past ten years Uganda has adopted new reading curricula that emphasize explicit phonics instruction, trained over 30,000 in-service teachers, and all pre-service primary teachers, in learner-centered and phonics-based reading pedagogies, and introduced a new way of comparing literacy outcomes across languages using reading speed. Drawing on the anthropology of policy, sociology of measurement, and anthropology of literacy as analytical frames, I explore the take-up and consequences of these significant reforms. I ask: How are policymakers and practitioners, including those in government, international non-governmental organizations (NGOs), civil society, and schools, appropriating early grade reading reforms in Uganda, and with what intended and unintended consequences? Utilizing a comparative case study design that includes nine months of participant observation in schools and key events, stakeholder and teacher interviews, document analysis, and a teacher survey, I trace interactions among differently situated actors to understand the frictions that emerge when implementing a phonics-based instructional model across linguistic and regional contexts.

CHAIR

Helen Ladd

SPEAKERS

Maricela Bañuelos
Seals and Leaks in the Latine Doctoral Pipeline
Latines are the largest racial-ethnic minority group in the United States, comprising 19% of the United States? population and are the second fastest growing racial-ethnic group. Yet, they made up a mere seven percent of all Ph.D. degree recipients in 2020, which has only increased by two percent in the past 20 years. Some key challenges in Latines? pathways include systemic oppression and navigating the barriers faced by first-generation college students. These systemic issues continue once Latines enroll in doctoral programs, manifesting in racialized and unequal socialization, which is detrimental to Latines? satisfaction and morale. My dissertation builds on this scholarship by employing a longitudinal qualitative methodology that examines the experiences of Latine that applied to doctoral programs but did not enroll, the factors that influenced whether Latine chose to reapply, and how they experienced reapplication processes. Secondly, it examines how Latines? social capital during the doctoral application juncture shapes their subsequent experience in developing support systems in doctoral programs or accessing support in their reapplication processes. Thirdly, my dissertation explores the impact that COVID-19 had on Latines? doctoral trajectories, given the way the pandemic has uniquely affected the Latine community, changed universities funding and resources, and amplified existing social inequalities. My dissertation provides an important contribution to educational literature by identifying critical junctures where universities can intervene to create seals in existing, but unexplored, Latine doctoral pipeline leaks.

Mez Perez
Crafting Futures: Speculative Designs Toward Justice-Centered STEM Education
In this dissertation, I rearticulate the relationship between computing and the future through a focus on how youth of color enact alternative ways of thinking about and being with computing and STEM more broadly. Overarching this dissertation is attention to speculative design as a standpoint from which to approach the creation of learning environments for youth to enact their desired futures. I ask: What speculative activities emerge from youth of color participating in STEM learning environments, and how can researchers, educators, and designers support their emergent work? The findings surface how youth make their desired futures present while they participate in computing and STEM-rich learning environments. In the first study, based in a STEM-rich makerspace in Michigan, youth materialize their desires by creating artifacts that would be displayed in the makerspace. In the process, they navigate and push back on multiple realities in which they are positioned through deficit framings. In the second study, from an arts-based speculative activity in a history museum, I highlight one youth’s creation of a speculative prop, which made the future present through the ways she upended the expectations of the interaction. In the third study, based in a computing and environmental justice program in a public library, I discuss how youth ‘make time’ within the program as part of their work to define “justice” on their own terms. Taken together, we can see that designing justice-centered, community oriented STEM learning environments requires building on the ingenuity and desires of youth of color. In highlighting youths’ innovative work to imagine more just technological futures, I contribute knowledge of specific practices that could be designed for, as well as a stance to design—counter clockwork—that centers youths’ temporal reconfigurations as a central method for working against extractive technological futures.

CHAIR

Sylvia Hurtado

This session will explore strategies for effectively sharing research beyond academia and making a meaningful impact on communities. Speakers will discuss ways to engage with the public and innovative approaches to dissemination through media, partnerships, and digital platforms.

Speakers

• Carol Brochin, The University of Arizona
• Mike Mena, Brooklyn College

Facilitator

• Claudia Cervantes-Soon, Arizona State University

Review our online document for panelist biographies.

This session will explore strategies for translating research for education practictioners and innovative approaches to dissemination through media, partnerships, and digital platforms.

Speakers

• Jameson David Lopez, The University of Arizona
• Yolanda Sealey-Ruiz, Columbia University

Facilitator

• Keon McGuire, North Carolina State University

Review our online document for panelist biographies.

This session will explore strategies for shaping educational policy through research and effective dissemination. Speakers will discuss ways to engage with education and policy leaders and innovative approaches to sharing research through media, partnerships, and digital platforms.

Speakers

• Okhee Lee, New York University
• Chi Nguyen, The University of Arizona

Facilitator

• Jack Busbee, The National Academy of Education

Review our online document for panelist biographies.